Patricia A. Smiley

Assessing parental empathy: a role for empathy in child attachment

Although empathy has been associated with helping behavior and relationship quality, little research has evaluated the role of parental empathy in the development of parent–child relationships. The current study (1) establishes preliminary validity of the Parental Affective and Cognitive Empathy Scale (PACES), a method for coding empathy from parents’ narrative responses to the Parent Development Interview – Revised for School-Aged Children (PDI-R-SC), and (2) tests a theoretical model of empathy and attachment. Sixty caregivers and their children completed a battery of questionnaire and interview measures, including the PDI-R-SC and the Child Attachment Interview (CAI). Caregivers’ interview narratives were scored for empathy using PACES. PACES showed good interrater reliability and good convergent validity with a self-report empathy measure. Parent empathy was positively related to child attachment security (using a continuous score for narrative coherence) and emotional openness on the CAI, as well as to child perceptions of parental warmth. Moreover, parent empathy mediated the relation between parents’ self-reported attachment style and their children’s attachment security. Implications for attachment theory and future directions for establishing scale validity are discussed.

Intention Understanding and Partner‐Sensitive Behaviors in Young Children’s Peer Interactions

Recent research on peer interaction shows that complex, coordinated play emerges around 24 months. Increased understanding of others’ intentions has been proposed as a reason for its emergence at this juncture. In this study, we assessed understanding of the intentional structure of human action in children aged 19 to 39 months by eliciting verbal explanations of observed action. We hypothesized that more elaborated understanding of intention would be related to more partner-sensitive behaviors during interactions with familiar, same-age peers at home. We found that level of intention understanding predicted types of overtures made, types of objects offered, monitoring partner responses, partner compliance, and types of speech acts addressed to partners. Results are discussed in terms of the contribution of intention understanding to interactive competence, the role of linguistic competence in conceptual development, the effects of context on the production of speech acts and developing theory of mind.

Can Toddy Give Me an Orange? Parent Input and Young Children's Production of I and You

Learning personal pronouns is a challenging linguistic task because children must adopt words for self- and other-reference that parents use for other- and self-reference, respectively. We examined person-reference in action contexts by 11 first–born children and their parents from the CHILDES database, coding the extent to which parents mixed first- and second-person pronouns with third-person names as well as their childrens production of I, you, and other self- and other-referring words. Children whose parents produced a mix of pronouns and names for self- and other-reference (i.e., I, me, my, and Mommy; you and child name) acquired I and you more readily compared with children whose parents mixed pronouns and names only for self-reference and children whose parents produced only I and you. Moreover, children in the latter two groups were more likely to spontaneously introduce forms other than I and you for self- and other-reference. We conclude that young children are conceptually prepared to acquire the conventional system of person-reference and that mixed input supports their learning of I and you.

Interactive effects of attachment and FKBP5 genotype on school-aged children's emotion regulation and depressive symptoms.

Graphical abstract Figure. No caption available. HighlightsFKBP5 and attachment insecurity are associated with emotion dysregulation and depression.We examine their interaction in predicting outcomes in community sample of children.Parental overcontrol only associated with attachment insecurity among minor allele carriers.Genes and children’s insecurity interactively predict children’s dysregulation and depressive symptoms.Results generally support a differential susceptibility perspective. Abstract Attachment insecurity is influenced by both environmental and genetic factors, but few studies have examined the effects of gene‐environment interactions. In the context of environmental stress, a functional variant in the glucocorticoid receptor co‐chaperone FKBP5 gene has been repeatedly shown to increase risk for psychiatric illness, including depression. We expand on prior work by exploring cross‐sectional attachment by gene effects on both attachment insecurity and downstream physiological and behavioral measures in a diverse community sample of school‐aged children (N = 99, 49% girls, Mage = 10.29 years, 66.6% non‐White) and their mothers. Specifically, we examined moderating effects of FKBP5 rs3800373 genotype on the links between parenting insensitivity (overcontrol) and child attachment. Further, we assessed whether FKBP5 moderates the links between maternal and child attachment and children’s emotion regulation self‐report, respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) in response to a standardized laboratory stressor, and depressive symptoms. Higher levels of overcontrol predicted lower child attachment security only in FKBP5 minor allele carriers. Among children with two minor alleles (CC), attachment security was negatively associated with emotion suppression, rumination, depressive symptoms, and RSA reactivity; similarly, for these children, maternal attachment anxiety was positively associated with depressive symptoms. The findings can be conceptualized in a differential susceptibility framework, where the FKBP5 minor allele confers either risk or resilience, depending on the parenting environment.

Child and maternal attachment predict school-aged children’s psychobiological convergence

Psychobiological convergence-the alignment of task-related changes in childrens self-reported and physiological indices of reactivity-has recently emerged as a powerful correlate of childrens attachment representations, but has not been explored for its association with childrens self-reported attachment, with parents attachment, or with respect to cardiovascular reactivity. The present study found that, within a diverse community sample of mothers and school-aged children (Nxa0=xa0104, Mage xa0=xa010.31), the positive link between cardiovascular (respiratory sinus arrhythmia [RSA]) and subjective reactivity to a stressor was only significant among children with high levels of security and children of mothers with low levels of attachment avoidance and anxiety. The convergence of childrens subjective and physiological experience is discussed as a key developmental competence that may lay the groundwork for effective coping.