Parent-child relationship and child anger proneness in infancy and attachment security at toddler age: a short-term longitudinal study of mother- and father-child dyads

ABSTRACT

Early parent-child relationship and child negative emotionality have both been studied as contributors to attachment security, but few studies have examined whether negative emotionality can moderate effects of parent-child relationship on security and whether the process is comparable across mother- and father-child dyads and different security measures. In 102 community families, we observed parent-child shared positive affect and infants’ anger proneness at 7 months, and attachment security at 15 months, using observer-rated Attachment Q-Set (AQS) and a continuous measure derived from Strange Situation Paradigm (SSP). For mother-child dyads, high shared positive affect and low anger proneness were associated with AQS security. Those effects were qualified by their interaction: Variations in shared positive affect were associated with security only for relatively more anger-prone children.  That effect reflected the diathesis-stress model. For father-child dyads, shared positive affect was associated with security. There were no effects for SSP security with either parent.

KEYWORDS:

• Attachment security
• temperament
• parent-child relationship
• infants

Acknowledgments

We thank Lea Boldt and many students and staff members for their help with data collection and coding, Bonnie Conley and Susan Paris for coding SSP, and the participating families for their commitment to this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data sharing statement

The data that support the findings of this study are not publicly available. However, further information about this study is available from the authors upon reasonable request.

Notes

1. Typical categorical data were also obtained from SSP; however, in this article, we chose to use the continuous security measure, parallel to the AQS security measure.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the grants from National Institute of Mental Health [R01 MH63096, K02 MH01446] and National Institute of Child Health and Human Development [R01 HD069171 and R01 HD091047] to Grazyna Kochanska.