Poster #134 - Attachment Processes and Early Manifestations of Callous-Unemotional Behaviors

• In Event: 3-206 - Poster Session 13
  In Poster Session: PS 13 Section - Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Integrative Statement

Introduction. Callous-unemotional (CU) behaviors include a lack of guilt, lack of empathy and shallow affect (Hare, 2003). These behaviors in childhood are crucial in the developmental course of severe antisocial behavior (Frick & Dickens, 2006) and adult psychopathy (Loney, Taylor, Butler & Iacono, 2007). CU behaviors may emerge as early as three years and perhaps sooner (Ezpeleta et al., 2013). It is therefore important to identify risk factors and developmental mechanisms underlying CU behaviors.

A host of individual (e.g., genetics; Henry et al., 2018) and social factors (e.g., parenting; Waller, Gardner, & Hyde, 2013) have been considered. Among these is the possibility that attachment processes, as indexed by parental sensitivity and child attachment security, may play a role. Both sensitivity and security are linked to empathy (Stern & Cassidy, 2017) and emotional recognition in children (Steele, Steele, & Croft, 2008), both being inversely associated with CU behaviors (Lui, Barry, & Sacco, 2016). Conceptually, a caregiving environment where children’s distress and needs are responded to in a sensitive way serves to shape their ability to respond to others’ distress. Lack of exposure to sensitive parenting may thus facilitate the emergence of CU behaviors.

Recent studies provides mixed support for the association between CU behaviors, parental sensitivity and attachment security (Bedford et al., 2015, 2017; Wright, Hill, Sharp, & Pickles, 2018). Moreover, it is necessary to account for the possible contribution of general forms of externalizing in studying CU behaviors, as attachment processes are linked to externalizing in general (Fearon et al., 2010).

Objectives. We aimed to determine whether observed maternal sensitivity (infant age 6 and 10 months) and observed attachment security (15 and 18 months) predict CU behaviours at 18 months, over and above child aggression and psychosocial risk.

Method. 138 mother-infant dyads participated in this study. An oversampling of adolescent mothers (<20 years at child birth; n=93) was conducted. Psychosocial risk was defined as being the child of an adolescent mother (0 vs. 1). Maternal sensitivity was assessed using the Maternal Behavior Q-Sort (Pederson & Moran, 1995). Attachment security was assessed using the Attachment Q-Sort (Waters, 1995). CU behaviors and Aggression were based on parent ratings of subsets of items taken from the Child Behavior Checklist-Preschool version (Achenbach & Rescorla, 2000).

Results. Sensitivity and attachment scores were reduced into a single factor extracted through principal components analysis, accounting for 51% of the variance. Factor scores were thus used in the analyses. Hierarchical regressions indicated that this factor negatively predicted 18-month CU levels after controlling for child aggression and psychosocial risk. The full regression model accounted for 22% of the CU variance. Psychosocial risk did not interact with the attachment/sensitivity factor to predict CU behavior.

Conclusions. Attachment-related processes predict CU levels during infancy, over and above psychosocial risk and concurrent aggression, suggesting that attachment is specifically linked to early CU behaviors. This result should prompt more systematic inclusion of attachment-linked processes in developmental models of CU behaviors, as such information may help guide early prevention efforts.

Authors

• Jeffrey Henry, Université Laval
  Presenting Author

• George Tarabulsy, Université Laval
  Non-Presenting Author

• Annie Bernier, University of Montreal
  Non-Presenting Author

• Marc A. Provost, Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jean-Pascal Lemelin, Université de Sherbrooke
  Non-Presenting Author