Maternal Attachment and Children's Emotional and Cognitive Competences

The goal of the study was to examine the relation between dimensions which lie in the basis of maternal attachment (anxiety and avoidance) and the development of children's competences in the emotional domain (reflective functioning, mixed emotions understanding, sequential emotion understanding) and cognitive development (verbal comprehension, logic, graphomotor skills and understanding quantities). For this purpose, 60 children and their mothers were tested. Revised Adult Attachment Scale (RAAS; Collins, 1996), was used to assess the two attachment dimensions. The Affect Task (Steele, Steele, & Fonagy, 1994) contains several subscales, including those intended to assess children's reflective functioning, mixed emotions understanding and sequential emotion understanding. Children's cognitive competences were assessed through their success on the Readiness for Elementary School Test (POŠ; Tolčić, 1986). Results indicate significant negative correlations between dimensions of maternal attachment and emotional competences. Also, avoidance is a significant predictor of mixed emotions understanding and sequential emotion understanding. Furthermore, anxiety negatively correlate