VI. Earned-security in retrospect: depressive symptoms, family stress, and maternal and paternal sensitivity from early childhood to mid-adolescence.

The gold standard for examining attachment-related change is to do so using prospective data (see Chapter 5). In the absence of such data, however, there is a tradition of using the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI; George et al., 1984–1996) to identify an earned-secure group containing participants who produce coherent (i.e., secure) discourse during the AAI but describe relatively unsupportive experiences with one or more primary caregivers during the interview. The major assumption that guides such work, of course, is that such adults actually encountered difficult early experiences with primary caregivers and/or had insecure attachments in childhood (see Roisman & Haydon, 2011, for a review). Early research using a variety of such retrospective operationalizations of attachment-related resilience (seeMethods Section) offers evidence that such individuals—like adults who meet criteria for the secure group generally— provide sensitive caregiving to their children (Pearson et al., 1994; Phelps, Belsky, & Crnic, 1998; Saunders, Jacobvitz, Zaccagnino, Beverung, & Hazen, 2011) and share high-quality relationships with their romantic partners (Paley, Cox, Burchinal, & Payne, 1999). However, consistent with the idea that there may be a “price paid” for having struggled through early interpersonal challenges, studies in this area also offer evidence that those whomeet criteria for earned-secure attachment status report levels of internalizing distress comparable to or in excess of those typical of individuals in the insecure group (Pearson et al., 1994; Roisman et al., 2002, 2006). Prospective studies of earned-security take decades and a great deal of human and financial resources to complete successfully. Therefore, a valid