Early Attachment Organization Moderates the Parent-Child Mutually Coercive Pathway to Children's Antisocial Conduct

Sample

• N: 101
• Subject Ages: 7 months at recruit, followed until 67 months
• Location: United States, Iowa
• SES: Broad range of income and education
• Eligibility: Two-parent families with normally developing children
• Additional: 90% of mothers were white, 84% of fathers were white

Hypotheses

1. The child’s resentful opposition serves as a mechanism or mediator that accounts for links between parental power assertion and child future antisocial behavior.
2. The early history of the parent-child relationship, reflected in the child’s attachment organization, moderates this mediational chain. 

Variables Measured, Instruments Used

• Children’s attachment security at 15 months - Strange Situation with both mothers and fathers
• Mother’s and father’s power assertion in discipline contexts - 25 and 38 months coded contexts, in the lab during naturalist situations
• Children’s resentful opposition at 52 months -
  • children’s defiance: coded contexts in the lab during Do and Don’t contexts
  • children’s negative emotional tone in interactions with parents: negative affect was coded during naturalistic observations
  • children’s unresponsiveness to parents: obtained by reversing the scores of the child responsiveness to parents coded during naturalistic observations
  • composite of children’s resentful opposition: the three scores were intercorrelated, therefore standardizing and aggregating them into one score for children and mothers and one score for children and fathers
• Children’s antisocial disruptive behavior problems at 67 months -
  • the Child Symptom Inventory
  • the Inventory of Callous-Unemotional Traits
  • the Macarthur Health Behavior Questionnaire
  • the Composite of antisocial and disruptive behavior

Design—Longitudinal