Brief description
My work is centered around the areas of parent-child relations and attachment and it focuses on two related main domains. In each of the domains, together with Prof. David Oppenheim from the Department of Psychology at the University of Haifa, we concentrated on developing the concept, developing assessment procedures, and implementing the knowledge via workshops.
My first area of interest focuses on parents’ ability to show insightfulness regarding their children’s inner world. Insightfulness is seen as the capacity underlying positive parenting and providing the context for secure child-parent attachment. We developed research procedure (the Insightfulness Assessment – IA) in which parents view video segments of their interactions with their children and are subsequently interviewed regarding their children’s and their own thoughts and feelings during the segments. Many research studies with typical and atypical populations have supported the notion that insightfulness is associated with mothers' sensitive behaviors toward their child and with children's secure attachment toward their mothers.
A related area of research centers on parent-child dialogues about emotional events. In our work, we suggested to look at parent-child dialogues, particularly around the co-construction of narratives about emotional events, as a promising ways to assess processes of meaning making. More specifically, we believe that the ability of children and parents to construct a believable, relevant, coherent, and cooperative dialogue on personal and emotional events is one of the cornerstones of security in the years following early childhood.
In order to examine these suggestions, we developed a new coding method – the AEED (Autobiographical Emotional Events Dialogues, Koren-Karie, et al. 2000). Recent work utilizing this measure provides support for our hypothesis by showing relations between AEED classifications obtained during childhood and early attachment. As with the IA, the AEED was used in both low risk and high risk populations. The AEED has gain international academic recognition. It has been used in research laboratories in h Australia, USA, Canada, Amsterdam and in Sapienza University in Rome.