Children’s Attributions Regarding the Expression of Emotion as a Function of Attachment.

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

Integrative Statement

Children with preoccupied attachment engage in hyperactivating emotion regulation strategies, amplifying their experience and expression of negative emotion (Cassidy, 1994). Unsurprisingly, as compared to children with secure attachment, preoccupied children are at risk for emotion dysregulation, low self-esteem, depression, and anxiety (e.g., Roelofs et al., 2006). Yet, little is known about the social-cognitive aspects of attachment preoccupation, which is theorized to guide children’s perceptions, behaviors, and emotions in relationships. In line with cognitive behavioral principles, we contend that understanding preoccupied children’s social cognition may reveal targets for prevention or intervention and may provide insight into the ways in which preoccupied children view themselves. Given that preoccupied children express high levels of negative emotionality, understanding their attributions regarding negative emotion may yield valuable information. To test this assertion, we conducted an in-depth study of participants’ attributions regarding other children’s emotional experience and expression.
A diverse group of school-aged children participated in this study (N = 106, 53% girls, Mage = 9.83, SDage = 1.49). Children completed the Child Attachment Interview (Shmueli-Goetz et al., 2004), which was coded by certified raters and actor analyzed to reveal two dimensions – a preoccupied to secure dimension, the focus of the current study, and a dismissing to secure dimension. Participants were presented with six Vulnerability Vignettes depicting children expressing sadness and fear (Borelli, 2009), as well three neutral control vignettes. Following the presentation of each vignette, participants reported their perceptions of how strong and weak the children depicted in the vignettes were (e.g., rated from 1 = Not strong at all to 7 = Really, really strong), as well as the degree to which they liked them and desired to affiliate with them. Participant’s ratings served as indices for cognitive (attributions) and emotional (liking, desire to affiliate) reactions to the children depicted in the vignettes. We predicted that greater attachment preoccupation would be associated with rating the children as less strong, weaker, and less likeable, and would be associated with lower affiliation desire.
In line with hypotheses, higher attachment preoccupation was associated with rating sad children as being less strong and weaker (see Table 1). In addition, children with higher preoccupation liked sad children less and showed lower affiliation desire. In contrast, preoccupation was not related to participants’ perceptions of frightened children, except that greater preoccupation was associated with lower liking of fearful children. Deeper exploration of the data revealed that preoccupied children only rated sad children as less strong when sad children were depicted as seeking parental help (see Fig.1). All findings held after controlling for participants’ depressive symptoms, whereas links between preoccupation and general attributions did not, suggesting that cognitive aspects of children’s judgments of children’s emotion expression are associated with preoccupied attachment above and beyond that accounted for by depression. This study provides a glimpse into the social cognitive processes of children with preoccupied attachment. Discussion will focus on the ways in which these findings contribute to our understanding of social information processing in school-aged children with preoccupied attachment in this age range.

Authors

• Gerin Elizabeth Gaskin, Claremont Graduate University
  Presenting Author

• Jessica Borelli, University of California, Irvine
  Non-Presenting Author