Poster #122 - Children’s Attachment Security, Empathy, and Callous-Unemotional Traits: A Path From Toddler to Early School Age

• In Event: 1-061 - Poster Session 02
  In Poster Session: PS 02 Section - Moral Development

Integrative Statement

Young children’s capacity for empathy is a hallmark of socioemotional development (Brownell, 2013; Killen & Smetana, 2015; Thompson, 2015). Additionally, in developmental psychopathology, impoverished empathy and low concern for others are core components of callous-unemotional (CU) traits, which are a substantial risk factor for antisocial trajectories (Blair, 1995; Frick & White, 2008, Rhee et al., 2013). Understanding how individual differences in empathy emerge is an important goal, vigorously pursued by developmental scholars. Surprisingly very few studies have examined the role of early attachment, although Shaver, Mikulincer, Gross, Stern, and Cassidy (2016) argued that a secure attachment is a prototypical positive ecology for emerging empathy, due to the child’s experience of responsive care and the parent serving as a model of compassion. Almost no studies, however, have examined both mother- and father-child relationships.

We examined a path from attachment security at toddler age to empathy and concern about others at preschool age to CU traits at early school age. We expected higher attachment security to promote children’s future empathy, which, in turn, would serve to lower risks for CU traits. In 102 community families, we collected parallel multi-method data for mother- and father-child dyads. Children’s attachment security at 2 years was assessed using Attachment Q-Set (AQS, Waters, 1987), completed by trained raters who observed the child and parent during a 2.5-hour laboratory session in psychologically diverse contexts (Boldt, Kochanska, Yoon, & Koenig Nordling, 2014). Children’s empathy was observed at 3 and 4½ years in well-established simulated distress paradigms, with the parent pretending to be hurt by the child playing with a toy hammer. Children’s affect and behavior were coded for 5-sec segments with microscopic codes and rated for overall distress and empathic concern. The codes were standardized and aggregated into coherent composites (Cronbach’s alphas .73 - .84). Parents also rated child empathy at age 4.5, using a 13-item scale (Kochanska, DeVet, Goldman, Murray, & Putnam, 1994; alphas .80 for mothers and .76 for fathers). Parents rated children’s CU traits at 6.5 years (Inventory of CU traits, ICU, Frick, 2003, alphas .86 and .82).

Analyses tested double-mediation models, separately for mother- and father-child dyads, with child security modeled as the predictor, observed and parent-reported child empathy as the two mediators, and the child’s CU traits as the outcome measure. We tested the proposed paths in PROCESS (Hayes, 2013), using bias-corrected bootstrapping with 5,000 resamples drawn to obtain the 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for the indirect effects of child early security to his or her CU traits through empathy.

Overall, data clearly supported the proposed indirect effect of security on CU traits, although they differed for mother-child versus father-child dyads with regard to the empathy measure that mediated the relation. For mother-child dyads, the path from security to CU traits was mediated by observed empathy, B = -.09, SE = .05, 95% CI [-.196, -.003], whereas for father-child dyads, it was mediated by father-reported empathy, B = -.16, SE = .08, 95% CI [-.327, -.027]. We will discuss possible reasons for the differences.

Authors

• Nicole Carolyne Yeager, University of Iowa
  Presenting Author

• Kathryn C Goffin, University of Iowa
  Non-Presenting Author

• Katrina Joy Friedrich, The University of Iowa
  Non-Presenting Author

• Grazyna Kochanska, The University of Iowa
  Non-Presenting Author