Articles Patterns of Attachment and Maternal Discourse Effects on Children's Emotion Understanding From 3 to 5 Years of Age (original) (raw)
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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.
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.
Social Development, 2007
Mothers' mental state language in conversation with their preschool children, and children's preschool attachment security were examined for their effects on children's mental state language and expressions of emotional understanding in their conversation. Children discussed an emotionally salient event with their mothers and then relayed the event to a stranger. Compared to mothers of insecurely attached children, mothers of securely attached children used more mental state language and had children who used more mental state language with both mother and stranger, and who expressed more emotional understanding in the mother-child conversation. Maternal mental state language and attachment security made shared contributions to children's mental state language with their mothers. Maternal mental state language accounted for the effects of attachment security on children's expressions of emotional understanding in the mother-child conversation. Mothers' mental state language to their children may enhance secure attachment and foster children's understanding of mental states in self and others.
Social Development, 2001
Data from the six-year follow up of a longitudinal study investigating intergenerational patterns of attachment and the effects of early relationships upon subsequent social, emotional and cognitive development are presented. Around the time of their sixth birthday, 63 children participated in an affect understanding task, involving cartoon diagrams depicting social and emotional dilemmas. As predicted, performance on this task, assessed in terms of mixed-emotion understanding, was predicted by security of the infant-mother attachment relationship (as assessed in the Strange Situation at oneyear) and security or autonomy in the mother's representations of, and reflections upon, her attachment history (as assessed with the Adult Attachment Interview of AAI-during pregnancy) prior to the child's birth. Regression analyses suggested that the infant-mother attachment data significantly enhanced the prediction of an advanced understanding of mixed emotions at six-years, even after controlling for variations in the children's age at time of testing, as well as child and parent verbal skills. The inclusion of earlier assessments of the child-father Strange Situation assessment (at 18months) did not enhance the model; nor did the attachment status of the mothers or fathers as observed in their prenatal AAIs. Discussion concerns the contributions of early attachment processes, including family conflict, to the ability to verbally express an understanding of mixed emotions in a task depicting hypothetical social and emotional dilemmas.
Attachment and emotional understanding in preschool children.
Developmental Psychology, 1998
This study was designed to elucidate the association between attachment and emotional understanding in preschool children. Forty children between the ages of 2.5 and 6 years and their mothers participated in the study. Mothers completed the Attachment Q-set, and children took part at their preschools in both an affective perspective-taking task and a series of interviews concerning naturally occurring incidents of emotions. Overall, age and attachment security predicted a child's aggregate score on the emotional understanding tasks. However, when the score was separated by the valence of the emotion, attachment security and age predicted a child's score for only those emotions with a negative valence (e.g., sadness) and not for those emotions with a positive valence (e.g., happiness). Thus, a secure attachment relationship seems to be important in fostering a child's understanding of emotion, primarily negative emotions.
Children's emotion understanding in relation to attachment to mother and father
The British journal of developmental psychology, 2018
Although attachment plays a key role in children's socio-emotional development, little attention has been paid to the role of children's attachment to their father. This study examined whether insecure attachment to each parent was associated with reduced emotion understanding in children and whether children showed consistent attachments to their mother and father. We measured children's attachment to each parent using the Manchester Child Attachment Story Task and child emotion understanding using the Test of Emotion Comprehension (children's M = 5.64 years, SD = 0.84). The results indicated that insecure father-child attachment and insecure mother-child attachment were each associated with lower emotion understanding in children after controlling for parent's depressive symptoms and children's age. There was significant concordance of child attachment to mother and father. The findings provide support for convergence of children's attachment across par...
Attachment & human development, 2014
Research on the attachment-dialogue link has largely focused on infant-mother attachment. This study investigated longitudinal associations between infant-mother attachment and maternal attachment representations and subsequent mother-child emotion dialogues (N = 50). Maternal attachment representations were assessed using the Adult Attachment Interview when children were 3 months, infant-mother attachment was assessed using the Strange Situation Procedure at 13 months, and mother-child emotion dialogues were assessed using the Autobiographical Emotional Events Dialogue at 3.5 years. Consistent with past research, the three organized categories of infant-mother attachment relationships were associated with later mother-child emotion dialogues. Disorganized attachment relationships were associated with a lack of consistent and coherent strategy during emotion dialogues. Autonomous mothers co-constructed coherent narratives with their children; Dismissing and Preoccupied mothers creat...
Parent child emotion communication attachment and affective narratives.pdf
Forty-four pre-schoolers (ages 4.3 to 5.8 years) and their primary caregivers participated in a study on the connections between parent-child emotion communication and a narrative assessment of pre-schoolers' attachment. Children completed the Separation Anxiety Test (SAT), a narrative assessment of children's responses to attachmentrelated separations (including self-reliance, avoidance, attachment and coherence scores). Several aspects of parent-child discussions of emotion-eliciting events were also assessed in the Emotion Communication Task. Results indicated that SAT coherence was positively related to SAT attachment and negatively related to SAT avoidance. Furthermore, SAT coherence was positively related to parental scaffolding and negatively related to parental and child negativity during the Emotion Communication Task. Parental scaffolding and child reciprocity were positively related to each other and, in general, were negatively related to parental and child negativity. Discussion focused on the potential contributions of children's interactions with caregivers to the development of children's attachment narratives and emotion-related understanding.
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.
Developmental Psychobiology, 2010
The aim of the study was to investigate parental perception and interpretation of infant emotional expression depending on their attachment representation. Forty-six parents' responses to infant pictures depicting positive, neutral, and negative emotions were assessed on the level of affective judgments (valence, arousal), mimic responses (facial muscle activity), and of the eyelid reflex (using the startle paradigm). Results revealed small differences between parents of different attachment representations with respect to their subjective evaluations. However, secure parents, as compared to insecure ones, showed a positive bias in their mimic responses to infant pictures. The modulation of the startle response indicated a negative evaluation of negative infant emotion expressions in dismissing parents, while an augmentation of the startle response to negative infant emotions could not be observed in secure and preoccupied parents. The findings highlight the role of attachment experiences for emotional information processing in parents and its consequences for parental behavior. ß 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Dev Psychobiol 52: 411-423, 2010.