Antecedents to and outcomes associated with teacher-child relationship perceptions in early childhood: Further evidence for child-driven effects.

Preschool teachers' perceptions about relationships with students (teacher-child relationships [TCRs]) predict children's subsequent social competence (SC) and academic progress. Why this is so remains unclear. Do TCRs shape children's development, or do child attributes influence both TCRs and subsequent development? Relations between TCRs and other measures were examined for 185 preschoolers (107 girls, 89 longitudinal, and ~75% European American). Teachers rated TCRs and child social/affective behaviors. Teacher-child interactions (TCIs) and children's affect expressiveness were observed. Child SC and receptive vocabulary were assessed. TCRs were significantly correlated with each type of outcome. TCIs, SC, expressed affect, and teacher-rated behaviors also predicted TCRs longitudinally. Results suggest that TCR ratings predict subsequent adaptation because they summarize children's behavioral profiles rather than on TCR quality per se.

Salivary oxytocin after play with parents predicts behavioural problems in preschool children.

BACKGROUND: Oxytocin (OXT) has attracted research interest for its potential involvement in many of the behavioural problems observed in childhood. Due to its logistical advantages, saliva is an attractive fluid to quantify neuropeptides in children. Salivary OXT has been suggested as a potential biomarker for psychopathology during childhood. However, several questions still remain about the extent to which, and under what conditions, concentrations of OXT in saliva can be reliably measured and are related to behavioural problems in preschool age children. METHODS: Seven samples of saliva from 30 preschool children (17 girls) were collected in five different days at their homes. Three of the samples were collected by the children's parents at baseline daily routine conditions, and four of the samples were collected by researchers during two home-visits: before and after two 15-minute dyadic play sessions (one with mothers and one fathers) between each individual parent and the child. Oxytocin concentrations were quantified by Radioimmunoassay with prior extraction. Children's behavioural problems were assessed by the Caregiver-Teacher Report Form (C-TRF) questionnaire, completed by the child's' preschool teacher. RESULTS: Salivary OXT measured in baseline samples could not predict any of the behavioural problems measured by the C-TRF. However, when measured after playing with parents salivary OXT showed a stronger pattern of negative correlations, specially with the depression and opposition scales of the C-TRF. Furthermore, salivary OXT was unlikely to be reliably measured using single sampling, but acceptable reliabilities were achieved when averaging several samples. Finally, the single measures of salivary OXT evoked after an episode of play with parents showed better reliabilities than collected at baseline. CONCLUSION: Measurements of OXT evoked after positive affect interactions with parents seem to capture aspects of the OXT system in young children that might be relevant for understanding the role of this system in children's social behaviour.

Early Child Care Experiences and Attachment Representations at Age 18 Years: Evidence from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development.

The role of early child care experiences on the development of the mother-child attachment relationship has been studied extensively. However, no prospective studies of early child care have addressed how these experiences might be reflected in the content of attachment representations during adolescence and beyond. The goal of this study was to estimate relatively precise associations between child care quality, child care quantity, and type of care in the first 54 months of life and the content of adolescents' attachment representations around age 18 years (N = 857; 51% female; 78% White, non-Hispanic; M income-to-needs ratio = 4.13), leveraging data from the longitudinal NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (SECCYD). We identified a small positive association between the observed quality of early child care (but not quantity or type of care) and secure attachment states of mind as measured by the Adult Attachment Interview (but not the Attachment Script Assessment) at age 18 years that was robust to demographic covariates and observations of maternal and paternal sensitivity during childhood. We observed no significant interactions among child care variables. Associations between early child care experiences and indicators of adolescent attachment were likewise not moderated by maternal sensitivity from infancy to mid-adolescence or by maternal reports of child temperament in early childhood.

Early Attachment to Mothers and Fathers: Contributions to Preschoolers' Emotional Regulation.

Children acquire and develop emotional regulatory skills in the context of parent-child attachment relationships, nonetheless empirical studies have focused mainly on mother and less information is available regarding the role of both parent-child attachment relationships. Furthermore, despite its importance, there is no information regarding preschool years. This study aims to fill this gap by exploring the potential influences of both mother-child and father-child attachments on preschooler's later emotion regulation observed in the peer group. Fifty-three Portuguese nuclear families (mother, father and focal child) participated in the study; 47% of the children were boys and 53% were girls. Attachment Security was assessed at home using the Attachment Behavior Q-set when children were 3 years of age, and emotion regulation was observed in the preschool classrooms attended by the children at age 5, using the California child Q-sort to derive an Emotion Regulation Q-Scale. Results showed that the combined influence of both parent-child attachment security predicted better emotion regulation results, than did the specific contributions of each parent per se. Findings are consistent with integrative approaches that highlight the value of including both mother- and father-child attachment relationships, as well as their combined effect, when studying emotion regulation.

Measurement invariance across mother/child and father/child attachment relationships.

We examine the factorial structure of the Security Scale Questionnaire (SSQ), exploring measurement invariance across mother-father-child attachment relationships, child sex, and country. We used the new 21-item SSQ version that integrates both safe haven and secure base behaviors in a two factors structure. Participants were 457 children (224 girls and 233 boys), ranging from 9 to 14 years old (M = 10.84, SD = 1.02) from Portuguese and USA samples. We confirmed the SSQ's two-factor structure, although four items were unrelated to the latent structure and excluded from the final model. Results showed that SSQ can be used to study both mother/child and father/child attachment relationships. Multi-group analyses suggested measurement invariance between boys and girls and between Portuguese and USA samples. Our findings suggest that the SSQ can be considered a valid and cost-effective tool to measure perceived attachment security in middle childhood for both mother/child and father/child relationships.

The significance of early temperamental reactivity for children's social competence with peers: A meta-analytic review and comparison with the role of early attachment.

Early temperamental reactivity and attachment security are key predictors of children's social competence with peers. Leveraging meta-analytic evaluation of the significance of early attachment for social competence already available (Groh et al., 2014), this quantitative review examined the significance of early temperamental reactivity for social competence with peers and compared the strength of this association with that for attachment. Based on 140 independent samples (u = 382; N = 49,891), the meta-analytic association between early difficult temperament and (lower) social competence was significant (r = 0.13, z = 0.13; 95% CI [0.11, 0.16]), but decreased as time between assessments increased. Findings were similar for negative and positive emotionality. Greater negative emotionality was associated with lower social competence (r = 0.14, z = 0.14; 95% CI [0.11, 0.17], k = 93, u = 172), and greater positive emotionality was associated with better social competence (r = 0.18, z = 0.18; 95% CI [0.12, 0.24], k = 43, u = 54). Meta-analytic associations were reduced when overlapping informants and overlapping items in temperament and social competence assessments were excluded (difficult temperament: r = 0.10, z = 0.10; 95% CI [0.06, 0.13]; negative emotionality: r = 0.10, z = 0.10; 95% CI [0.05, 0.15]; positive emotionality: r = 0.10, z = 0.10; 95% CI [0.06, 0.14]). Meta-analytic associations between these broadband temperament dimensions and social competence were smaller than the meta-analytic association between attachment security and social competence. Discussion focuses on the developmental significance of early temperament for social competence and ways to reconcile literatures on early temperament and attachment in future research on the developmental antecedents of children's social competence. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Does secure base script knowledge mediate associations between observed parental caregiving during childhood and adult romantic relationship quality and health?

Increasingly, attachment representations are being assessed via secure base script knowledge - the degree to which individuals show awareness of the temporal-causal schema that summarizes the basic features of seeking and receiving effective support from caregivers during times of need. Limited research has assessed the links between secure base script knowledge and aspects of adult functioning and the role that secure base script knowledge may play in accounting for associations between early caregiving quality and adulthood functioning. We used follow-up assessments of the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development cohort (N = 585) to examine whether secure base script knowledge at age 18 years: (a) is associated with later romantic relationship quality, depressive symptoms, and body mass index (BMI) at age 26 years, and (b) mediates expected associations between the quality of maternal and paternal sensitivity across the first 15 years of life and age-26 outcomes. More access to, and elaborated knowledge of the secure base script predicted less extreme hostility with romantic partners, and better emotional and physical health. Moreover, secure base script knowledge mediated the links between early maternal and paternal sensitivity and both later romantic partner hostility and depressive symptoms, but not BMI.

Convergent and Discriminant Validities of SCBE-30 Questionnaire Using Correlated Trait-Correlated Method Minus One.

Correlated trait-correlated method minus one was used to evaluate convergent and discriminant validity of Social Competence Behavior Evaluation questionnaire (Social Competence, Anger-Aggression, Anxiety-Withdrawal) between multiple raters. A total of 369 children (173 boys and 196 girls; M age = 55.85, SD age = 11.54) were rated by their mothers, fathers, and teachers. Results showed more convergence between parents than parent-teacher ratings. Mother-teacher share a common view of child behavior that is not shared with father. Parents had more difficulty distinguishing internalizing and externalizing behaviors (especially fathers). Measurement invariance across child sex was explored, results imply that differences between boys and girls were not due to measure. Girls (compare to boys) were described as more social competent by their fathers and teachers, while boys as more aggressive by mothers and teachers.

Children's Play Profiles: Contributions From Child's Temperament and Father's Parenting Styles in a Portuguese Sample.

Using a sample of Portuguese preschool-age children, we aimed to identify different play profiles based on teachers' descriptions of social and non-social behaviors, as well as characterize them in terms of children's characteristics (sex and temperament) and fathers' parenting styles (e.g., warmth and involvement or punitive strategies). The 243 children were distributed across four profiles (identified through a two-stage cluster analysis): Solitary/Reticent, Social Rough, Social, and Social Solitary. A univariate effect was found between play profiles and children's effortful control, as well as fathers' punitive strategies. In addition, a significant multivariate interaction was found between child's sex and the Solitary/Reticent and Social Rough profiles for father's punitive strategies. In this sample, children with social play profiles seem to use diverse types of behaviors during their interactions with peers and in being adjusted within the group. As children's early experiences with peers are a central context for healthy development, a better understating of the diversity of play profiles and its predictors is important for early interventions.

Early father-child and mother-child attachment relationships: contributions to preschoolers' social competence.

The main goal of this study was to explore the contributions of early father-child and mother-child attachment relationships to children's later social competence with their preschool peers; possible unique and shared contributions were tested. Using a multi-method design and focusing on direct observation, attachment was assessed at home at age 3 with the Attachment Behavior Q-sort (AQS) and two years later social competence was assessed at classrooms of 5-year-olds using a set of seven measurement indicators that are part of the Hierarchical Model of Social Competence. Results show that attachment to each parent made unique and significant contributions to children's social competence and suggested the possibility that each caregiver may have somewhat different patterns of influence on the different indicators of children's social competence. Findings also suggest the possibility that a secure attachment with one parent may buffer the impact of having an insecure relationship with the other. Due to sample size, these results should be seen as a starting point to generate new and larger studies.

Scripted knowledge about attachment and social competence in preschoolers: overview.

The papers in this special issue of Attachment & Human Development address questions concerning relations between attachment representations and social competence during early childhood in samples from five different countries. All studies examined these questions using the concept of the "secure base script" that has been widely studied in samples of adults, adolescents, and school-age children. In all samples, the secure base script was scored from attachment-relevant narratives elicited from children in a doll-play task. Consistent with existing literatures, the secure base script score had positive and significant associations with adult ratings of child social competence, even in the presence of potential confounding covariates.

Scripted attachment representations and adaptive functioning during early childhood.

Attachment theorists have characterized children's internal working models, forged from early attachment relationship histories, as the link between earlier and later manifestations of competence. In this study, working models of attachment were measured as access to and use of the secure base script (SBS) to organize children's attachment relevant narratives (N = 139). Study goals were to assess relations between SBS use and a range of adaptive functioning domains including peer social competence, teacher/child relationships, effortful control, executive function, and verbal intelligence. Simultaneous path analyses using structural equations indicated that SBS use was significantly associated with each of these outcome domains. Findings were reproduced when effects of verbal intelligence, sex and age were controlled, except for effortful control. Results suggest that children's internalized attachment representations are intertwined with adaptive functioning during early childhood.

Preschoolers' secure base script representations predict teachers' ratings of social competence in two independent samples.

Associations between attachment security, assessed as a secure base script (SBS), and teachers' social competence ratings were examined in two samples (one from the Midwest region and the other from the Southern region of the United States). Consistent with previous reports, significant associations between domains were obtained in both samples and after combining the two samples, r = .33, p < .001. The associations remained significant when child sex, age, and verbal intelligence were controlled. Findings are discussed with reference to relations between SBS scores and the covariates. Regarding sex differences, an existing literature suggests that girls, compared with boys, may be advantaged with respect to skills that could support higher scores on the task used to assess secure base scripts. In both samples, teachers rated girls as somewhat higher on scales of social competence and controlling for sex reduced the magnitude of associations between SBS and social competence, but the results remained significant in all tests.

Assessing and quantifying the secure base script from narratives produced by preschool age children: justification and validation tests.

Building on aframework presented by Bretherton and associates, Waters and associates argued that interaction sequences relevant to children's access to and use of asecure base for exploration during infancy/toddlerhood become internalized as script-like representations. For adults, these scripted representations are readily assessed using word-prompt lists d to elicit attachment relevant narratives. However, this method is not appropriate during early childhood. Waters and associates used stories from Bretherton's Attachment Story Completion Task for this purpose. However, the method they used to score secure base script use is not efficient for larger samples (e.g. over 50), and new approaches for scoring have been designed. We describe two approaches to story selection and scoring for access to and use of the secure base script. The two scoring methods show substantial and significant overlap and also have significant associations with other methods of measuring attachment security during early childhood.

Preschoolers' secure base script representations predict teachers' ratings of social competence and externalizing behavior.

Recent meta-analyses have reported significant effects of attachment quality on social competence, mostly using observational assessments of attachment behavior to assess security. We analyze the associations between attachment security - assessed as a secure base script, and social competence with peers - measured by teachers' ratings on two self-report instruments, in a Portuguese sample of 82 preschool children (34 boys and 48 girls). We also tested the association between children's secure base script scores and teacher ratings for externalizing and internalizing symptomatology. Results show significant sex differences. Girls had higher scores on secure base script and were rated by teachers as more socially competent, while boys received higher ratings for aggressive/externalizing behaviors. Nonetheless, when the effect of child sex was controlled, attachment representations were positively associated with child social competence and negatively associated with ratings of externalizing behaviors.

THE MOTHER-CHILD ATTACHMENT PARTNERSHIP IN EARLY CHILDHOOD: SECURE BASE BEHAVIORAL AND REPRESENTATIONAL PROCESSES.

The chapters in this monograph describe the transition of attachment representations from a predominantly sensorimotor, in the moment, experience for the infant/toddler to internalized, mental representations of attachment that are transportable to new social contexts, in which attachment figures may not be present. The chapters focus on means that parents use to help their child effect this transition in terms of both behavioral support for the child's secure base behavior and for cognitive skills that underlie the child's construction of mental models of attachment. The results cohere across studies and make a compelling case for Bowlby's notion that internal models of how attachment "works" are co-constructed through social processes during early childhood. Taken together, the results reported here constitute a milestone achievement for the attachment enterprise in terms of their theoretical and methodological rigor. These findings also justify Bowlby's confidence that cognitive psychology would become a critical disciplinary ally of attachment theory.

Mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters: Are there sex differences in the organization of secure base behavior during early childhood.

Recent empirical studies reporting sex differences in attachment relationships have prompted investigators to consider why and under what conditions such results might be observed. This study was designed to explore possibilities of identifying sex differences in the organization of attachment-relevant behavior during early childhood. Observations of 119 children (59 boys) with their mothers and (separately) with their fathers were completed and children were described using the AQS. Results indicated that girls and boys did not differ with respect to global attachment security but at more specific level analyses revealed differences between parents that reflected differences in the behaviors of girls vs. boys with mothers and fathers. Our findings contradict arguments from evolutionary psychologists claiming that sex differences in attachment organization arise during middle childhood. By adopting an attachment measure sensitive to the possibility of behavioral sex differences our data suggest that such differences may be detectable earlier in development. Moreover, these differences are subtle and nuanced and do not suggest large sex differences in attachment security per se.

Children's Representations of Attachment and Positive Teacher-Child Relationships.

This study was designed to explore whether children's representations of attachment contribute to the co-construction of positive teacher-child relationships. An assessment of verbal intelligence was included as a predictor on the assumption that teachers might perceive themselves as having better relationships with more verbally competent children. Participants were 52 children from two pre-schools, in the district of Lisbon. The Attachment Story Completion Task (ASCT) was used to assess children's attachment security. The PCV-P (a scale developed in portuguese language) was used to describe teacher-child relationships through teachers' ratings of child secure base behavior and emotion regulation and the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence (WPPSI-R) was used to access verbal skills. Bivariate correlations showed that the teachers' rating of child secure base behavior was significantly associated with both child attachment security and verbal IQ. In a multiple regression analysis, the overall model R2 was significant, as was the interaction term showing a moderating effect of attachment security on the relation between verbal IQ and teachers' ratings of secure base. The results suggest that co-construction of a close attachment-relevant relationship with teachers in early childhood is, in part, a function of the security in the context of parent-child attachment, but also of child verbal development.

Attachment and Temperament in the Early Life Course: A Meta-Analytic Review.

This meta-analytic review examines the association between early attachment (assessed at 1-5 years) and child temperament (assessed at birth-12 years), and compares the strength of this association with recently documented meta-analytic associations between early attachment and social competence, externalizing behavior, and internalizing symptoms. Based on 109 independent samples (N = 11,440) of diverse socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds, temperament was weakly associated with attachment (in)security (d = .14, CI [0.08, 0.19]) but modestly associated with resistant attachment (d = .30, CI [0.21, 0.40]). Temperament was not significantly associated with avoidant (d = .10, CI [-0.02, 0.19]) or disorganized (d = .11, CI [-0.03, 0.25]) attachment. Across developmental domains, early attachment security was more strongly associated with social competence and externalizing behaviors than internalizing symptoms and temperament.

Co-evolution of Friendships and Antipathies: A Longitudinal Study of Preschool Peer Groups.

We used stochastic actor-based models to test whether the developmental dynamics of friendships and antipathies in preschool peer groups (followed throughout three school years) were co-dependent. We combined choices from three sociometric tasks of 142 children to identify friendship and antipathy ties and used SIENA to model network dynamics. Our results show that different social processes drive the development of friendship and antipathy ties, and that they do not develop in association (i.e., friendship ties are not dependent on existing antipathies, and vice-versa). These results differ from those of older children (age range = 10-14) suggesting that the interplay of friendship and antipathy only plays a significant role in the peer group context in older children. We propose these differences to be likely related with preschool age children's inaccurate perceptions of their classmates' relationships, particularly of their antipathies, and/or with the absence of shared norms to deal with antipathetic relationships.