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Social understanding, attachment security of preschool children and maternal mental health
Author(s) -
Greig Anne,
Howe David
Publication year - 2001
Publication title -
british journal of developmental psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.062
H-Index - 75
eISSN - 2044-835X
pISSN - 0261-510X
DOI - 10.1348/026151001166164
Subject(s) - psychology , mental health , beck depression inventory , developmental psychology , cognition , task (project management) , depression (economics) , psychiatry , anxiety , management , economics , macroeconomics
Studies on children's social understanding tend to assume that understanding the minds and emotions of others are theoretically and methodologically indistinct. This study, however, aimed to assess differential effects, with particular reference to the quality of the attachment relationship and maternal mental health. The participants were 45, 40‐month‐old children who were assessed on tasks of social understanding (false belief, Bartsch & Wellman, 1989, and emotion understanding, Denham & Auerbach, 1995); attachment security was assessed by a story completion task (Bretherton, Ridgeway, & Cassidy, 1990), and maternal mental health was assessed by Beck's Depression Inventory (BDI) (Beck, Ward, Mendelson, Mock, & Erbaugh, 1961). The hypotheses were (a) that insecure children would have mothers scoring higher on the BDI than secure children and poorer performances on the social understanding tasks; (b) that insecure children need not be any worse than secure children in mind appraisal, rather, it was anticipated that their difficulties would be with emotion appraisal. It was found that, relative to secure children, insecure children had lower verbal mental ages, poorer performances on emotion understanding and had mothers scoring higher in depression. Interestingly, no significant effects were found for mind understanding. A regression analysis showed that verbal mental age and attachment were significant predictors of the child's emotion task performance whilst depression and SES were not. In the light of these results, this paper considers the need for a move towards an integration of theories and methods.