Abstract
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.
Highlights
The quality of parent-child relationships has an effect on distressed children’s attempts to seek and maintain maternal proximity and support [1]
Recent middle childhood research demonstrated that children’s explicit uncertainty regarding maternal support is characterized by an enhanced attentional focus on mother [8, 9]. As this attachment-related attentional bias might be important to understand the dynamics that influence attachment behavior, the current study aimed to investigate whether this attentional bias is related to distressed children’s inclination to seek their mother’s proximity
1% of the data was missing, but the Trust score of four children was missing due to skipped items
Summary
The quality of parent-child relationships has an effect on distressed children’s attempts to seek and maintain maternal proximity and support [1]. Attachment theory explains this effect by suggesting that experiences with parental care and support become internalized into attachment representations that guide children’s subsequent support seeking behavior [2]. The crucial question regarding how attachment representations influence proximity and support seeking behavior has long been understudied and little understood. Better understanding these underlying processes is necessary to provide a clearer theoretical framework to explain how parent-child interactions influence child behavior and its development across the lifespan [3]. As lack of proximity and support seeking is a fundamental transdiagnostic risk factor for childhood
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