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Gender and Attachment Representations in the Preschool Years

Comparisons Between Five Countries

Université de Lausanne, blaise.pierrehumbert{at}unil.ch

Maria Pia Santelices

Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

Margarita Ibáñez

Hopital Universitario San Juan de Dios

Maika Alberdi

Hopital Universitario San Juan de Dios

Barbara Ongari

Università di Trento

Isabelle Roskam

Université Catholique de Louvain

Marie Stievenart

Université Catholique de Louvain

Rosario Spencer

Universidad Católica del Maule

Andrés Fresno Rodríguez

Universidad de Talca

Ayala Borghini

Université de Lausanne

Bowlby proposed that the individual's social experiences, as early as in infancy, contribute to the construction of Internal Working Models (IWMs) of attachment, which will later guide the individual's expectations and behaviors in close relationships all along his or her life. The qualitative, individual characteristics of these models reflect the specificity of the individual's early experiences with attachment figures. The attachment literature globally shows that the qualities of IWMs are neither gender specific nor cultural specific. Procedures to evaluate IWMs in adulthood have been well established, based on narrative accounts of childhood experiences. Narrative procedures at earlier ages (e.g., in the preschool years) have been proposed, such as Bretherton's Attachment Story Completion Task (ASCT), to evaluate attachment representations. More than 500 ASCT narratives of preschoolers, coming from five different countries, have been collected, in the perspective of examining possible interactions between gender and culture regarding attachment representations. A specific Q-Sort coding procedure (CCH) has been used to evaluate several dimensions of the narratives. Girls' narratives appeared as systematically more secure than those of same-age boys, whatever their culture. The magnitude of gender differences, however, varied between countries. Taylor's model of gender-specific responses to stress and Harwood's and Posada's hypothesis on inter-cultural differences regarding caregiving are evoked to understand the differences across gender and countries.

Key Words: attachment • gender • culture • children

Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, Vol. 40, No. 4, 543-566 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/0022022109335181


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