Emotion Regulation and Attachment: Unpacking Two Constructs and Their Association (original) (raw)
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Research in Human Development, 2006
In this study, we examined characteristics of the mother-child context that may support young children's emotion expressions and emotion regulation. We observed children (N= 154) in four emotion-eliciting episodes to measure their emotion expressions and mother-focused regulation strategies. Mothers reported on the toddlers' attachment security. Lower levels of maternal controlling behaviors and higher levels of attachment security were associated with more adaptive emotion expressions by toddlers, and more maternal positive behavior was associated with more mother-focused regulation. Toddlers' use of mother-focused regulation was also associated with decreased levels of negative affect in positive and fear emotion-eliciting tasks but not in frustration tasks. The associations differed for boys and girls and differed depending on the context of the specific emotion elicited. Article: Recently, the definition of emotion regulation and its relation to emotion expressions has been a topic of debate (Cole, Martin, & Dennis, 2004). Given that children learn styles of dealing with emotions from early parent-child interactions (Calkins, 1994; Eisenberg, Cumberland, & Spinrad, 1998), it seems clear that relationships play a strong role in children's emotional development. Emotional self-regulation is one component of children's self-regulation (Grolnick & Farkas, 2002) and is a major developmental task during toddlerhood (Kopp, 1982, 1989). Children's emotional self-regulation has been identified as important to later optimal development because problems with emotionality and emotion regulation play a significant role in young children's behavior problems (Calkins & Dedmon, 2000; Cole, Michel, & O'Donnell, 1994). As Panneton, Kitamura, Mattock, and Burnham (this issue) discuss, emotion communication in the parent-child context begins early in child development. During toddlerhood, children are further expected to learn to control their emotions in a socially acceptable manner, and toddlers rely on parents to help them master emotional self-regulation (Kopp, 1982, 1989). Examining the links among children's emotion expressions, emotion regulation, and the characteristics within the parent-child dyad is important to identifying potential antecedents to more serious problems later in development.
Infant Behavior and Development, 2013
This study investigated the relationships between children's secure base and emotion regulation, namely their behavioral strategies and emotional expressiveness, during different situational and social contexts in naturalistic settings. Fifty-five children ranging in age from 18 to 26 months of age and their mothers participated in this study. Children were exposed to three situational (fear, positive affect and frustration/anger) and two social (maternal constraint and involvement) contexts. Toddlers' behavioral strategies differed as function of emotion-eliciting context, maternal involvement and attachment quality. Emotional expressiveness varied as function of an interaction involving situational contexts, maternal involvement and children's attachment security.
Children's awareness concerning emotion regulation strategies: Effects of attachment status
Social Development, 2017
The current study evaluated the effects of preschoolers' attachment status on their awareness concerning emotion regulation strategies. A total of 212 children between 3 and 5 years participated in this study and completed two self-report tasks. The first was the Attachment Story Completion Task (ASCT), which assessed children's internal working models concerning parent-child attachment; the second evaluated children's ability to generate emotion regulation strategies in relation to three negative emotions (anger, sadness, and fear). Statistical analyses involved a mixed models multilinear regression approach controlling for age and gender. The results consistently revealed that the insecure avoidant group was significantly less likely than securely attached children to generate both comforting and self-regulatory strategies. Surprisingly, the insecure ambivalent group showed no deficits across measured outcomes. When the analyses were conducted separately for each negative emotion, findings for co-regulatory strategies for fear, and self-regulatory strategies for anger also suggested that avoidantly attached children exhibited the lowest levels of awareness compared with children from the secure attachment group. These findings stress the importance of children's attachment status, and implicitly, the quality of the parent-child interactions for children's awareness of emotion regulation strategies related to negative emotions.
Child Development, 2007
It was examined whether secure infant-mother attachment contributes to emotionally congruent and organized mother-child dialogues about emotions in later years. The attachment of 99 children was assessed using the Strange Situation at the age of 1 year and their emotion dialogues with their mothers were assessed at the ages of 4.5 and 7.5 years. Dialogues were about past emotional events and separation of a child from parents, and were classified into an emotionally matched group or 1 of 3 non-emotionally matched groups. Security in infancy was associated with emotionally matched dialogues at the age of 4.5; there was moderate stability in dialogues between 4.5 and 7.5 years; and infant attachment predicted dialogues at 7.5 beyond the prediction offered by age 4.5 dialogues.
Children’s perceptions of emotion regulation strategy effectiveness: links with attachment security
Attachment & Human Development, 2016
Six-and nine-year-old children (N = 97) heard illustrated stories evoking anger in a story character and provided evaluations of the effectiveness of eight anger regulation strategies. Half the stories involved the child's mother as social partner and the other half involved a peer. Attachment security was assessed via the Security Scale. Children reported greater effectiveness for seeking support from adults and peers in the peer context than the mother context, but perceived venting as more effective with mothers. Children with higher security scores were more likely to endorse problem solving and less likely to endorse aggression in both social contexts than those with lower security scores. Early evidence for gender differences was found in that boys endorsed the effectiveness of distraction while girls endorsed venting their emotion.
Two studies examined the influence of maternal discourse style and security of attachment, and their interaction, on preschoolers' emotion understanding. The first, with 3year-olds, unexpectedly found no significant prediction of emotion understanding from attachment and discourse, and the interaction of the predictors yielded theoretically unpredicted associations with emotion understanding. Consequently, measures of attachment and emotion understanding were obtained again on these children at age 5 in a second study. At this age, consistent with expectations, secure attachment predicted higher emotion understanding, especially in the context of maternal use of elaborative discourse from the earlier assessment. The findings suggest that during the period of significant representational advance between ages 3 and 5, the influence of maternal discourse and attachment security are developmentally transformed as children's conceptions of psychological states rapidly change. By age 5, however, maternal elaborative discourse in the context of attachment security fosters deeper emotion understanding in preschoolers.
Social Development, 2002
Two studies examined the influence of maternal discourse style and security of attachment, and their interaction, on preschoolers' emotion understanding. The first, with 3year-olds, unexpectedly found no significant prediction of emotion understanding from attachment and discourse, and the interaction of the predictors yielded theoretically unpredicted associations with emotion understanding. Consequently, measures of attachment and emotion understanding were obtained again on these children at age 5 in a second study. At this age, consistent with expectations, secure attachment predicted higher emotion understanding, especially in the context of maternal use of elaborative discourse from the earlier assessment. The findings suggest that during the period of significant representational advance between ages 3 and 5, the influence of maternal discourse and attachment security are developmentally transformed as children's conceptions of psychological states rapidly change. By age 5, however, maternal elaborative discourse in the context of attachment security fosters deeper emotion understanding in preschoolers.
Parent–child attachment and children’s experience and regulation of emotion: A meta-analytic review
Emotion, 2019
Attachment relationships serve as contexts within which children develop emotional capacities. This meta-analytic review assessed the strength of associations of parent-child attachment patterns with the experience and regulation of emotion in children under age 18 years. In a series of meta-analyses (k ϭ 72 studies, N's ranged from 87 to 9,167), we examined children's positive and negative affective experiences (assessed either globally or elicited in specific contexts), emotion regulation ability, and coping strategies. More securely attached children experienced more global positive affect and less global negative affect, expressed less elicited negative affect, were better able to regulate emotions, and more often used cognitive and social support coping strategies. More avoidantly attached children experienced less global positive affect, were less able to regulate emotions, and were less likely to use cognitive or social support coping strategies. By contrast, more ambivalently attached children experienced more global and more elicited negative affect, and were less able to regulate emotions. More disorganized children experienced less global positive affect and more global negative affect. These robust findings provide evidence that attachments to parents have implications for children's emotional development, although more research is needed on whether insecure attachment patterns are associated with distinct emotion profiles.
Parenting, 2014
Objective-Previous research has examined the developmental consequences, particularly in early childhood, of parents' supportive and unsupportive responses to children's negative emotions. Much less is known about factors that explain why parents respond in ways that may support or undermine their children's emotions, and even less is known about how these parenting processes unfold with adolescents. We examined the associations between mothers' attachment styles and their distress, harsh, and supportive responses to their adolescents' negative emotions two years later and whether these links were mediated by maternal emotion regulation difficulties.
2006
Despite its prevalence in low-income populations, there has been little attention paid to how maternal depression influences mother-child conversations about emotions and low-income preschool children's developing emotion understanding. The importance of a secure attachment as a positive influence on emotion understanding has also been infrequently studied in lower-income families. This longitudinal study examined attachment security and maternal depression when children were age 2 as predictors of mother-child references to emotion in conversations, and children's emotion understanding when children were three. Maternal depression at age 2, but not at age 3, showed a direct, negative relation to children's emotion understanding at age 3, independent of mother-child references to emotion and attachment security. More securely attached dyads made more references to emotion in conversation, which, in turn, promoted children's emotion understanding. It was concluded that secure attachment relationships support children's emotion understanding by promoting mother-child discussion of emotions, while emotion understanding in preschoolers is directly impaired by maternal depression.