M Steele

Infant-mother attachment at one year predicts children's understanding of mixed emotions at six years

Data from the six-year follow up of a longitudinal study investigating intergenerational patterns of attachment and the effects of early relationships upon subsequent social, emotional and cognitive development are presented. Around the rime of their sixth birthday, 63 children participated in an affect understanding task, involving cartoon diagrams depicting social and emotional dilemmas. As predicted, performance on this task, assessed in terms of mixed-emotion understanding, was predicted by security of the infant-mother attachment relationship las assessed in the Strange Situation at one-year) and security, or autonomy in the mothers representations of and reflections upon, her attachment history (as assessed with the Adult Attachment Interview, of AAI-during pregnancy) prior to the childs birth. Regression analyses suggested that the infant-mother attachment data significantly, enhanced the prediction of an advanced understanding of mixed emotions at six-years, even after controlling for variations in the childrens age at time of testing, as well as child and parent verbal skills. The inclusion of earlier assessments of the child-father Strange Situation assessment (at 18-months) did not enhance the model; nor did the attachment status of the mothers or fathers as observed in their prenatal AAIs. Discussion concerns the contributions of early attachment processes, including family, conflict, to the ability to verbally, express an understanding of mixed emotions in a task depicting hypothetical social and emotional dilemmas.

Maternal predictors of children's social cognition: an attachment perspective

BACKGROUND This paper assumes that the capacities to (1) openly acknowledge, and (2) elaborate a resourceful plan for coping with distress in the self and others are central features of social cognition. METHOD These capacities were assessed in a sample (N = 51) of 11-year-old children whose mothers and fathers had previously provided Adult Attachment Interviews (AAIs) before their children were born. The children were shown six line-drawn sequences of child(ren), with peer(s) and/or family in diverse situations involving some moderate distress. The experimenter described the adversity shown in the sequence (e.g., bully pushing over another school-aged child in the presence of onlookers) and then invited the child to attribute thoughts and feelings to the characters, and comment upon what might happen next. RESULTS Children whose responses scored highly for acknowledgement of the distress, and elaborating a resolution, were significantly more likely to have had mothers (but not fathers) whose AAIs were judged autonomous-secure as opposed to insecure (i.e., dismissing, preoccupied and/or unresolved). The significant influence of maternal representations of attachment upon the 11-year outcome remained even after taking account of concurrent parenting attitudes, childrens verbal intelligence, as well as the previously assessed infant-parent attachment patterns. CONCLUSIONS Discussion concerns the differential predictive power of maternal responses to the Adult Attachment Interview as related to the domain of childrens social and emotional understanding.

Children's play narrative responses to hypothetical dilemmas and their awareness of moral emotions

Five-year-old childrens moral development was assessed using a projective doll-play technique (the MacArthur Story Stem Battery; MSSB), an emotion-understanding task, concurrent maternal reports of behaviour problems and child performance in a cheating task. Three narrative scales were derived from the childrens MSSB play themes: a non-physical punishment scale, a prosocial scale and an antisocial scale. Thechildrens use of non-physical discipliningthemes was related to their awareness of moral emotions. The antisocial and prosocial narrative scales were related to concurrent maternal ratings of externalizing and internalizing problems, respectively. Although the emotions children anticipated in the emotion-understanding task did not predict behaviour in the cheating task, their justifications for the different emotions tended to do so, as did the prosocial play narrative scale. The findings suggest a degree of coherence across the assessments of moral development, and are discussed with reference to childrens script-based understanding.