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Reflective Functioning on Adult Attachment Interview (RF-AAI)

This Reflective Functioning on Adult Attachment Interview (RF-AAI) training will teach you how to assess a person’s mentalizing capacity.

About this training

Mentalizing refers to the capacity to make sense of one’s own behaviour and experiences as well as those of others in terms of intentional mental states. This course will teach attendees how to assess a person’s mentalizing capacity (operationalized here as Reflective Functioning) based on transcripts of the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI), a semi-structured interview on someone’s experiences with their attachment figures.

For many experts, measuring reflective function when a person is how to reflect upon their own childhood experiences as in the AAI is considered the gold standard to evaluate how effective a person can mentalize.

Attendees will further learn how to administer the AAI and how AAI-RF can be assessed and applied in various contexts (e.g. research, in clinical work including private practice, court proceedings or assessment work – the latter in relation to, for instance, fostering or social service assessments of parenting).

Once trained in AAI-RF, the coding procedure can also be applied to other narrative-based material such as therapy session transcripts, interviews on symptomatology related to mental difficulties and many other such sources.

Who is this training for?

The course is relevant to professionals from different background: clinicians, empirical researchers in development and clinical psychology or psychotherapy research and beyond, to those wishing to complement their assessment procedures with an empirical index for a critical psychological capacity.

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