Dr. Patti talks to Zeynep Biringen about the world-wide used emotional availability scale that she created. Biringen has identified four qualities of parents and two qualities of children related to emotional availability. For parents she looks for sensitivity, structuring, non-intrusiveness, and non-hostility. The two qualities in children that she looks for is child responsiveness and child involvement with parents. These six qualities make up what she describes as emotional availability (EA.)

Zeynep Biringen, PhD is a licensed clinical psychologist in Colorado and Professor Emerita at Colorado State University (CSU). She conducted research on adult-child relationships at CSU for over 25 years and has trained literally thousands of professionals (researchers, mental health clinicians, and other practitioners) in the evidence-based EA System.

Inspired by her mentor Robert N. Emde’s conceptualizations of emotional availability and emotions as well as Bowlby/Ainsworth attachment theory, Biringen has spearheaded the understanding of emotional availability (EA) as a rigorous scientific assessment of adult-child relationships, developing and refining the Emotional Availability (EA) System. Encouraged by Robert N. Emde, Biringen began to train professionals in the system well over 30 years ago.