Young adolescent's confidence in maternal support: attentional bias moderates the link between attachment-related expectations and behavioral problems

Attachment security is an important resilience factor for children at risk for psychopathology, whereas attachment insecurity can be an important risk factor. Effects of attachment security on behavior problems may be partially explained by expectations regarding attachment figures' availability and the moderating effect of concurrent automatic biases in children's attentional processing of their mother on the link between attachment-related expectations and behavioral problems. This hypothesis was tested in two studies with 10-12 year old early adolescents (Study 1: N = 32; Study 2: N = 138). In both studies, the findings confirmed the moderation hypothesis, suggesting that less confidence in maternal support was related to more behavioral problems when children's attentional processing of mother was biased