Eva Vandevivere

Under Which Conditions Do Early Adolescents Need Maternal Support

Maternal support is known as a protective factor during infancy, childhood, and adolescence. However, less is known about the conditions leading to support-seeking behaviors toward mothers in early adolescence. In comparison with younger children, it is assumed that the specific nature of these conditions changes with continuing cognitive maturation. To shed light on the normative development of attachment-related behaviors beyond infancy and, more specifically, on the activating conditions for support seeking, 98 early adolescents were instructed to write about a distressing situation during which they needed their mother’s support. Seven distressing conditions could be derived from the current data. Two not previously described age-relevant conditions, academic failure and social conflict, were identified. Notably, 62% of the reported conditions referred to situations Bowlby (1969/1982) originally proposed, empirically confirming the importance of these conditions in early adolescence.

Attachment and Children’s Biased Attentional Processing: Evidence for the Exclusion of Attachment-Related Information

Research in both infants and adults demonstrated that attachment expectations are associated with the attentional processing of attachment-related information. However, this research suffered from methodological issues and has not been validated across ages. Employing a more ecologically valid paradigm to measure attentional processes by virtue of eye tracking, the current study tested the defensive exclusion hypothesis in late childhood. According to this hypothesis, insecurely attached children are assumed to defensively exclude attachment-related information. We hypothesized that securely attached children process attachment- related neutral and emotional information in a more open manner compared to insecurely attached children. Sixty-two children (59.7% girls, 8–12 years) completed two different tasks, while eye movements were recorded: task one presented an array of neutral faces including mother and unfamiliar women and task two presented the same with happy and angry faces. Results indicated that more securely attached children looked longer at mother’s face regardless of the emotional expression. Also, they tend to have more maintained attention to mother’s neutral face. Furthermore, more attachment avoidance was related to a reduced total viewing time of mother’s neutral, happy, and angry face. Attachment anxiety was not consistently related to the processing of mother’s face. Findings support the theoretical assumption that securely attached children have an open manner of processing all attachment-related information.

Attachment and Effortful Control: Relationships with Maladjustment in Early Adolescence

Based on former research, it can be assumed that attachment relationships provide a context in which children develop both the effortful control (EC) capacity and the repertoire of responses to regulate distress. Both are important to understand children’s (mal)adjustment. While the latter assumption has been supported in several studies, less is known about links between attachment and EC. We administered questionnaires to measure anxious and avoidant attachment or trust in maternal support in two samples of early adolescents. EC was reported by the child in Sample 1 (n = 244), and by mother in Sample 2 (n = 177). In both samples, mothers reported children’s maladjustment. Consistent with predictions, insecure attachment was related to reduced EC. Moreover, EC indirectly linked insecure attachment to maladjustment. This study provides evidence that studying EC is important to understand the self-regulatory mechanisms explaining the link between attachment and (mal)adjustment in early adolescence.

The Role of Attachment Anxiety in Maternal Attentional Processing of their Child's Face: An Eye-Tracking Study:

Although mothers attention to offspring is deemed important to support their offsprings secure attachment development, little research tested this association. The current study aimed to test the hypothesis that how mothers orient their attention to their offspring is linked to differences in offsprings attachment style. Additionally, we tested whether this association depended on which emotions children express. 29 mothers participated with their offspring (48.3% girls; ages 9 to 15 years, M = 10.93, SD = 1.67). Across two experimental blocks, eye movements were recorded as mothers viewed photographs of offspring and unfamiliar children showing neutral (block 1) and facial expressions of fearful, happy and sad (block 2). Offsprings self-reported attachment anxiety was related to increased maintained attention of the mother on the offsprings neutral face, while more attachment security was related to reduced maintained attention. With regard to emotional faces, mothers of more anxiously attached children showed more maintained attention on all emotional expressions of their offspring, including sadness. Furthermore, we found a positive attentional bias of mothers with more securely attached children; increased attention on the offsprings happy face was found. No attentional processes were found for attachment avoidance. Different attachment-related parenting behaviors, leading to a specific attachment style of the offspring, could be explained by these attentional allocations.