Poster #60 - When do Youth Generalize Representations of Parents to Peers: The Role of Maltreatment

• In Event: Poster Session 05

Abstract

Unfamiliar individuals may trigger strong emotions in us upon first contact. One mechanism to explain this is representation generalization (Andersen & Chen, 2002), whereby a cue observed on unfamiliar individual triggers the mental representations of a significant other which in turn are generalized back to the individual in the form of expectations, emotions, etc. Mental representations of significant others guiding one’s social world in this way is indeed the core idea of many clinical and developmental theories of psychology (Bowlby, 1973; Beebe & Lachmann, 2002).
However, the boundary conditions of this process are underspecified to date. Specifically, it is unclear how selectively individuals generalize and relatedly what conditions may drive one to generalize „despite absence of fit“ (Bowlby, 1988). The latter is especially relevant for people experiencing psychological difficulties, as people learn to rely under extreme stress on negatively biased, automatic processing of the social environment (Luyten & Blatt, 2016). Therefore, this study aims to fill these gaps by selectively activating parental representations of maltreated adolescents during a virtual ball-tossing paradigm to examine how similarity vs non-similarity to a parent influences their encounters with new peers.
To this end, participants (N ≈ 200) describe one of their parents using open-ended statements via an online survey a week before their arrival at the lab. These statements are then used by the researchers to create idiosyncratic „Target“ blurbs that contain ten descriptive sentences, six of which are paraphrased parental descriptive items and four of which are filler.
During their appointment, adolescents play “Cyberball” (Williams & Jarvis, 2006) with two co-players who are supposedly connected online and are introduced to the participant before the game via these descriptive blurbs: One of these co-players (Target) resembles their parent personality-wise, while the other co-player constitutes the Control. While Cyberball is originally a social-exclusion paradigm, our design only contains an inclusion phase (%33 of ball tosses to the participant) to create a social context as neutral as possible. An electrocardiogram (ECG) simultaneously records participants’ heart rate during Cyberball. After the game, participants complete a recognition-memory test on previously seen blurbs of two co-players. Meanwhile in another room, the parent completes the Maternal Maltreatment Classification Interview (MMCI; Cicchetti, Toth, & Manly, 2003) with which adolescents are classified as either maltreated or non-maltreated based on the presence of any maltreatment events.
We expect to find that maltreated and non-maltreated adolescents exhibit differential mnemonic and cardiac responses to these two co-players as a function of parental resemblance and that these differences index their relational expectations. Specifically, our main hypothesis is that maltreated adolescents will display less pronounced immediate heart-rate deceleration following not-receiving-the-ball from Target vs Control. This hypothesis rests on the premises that heart-rate deceleration is a correlate of heightened attention to salient negative stimuli (Bradley, 2009) and that not receiving the ball from Target vs Control will be less unexpected for the maltreated participants, as their parental expectations are already negatively-biased.

Authors

• Dorukhan Açıl, Leipzig University
  Presenting Author

• Jan Keil, Leipzig University

• Angelika Johanna Bracher, Leipzig University

• Pascal Vrtička, University of Essex

• Kai von Klitzing, Leipzig University

• Lars Otto White, Leipzig University