Les narratifs d'enfants et leur lien avec les comportements d'attachement précoce

A central discovery from recent attachment research is that the individual differences most pertinent for assessing attachment representations are revealed in the coherence of the narratives, and that the content is less relevant. The goal of this paper is to illustrate this critical distinction between coherence and content regarding the narratives of preschoolers by linking these assessments to the children's attachments to their mothers as measured when they were infants. The narrative procedure is the MacArthur Story Stem Battery (MSSB). A coherence scale evaluates the fluency of the narrative as well as the child's understanding of the problems presented in the story stems, and their resolution. The assessment of the content of the narrative refers to the degree to which the protagonists are described as dealing competently with the emotional issues raised in the story stems. The MSSB includes not only story stems that target attachment themes but also story stems about other emotionally laden themes. This allows examining the characteristics of narratives in situations raising various emotional themes.