Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

5-1989

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

Psychology

Major Professor

Anne McIntyre

Committee Members

Robert G. W.

Abstract

Previous research has suggested that higher degrees of maternal appropriate or facilitating responsiveness are characteristic of the adequate mother and lesser degrees characteristic of the less adequate mother. It has also been suggested that the maternal personality characteristics that correlate with variations in facilitating responsiveness involve how maturely or "objectively" mothers perceive others. The construct of object representation was seen as a way of conceptualizing and measuring the continuum of maturity-immmaturity and the internal factors that are involved in interpersonal perception and behavior. It was hypothesized that variations in levels of object representation would correlate with variations in levels of maternal facilitating responsiveness in interaction with the infant.

Thirty mothers and their eight- to ten-month-old infants were selected to explore these relationships in a volunteer sample, screened to limit the influence of significant health problems, mother-infant separations, differences in maternal age, and father absence.

Two measures of maternal object representation were employed. One involved rating a description of the infant for conceptual level and the second involved rating earliest memory for qualitative level. Scores on these iv two measures were compared to behavioral measures of maternal facilitating responsiveness to infant social behavior, to infant exploration, and to infant distress and to a measure of maternal anticontingent responsiveness.

The hypothesis as stated was not supported. However, when groups were distinguished on personality and behavioral variables and analyzed using nonparametric statistics, a significant association was found, indicating that lower scores on the conceptual level measure were associated with the presence of maternal inappropriate or nonfacilitating responsiveness. Two other associations approaching significance were also found, indicating that high conceptual level scores occurred in greater proportion than low conceptual level scores among mothers with medium as opposed to low and high levels of facilitating responsiveness and that low conceptual level scores occurred in greater proportion than high conceptual level scores among mothers of infants who showed no social behavior.

Results are interpreted as raising important questions about assumptions regarding the psychologically mature mother and the continuum of responsiveness and about the behaviors involved in adequate and in inadequate mothering. Results also suggest that the two measures of maternal object representation used may measure different dimensions of personality.

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