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3-076 - Attachment and social cognition – a bio-psychological perspective from infancy to early adulthood.

Sat, March 23, 9:45 to 11:15am, Baltimore Convention Center, Floor: Level 3, Room 339

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

In this multidisciplinary symposium, we provide insight into implications of attachment for social cognitive functioning from a bio-psychological perspective across different developmental stages. The presented papers from three countries take different approaches to both attachment and social cognitive functioning using various measures in samples that cover an age-span from infancy to early adulthood.
The first paper examines associations between infant attachment classifications (Strange Situation) and preschool executive function (EF) in a large prospective cohort, and reports that avoidant infant-mother attachment predicts more problematic EF in preschool children on some EF subdomains but not others. The second paper explores whether cognitive/attributional aspects of attachment internal working models (IWMs) are associated with the experience and expression of vulnerability in school-age children. This paper shows that preoccupied attachment representations (Child Attachment Interview) are related to more negative appraisal of vulnerability. The third paper shows in a sequential mediation model that associations between preschool attachment representations and school-age depressive symptoms are mediated by exclusion-related cardiac slowing – a psychophysiological index of expectancy violation – and school-age peer problems, independent of preschool temperament. The fourth paper explores the neural substrates of attachment-derived IWMs using fMRI in in children (ages 8-12), adolescents (ages 12-19), and adults (age >20) using three different social cognitive emotional tasks. Findings indicate that attachment-derived IWMs are associated with brain activity already in children, but that associations differ as a function of age.
Taken together, these studies suggest that attachment plays an important role for various aspects of social cognitive functioning throughout childhood.

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