Attachment and task persistence: attachment orientations, perception of teacher’s responsiveness, and adolescents’ persistence in academic tasks

ABSTRACT

The goal of the two studies reported here was to examine the contribution of adolescents’ attachment orientations (anxiety, avoidance) and their perception of teacher’s responsiveness to persistence in academic tasks. In Study 1 (N = 160), we assessed self-reports of persistence in schoolwork. In Study 2 (N = 240), we manipulated the symbolic presence of participants’ teacher (teacher priming) and assessed their actual persistence in a cognitive task. Across the two studies, attachment anxiety was associated with decreased persistence, and the perception of teacher as a responsive figure contributed to heightened persistence and buffered the detrimental effects of attachment anxiety. Study 2’s findings also showed that the beneficial effects of perceived teacher’s responsiveness on actual task persistence were found only when the teacher was made contextually salient but not when the teacher was not salient. We discussed the dispositional and contextual sources of attachment security that contribute to task persistence.

KEYWORDS:

• Attachment
• teacher–children relationship
• task persistence
• responsiveness
• adolescence

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In Study 1, preliminary analyses revealed no significant difference between the nine assessed classes in all the study variables, all Fs < 1. Moreover, multilevel regression analyses indicated that student’s affiliation to a given class did not significantly interact with attachment orientations or perceived teacher’s responsiveness in predicting persistence in academic tasks. Therefore, we dropt class affiliation from the main statistical analyses.

2. In Study 2, we did not collect information about participants’ affiliation to a specific class in their school.