Patterns of emotion regulation at two years of age: associations with mothers’ attachment in a fear eliciting situation

ABSTRACT

The study aims at identifying patterns of mother–toddler emotion regulation and testing whether they are related to mothers’ attachment. An Italian community sample (N = 38; 66% males) was followed longitudinally, with mothers’ attachment collected through the Adult Attachment Interview at 14 months of child’s age and mothers’ and children’s emotion regulation behaviors assessed through a fear-eliciting lab procedure when the child turned two years old. Two dyadic regulatory patterns were identified through a two-phased cluster analytic plan. Children characterized by one pattern approached, explored and played with the threatening stimulus, whereas children characterized by the other pattern tended to become frightened by this stimulus and avoided the object. The majority of children whose mothers were classified as secure displayed the first regulatory pattern. This finding contributes to extending understanding of how parental factors can influence the development of self-regulation.

KEYWORDS:

• Toddlerhood
• fear
• emotion regulation
• Adult Attachment Interview
• fear eliciting task

Acknowledgements

The authors express appreciation to all the families for their kind participation and to the master students of the baby lab of the University “G. D’Annunzio” of Chieti who took part in the data collection and coding.

ORCID

Gabrielle Coppola http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0147-6142

Notes

1. Because the two clustering procedures yield two dyads to be classified differently, we repeated the analysis by cross-tabulating the distribution of the two-way AAI classification by that of the regulatory clusters emerged from the non-hierarchical (k-means) analysis. Again, we found a significant association between the two distributions, Χ² (1, N = 38) = 5.15, p < .05, with 75% of the secure mothers, but only 39% of the dismissing ones, were in the smoothly regulated cluster, whereas 25% of secure mothers and 61% of the insecure ones were in the unevenly regulated cluster.

Additional information

Funding

This study was partially supported by the National Science Foundation [grant number BCS 1251322] and Hatch [grant number ALA042-1-14021].