Article2002

Patterns of Attachment and Maternal Discourse Effects on Children's Emotion Understanding From 3 to 5 Years of Age

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Child and Animal Learning Development Child and Adolescent Psychosocial and Emotional Development Attachment and Relationship Dynamics

Abstract

Abstract Two studies examined the influence of maternal discourse style and security of attachment, and their interaction, on preschoolers’ emotion understanding. The first, with 3‐year‐olds, unexpectedly found no significant prediction of emotion understanding from attachment and discourse, and the interaction of the predictors yielded theoretically unpredicted associations with emotion understanding. Consequently, measures of attachment and emotion understanding were obtained again on these children at age 5 in a second study. At this age, consistent with expectations, secure attachment predicted higher emotion understanding, especially in the context of maternal use of elaborative discourse from the earlier assessment. The findings suggest that during the period of significant representational advance between ages 3 and 5, the influence of maternal discourse and attachment security are developmentally transformed as children's conceptions of psychological states rapidly change. By age 5, however, maternal elaborative discourse in the context of attachment security fosters deeper emotion understanding in preschoolers.

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References

1972Attachment and Loss. Vol. 1. Attachment 1985Defining and Assessing Individual Differences in Attachment Relationships: Q-Methodology and the Organization of Behavior in Infancy and Early Childhood 1991Attachment in the Preschool Years 1991Young Children's Understanding of Other People's Feelings and Beliefs: Individual Differences and Their Antecedents 1986Social Cognition, Prosocial Behavior, and Emotion in Preschoolers: Contextual Validation 1991Family talk about feeling states and children's later understanding of others' emotions.1991Developing Narrative Structure 1987Conversations about feeling states between mothers and their young children.

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