Conference Agenda

Clinicians are increasingly encountering clients (particularly younger adults) whose distress is characterised not only by anxiety or depression, but by a pervasive sense of meaninglessness and uncertainty about the future. While most clinicians appreciate that attachment theory provides a powerful framework for understanding relationships and affect regulation, it has been under-recognised for its potential role in the construction of meaning and coherence in individuals' life narratives. This presentation offers an integrative clinical perspective that brings attachment theory into dialogue with existential and narrative approaches to meaning in life.

Drawing on Viktor Frankl's theory of meaning, contemporary attachment research, and narrative psychology, meaning is conceptualised not as the discovery of a singular life purpose, but as an attitudinal stance toward experience - particularly in relation to unavoidable suffering. Secure attachment is presented as a foundational condition that supports meaning-making by fostering positive internal working models, autobiographical competence, and the capacity to reflect on past events in coherent and growth-oriented ways. In contrast, anxious and avoidant attachment patterns are shown to undermine meaning through narrative entanglement, emotional suppression, or avoidance of reflection.

Research findings are reviewed demonstrating that threats to meaning activate the attachment system, and that security priming enhances narrative coherence and the ability to interpret life events as meaningful, even in the absence of external resolution. Clinical examples illustrate how therapy can function as a secure base from which clients re-author fragmented or rigid narratives, strengthen authenticity, and develop more coherent and hopeful identities.

This presentation does not report original empirical data but offers a clinically grounded synthesis of research and practice. Attendees will gain practical strategies for working with meaning-related distress, tailoring interventions to attachment style, utilising security primes, and supporting clients to construct life narratives that enhance both attachment security and a sustained sense of meaning.

It has been proposed that differences in infant–caregiver attachment extend beyond seeking reassurance and reflect trust in caregivers’ communication, or epistemic trust. Applying this perspective to the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI), and drawing on Mary Main’s use of Gricean pragmatics, we hypothesized that AAI classifications reflect generalized differences in expectations about communication: dismissing individuals expect communication to be under-informative, whereas preoccupied individuals expect it to be inefficient. To test these hypotheses, we studied the associations between AAI classifications and differences in how individuals interpret a type of utterance studied in linguistics, known as ‘underinformative scalar utterances’. These utterances have the form of “some xs are ys,” where it is true that “all xs are ys” (e.g., some elephants are mammals). In many contexts, hearers take such sentences as implying “not all xs are ys,” while others interpret them as asserting that at least some, and possibly all xs are ys. The first, pragmatic, interpretation assumes speakers aim to communicate efficiently. Hearers reason counterfactually, considering what the speaker could have said (e.g., all elephants are mammals) and inferring meaning from what was omitted. The second interpretation assumes the speaker produces a true, informative statement even if inefficient. Participants were 196 German women, who completed the AAI and a sentence verification task including underinformative scalar utterances. Consistent with our hypotheses, dismissing participants were more likely to interpret the utterances pragmatically, whereas preoccupied participants were less likely to do so. We discuss the implications of these findings for viewing AAI classifications as trait-like differences in how individuals calibrate informativeness and cognitive effort.

Background

The concept of epistemic trust was implicitly described by Bowlby in the 1960s and 1970s from the perspective of attachment theory. Bowlby emphasized that securely attached children experience the caregiver as a reliable source of information about the social world, thereby forming the foundation for openness to social communication. Several decades later, Fonagy et al. (2015) explicitly formulated epistemic trust as the capacity to regard information from others as relevant, trustworthy, and generalizable. Since 2015, research on epistemic trust has grown rapidly, with many related terms emerging and the field diversifying, making it challenging for researchers and clinicians to situate findings within broader theoretical and practical context. This pre-registered scoping review (10.17605/OSF.IO/WCNHU) synthesized the literature to clarify relations between epistemic trust and closely related constructs, aiming to develop a conceptual model of epistemic trust.

Methods
We followed PRISMA-ScR guidelines and searched the Scopus, PsychINFO, IBSS and Medline databases in November 2025 for peer‑reviewed studies on epistemic trust. Only studies focusing on epistemic trust as a psychological concept were included. This search yielded unique 2900 studies, of which 303 studied were included after title and abstract screening by four independent researchers in Rayyan. Full-text screening is ongoing (80% completed); based on current progress, about 200 studies are expected to be eligible for data extraction. Included studies will be analyzed deductively within predefined domains in ATLAS.ti and synthesized narratively; this will be finalized in May 2026.

Results
Results are expected to map how epistemic trust is theoretically and empirically related to epistemic vigilance, epistemic mistrust, and epistemic credulity, thereby informing the development of an up-to-date conceptual model of epistemic trust.

Conclusions
Findings may inform future research and practice on epistemic trust and facilitate the development and use of assessment tools to measure epistemic trust, ultimately contributing to improved intervention outcomes.

Attachment anxiety and avoidance are thought to increase the risk of overgeneralized memory (OM: recalling memories with little specificity) and rumination, with negative effects on mood, problem-solving, decision-making, and well-being. Here, we investigated links between attachment and rumination in relation to OM when recalling short narratives depicting attachment-related versus non-attachment-related situations.

Swedish-speaking women (N=41) encoded 120 attachment narratives, depicting events following the prototypical attachment script (exploration/life situation–crisis–need for help), and 120 non-attachment narratives depicting ordinary events, all with either supportive or non-supportive endings. Participants were then presented with “old” (same as original), “similar” (slightly changed details) or “new” narratives to classify. Memory overgeneralization was evaluated with an Overgeneralization Index (OI: incorrectly categorizing similar narratives as “old”) and Memory Discrimination (MD: correctly identifying similar narratives as “similar”) index. Attachment was assessed with the Experiences in Close Relationships Scale-Revised (ECR-R), and rumination brooding and reflection with the Ruminative Response Scale-Short Form (RRS-SF), while controlling for social desirability (Marlowe–Crowne Social Desirability Scale/MCSDS-S).

Participants showed more overgeneralization for attachment narratives compared to non-attachment narratives, which may be evidence of an attachment schema leading, when activated, to categorization of attachment-related events as same. Attachment anxiety predicted greater memory discrimination among individuals with low brooding but poorer discrimination among those with high brooding. Thus, while anxiety independently predicted memory discrimination, rumination moderated the link between anxiety and OM, suggesting that cognitive biases like OM may be central mechanisms for the maintenance of preoccupation with attachment-related thoughts and emotions associated with attachment anxiety.

Beyond links between attachment and cognitive outcomes, our results highlight the importance of considering both dispositional and situational aspects of rumination, clarifying its role in memory specificity and mechanisms for its contribution to the onset and maintenance of mood disorders and PTSD. Understanding these mechanisms is crucial for effective intervention.