Predicting Adolescents' Attachment Representations from Early and Current Mother-Child Emotional Communication

• In Event: 1-085 - The Nature of Attachment Representations in Early Adolescence: Longitudinal Roots and New Theoretical Directions

Integrative Statement

We examined how mother-child dialogues about children's emotional experiences in the preschool and in early adolescence years contribute to adolescents' attachment representations. Parent-child's conversations about autobiographical meaningful events have an important role in structuring and organizing children's emotional experiences (Nelson & Fivush, 2004) and promoting children's introspection and emotional regulation (Oppenheim & Koren-Karie, 2009). Such parent-child dialogues reflect the emotional communication between parents and children (Bretherton, 2005), and through them young children (Dubois-Comtois, Cyr, & Moss, 2011) and adolescents (Sher-Censor, Koren-Karie, Getzov, & Rotman, 2017; Allen, McElhaney, et al., 2003) learn about their internal world and build representations of close relations. We therefore expected early and current mother-child dialogues to be associated with children's attachment representations.
One hundred and eight children (54 boys) and their mothers, who participated in the study as preschoolers, where seen again in early adolescence. Children and mothers were asked to discuss events containing emotional meaning for the child in both time points. Mother-child dialogues were coded for their emotional congruence, as reflected in open, involved, accepting and emotionally adjusted mutual behavior in the conversation (AEED; Koren-Karie, Oppenheim, Haimovich & Etzion-Carasso, 2003). Two aggregate scales were constructed: Maternal sensitive guidance and child's cooperation. Adolescents' attachment representations were assessed with The Friends and Family Interview (FFI; Steele & Steele, 2005), and four aggregate scores were used: Adolescents' relations with their mothers, fathers and siblings, as well as the coherence of their narrative. It was hypothesized that more emotionally congruent mother-child dialogues, in preschool and in early adolescence, will be associated with secure and more coherent attachment representations in adolescence. Furthermore, the unique contribution of the early mother-child dialogues to adolescents' attachment representations was examined.
As expected, mothers' sensitive guidance and children's cooperation during their preschool dialogues were associated with adolescents' coherence in the FFI interview and secure representation of their relations with their mother (but not fathers) and their siblings. Analyses of concurrent associations showed that adolescents' cooperation in the emotional dialogue with mother were associated with the coherence of their interview and secure representations of their relations with mother, father and siblings; but maternal sensitive guidance was only associated with secure representation of sibling relationships. Finally, the findings revealed that the quality of mother-child dialogues in preschool had a unique contribution to adolescents' coherence of narrative and secure representations of their relations with their mothers and siblings, over and above current mother-child dialogues (see tables 1 and 2).
These results highlight the significant role played by children's early emotional communication with their mothers in shaping their attachment representations. Mother-child dialogues which enable open, accepting and organized expression of ideas and emotions, are associated with the development of secure internal working model of close relations in children. Furthermore, the findings highlight the unique contributions of early and current emotional communication to adolescents' mental representations, over the course of development.

Authors

• Revital Tamari, University of Haifa
  Presenting Author

• Ora Aviezer, Tel Hai College
  Non-Presenting Author

• David Oppenheim, University of Haifa
  Non-Presenting Author