Joke Heylen

Children's Attentional Processing of Mother and Proximity Seeking

Attachment expectations regarding the availability of mother as a source for support are supposed to influence distressed children’s support seeking behavior. Because research is needed to better understand the mechanisms related to support seeking behavior, this study tested the hypothesis that the cognitive processing of mother-related information is linked to proximity and support seeking behavior. Uncertainty in maternal support has been shown to be characterized by a biased attentional encoding of mother, reducing the breadth of children’s attentional field around her. We investigated whether this attentional bias is related to how long distressed children wait before seeking their mother’s proximity. Thirty-three children (9-11 years) participated in this study that consisted of experimental tasks to measure attentional breadth and to observe proximity seeking behavior and of questionnaires to measure confidence in maternal support and experienced distress. Results suggested that distressed children with a more narrow attentional field around their mother wait longer to seek her proximity. Key Message: These findings provide a first support for the hypothesis that the attentional processing of mother is related to children’s attachment behavior.

Variability in anger intensity profiles: Structure and predictive basis

The aim of this study is to describe variability in the shape and amplitude of intensity profiles of anger episodes and how it relates to duration, and to investigate whether this variability can be predicted on the basis of appraisals and emotion regulation strategies used. Participants were asked to report on a wide range of recollected anger episodes. By means of K-spectral centroid clustering, two prototypical shapes of anger intensity profiles were identified: early- and late-blooming episodes. Early-blooming episodes are relatively short and reach their peak immediately. These profiles are associated with low-importance events and adaptive regulation. Late-blooming episodes last longer and reach their peak (relatively) late in the episode. These profiles are related to high-importance events and maladaptive regulation. For both early- and late-blooming profiles, overall amplitude is positively associated with event importance and the use of maladaptive regulation strategies and negatively with the use of adaptive ones.

KSC-N: Clustering of Hierarchical Time Profile Data

Quite a few studies in the behavioral sciences result in hierarchical time profile data, with a number of time profiles being measured for each person under study. Associated research questions often focus on individual differences in profile repertoire, that is, differences between persons in the number and the nature of profile shapes that show up for each person. In this paper, we introduce a new method, called KSC-N, that parsimoniously captures such differences while neatly disentangling variability in shape and amplitude. KSC-N induces a few person clusters from the data and derives for each person cluster the types of profile shape that occur most for the persons in that cluster. An algorithm for fitting KSC-N is proposed and evaluated in a simulation study. Finally, the new method is applied to emotional intensity profile data.

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.

Attachment and depressive symptoms in middle childhood The moderating role of skin conductance level variability

The current study investigated whether biological sensitivity to emotional information moderates the link between attachment anxiety/avoidance and depressive symptoms. Sixty children (9–12 years old) completed questionnaires on attachment and depressive symptoms. Skin conductance level (SCL) was measured across three conditions: an emotionally neutral baseline condition, a negative mood induction condition, and a positive mood induction condition. SCL variability (SCLV) was calculated as the intraindividual variation across these conditions expressing the extent to which children are biologically sensitive to positive and negative emotional information. Results showed that SCLV moderated the association between depressive symptoms and attachment anxiety. Attachment anxiety was only linked with depressive symptoms when children showed more SCLV, suggesting that attachment anxiety is only a risk factor for children who are biologically sensitive to respond to emotional information. SCLV did not moderate the association between depressive symptoms and attachment avoidance. Instead, a significant correlation was found between attachment avoidance and SCLV, which replicated previous research and might be caused by more avoidantly attached children’s unsuccessful attempts to suppress emotional reactions.

Attachment and self-regulation performance in preadolescence

In preadolescence, research has shown links between the quality of children’s attachment relationships and children’s perceived self-regulatory abilities. However, less research has focused on the association between attachment and preadolescents’ self-regulation performance. In a sample of 120 children, aged 9–13, we administered questionnaires to assess trust in maternal support and anxious and avoidant attachment. In addition, mothers reported about their children’s self-regulatory abilities, and children performed the Stop-Signal Task (SST). Consistent with predictions, correlation analyses revealed that a more insecure attachment relationship with mother was not only associated with less self-regulatory abilities as perceived by mother but also with preadolescents’ lower self-regulation performance in the SST. Adding demographic variables as covariates to the analyses did not significantly alter these effects. The current multi-method study contributes to an increasing awareness of the importance of the quality of the mother–child relationship for children’s self-regulation.