Veríssimo, Manuela <br/><br/>
The Model of Maternal Internal Representation and the Secure Base Behavior of the Child in a Group of Adopted Children 

 -  2008.<br/>							 
<br/><br/> 56 
<br/><br/> Studying the quality of attachment in adopted children is of great importance to the attachment theory, allowing for an evaluation of the quality of attachment and its development in families that do not share the same genetic information or the same family history. This study aims to determine if the child’s age at the time of adoption affects the quality of attachment established within the new family and if a relationship between the mother’s internal working model and the adopted child’s secure base behavior exists. The AQS (Waters 1987) was used to assess the quality of the mother-child attachment relationship and the Maternal Narratives (Waters and Rodrigues-Doolabh 2001) were used to assess the mother’s internal working model. No significant correlation was found between the child’s age at adoption and the quality of attachment, suggesting that the child can establish meaningful relationships at two, three, and four years of age, thus stressing the importance of the presence of maternal sensitivity in the development of emotional ties. The results show that the quality of scripts of the maternal secure base is associated with the criterion of security in children. Thus, these results go hand in hand with Ainsworth’s findings, which emphasize the importance of maternal sensitivity in the construction of a secure attachment, and support one of the basic principles of attachment theory: “transgenerationality” where the mother’s internal working model mediates the quality of child care and interactions established with the child.