Attachment and emotion-regulation in middle childhood: The role of mother-related information processing, support-seeking towards mother, and maternal secure base support

In middle childhood, maternal inadequacy to help children regulate negative emotions in times of stress is found to increase the risk for developing psychopathology. Nevertheless, little is known about stress-regulation within middle childhood mother-child relationships. Attachment theory is an interesting framework for understanding these stress-regulatoryprocesses. It predicts that, based on experiences with parental supportin times of stress, children develop expectations regarding parental availability and support. These expectations influence their social information processing, which, in turn, influences their interpersonal behavior in times of stress, namely whether or not they seek parental support, and explore challenging stimuli. Finally, support-seeking is thought to increase children’s chances for successful stress-regulation, decreasingthe risk to develop psychopathology. These predictions from attachment theory have, however, not been validated in middle childhood. The current dissertation aimed to gain more insight in stress-regulatory processesin middle childhood mother-child relationships.The first study demonstrated that less trust in maternal support was related to a more negative memory bias for mother-referent information, supporting the hypothesis that children’s memory processing is biased in congruence with their attachment expectations.The second study demonstrated that children with less trust in maternal support had a stronger attentional focus towards mother-pictures versus simultaneouslypresented threatening stimuli, compared to children with more trust. This finding supported the hypothesis that an increased attentional focus towards mother in children with less trust, impairs these children’s exploration.The third study manipulated proximity-seeking towards versus avoidance of mother, and demonstrated that avoiding mother was less effective for regulating negative emotions in children withhigher scores on anxious attachment and children with higher scores on avoidant attachment. Moreover, for avoidant attachment, similar effects were found for the regulation of physiological stress assessed with skinconductance. For more secure children, stress- and emotion-regulation was independent of whether children approached or avoided mother.The fourth study demonstrated that higher scores on anxious attachment and avoidant attachment were related to slower support-seekingduring stress, and that slower support-seeking was related to more depressive symptoms at approximately 21months follow-up if children encountered a high amount of life-events.The fifth study investigated the emotion-regulatory effect of maternal secure base support, maternal presence, and maternal absence. In the latter design, emotion-regulation was independent of maternal behavior and children’s attachmentexpectations. Taken together, these results of the studies in this doctoral project suggest that (1) children’s expectations regarding maternal support influence children’s cognitive processing of attachment-related information, and that (2) support-seeking towards mother is an important stress-regulating strategy in middle childhood, but thatlinks with individual differences in attachment depend on the intensityof the stressor. Finally, (3) results regarding the emotion-regulatory effect of maternal secure base support are inconclusive, but the applieddesign might be a useful base for future research..status: publishe