Croft, Carla; (1997) Attachment and emotionality: The development and validation of an emotion-recognition task for early-school aged children. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

The first aim of this thesis is to establish reliability for a new measurement of emotional expression and recognition in early childhood, the Emotion-Recognition Task. The second aim is to examine the possibility that it is the quality of the attachment relationships within the family which are influencing individual differences in children's understanding of emotions as revealed by this task. Reliability for the task and coding system was established with a sample of American school children at ages five and six years. Further, the thesis draws on data collected in the context of a longitudinal study of attachment patterns among a sample of first-born children in London, spanning a period of six years. These children were assessed in the sixth year using the Emotion-Recognition Task. Attachment relationships with both mother and father were assessed in infancy by the Strange Situation, and in the sixth year by a modified Strange Situation procedure. The nature of parents' attachments was examined antenatally by the Adult Attachment Interview and the Reflective-Self Function scale. The function of attachment constructs in children's emotion task performance is examined through multivariate analyses. Also considered within these analyses is the influence of other parent and child variables on emotionality, such as, demographic factors, temperament, mental development, and expressive language skills. The analyses reveal attachment quality of mother (as measured by the Reflective-Self Function scale) and mother-infant attachment as the primary predictors of the combined majority of Emotion Recognition Task variables. Two variables, however, are revealed to have other primary predictors: overall coherence is influenced most strongly by family size, and overall embellishment and plausibility of emotion discussion is influenced most powerfully by mother's expressive language skills. A hypothesis is proposed which revolves, firstly, around the mother's Reflective-Self Functioning as the influential mechanism regarding both attachment patterns in infancy and the later emotional understanding of the child, and, secondly, around the influence of the family verbal "atmosphere" (as created by the sibling relationship and mother's expressive abilities) upon the child's emotion 'talk.'

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