Emotion Dialogues Between Mothers and Children at 4.5 and 7.5 Years: Relations With Children’s Attachment at 1 Year
David Oppenheim, Nina Koren-Karie, and Abraham Sagi-Schwartz
University of Haifa
It was examined whether secure infant–mother attachment contributes to emotionally congruent and organized mother–child dialogues about emotions in later years. The attachment of 99 children was assessed using the Strange Situation at the age of 1 year and their emotion dialogues with their mothers were assessed at the ages of 4.5 and 7.5 years. Dialogues were about past emotional events and separation of a child from parents, and were classified into an emotionally matched group or 1 of 3 non-emotionally matched groups. Security in infancy was associated with emotionally matched dialogues at the age of 4.5; there was moderate stability in dialogues between 4.5 and 7.5 years; and infant attachment predicted dialogues at 7.5 beyond the prediction offered by age 4.5 dialogues.
The co-construction of emotionally congruent, or-ganized, and cooperative dialogues between parents and children about children’s emotional experiences has been proposed as one of the important outcomes of security of the infant–mother relationship during the years following infancy (Bretherton, 1990; Gross-mann, 1999; Oppenheim & Waters, 1995; Thompson, 2000; Waters & Cummings, 2000). The role of the parent in such dialogues in promoting the child’s exploration of his or her internal emotional world has been described by attachment theorists as an ex-pansion of the parent’s role during the early years in supporting the infants’ secure exploration of the ex-ternal world (Main, 1996). Parental guidance of the child’s exploration of their emotional memories and experiences that is tuned to the child, emotionally regulating and organizing, and accepting of the child has been hypothesized to contribute to dialogues that enhance the child’s feeling of being understood and secure (Bretherton, 1993; Fivush, Bohanek, Robertson, & Duke, 2004; Harris, 1999; Nelson, 1996; Oppenheim & Waters, 1995). Accordingly, the goal of the present study was to test the hypothesis that early secure attachment contributes to such dialogues. This hypothesis was examined longitu-
dinally with mother–child dialogues observed in two conversational contexts at two time points, when children were 4.5 and 7.5 years old. We begin by discussing the development of mother–child emo-tion dialogues during the early years and their re-lations to attachment security.
Emotional communication is central to mother– child relationships from their very onset (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978; Bowlby, 1982). During infancy, mothers’ correct interpretation of their infants’ emotional signals and their prompt and sensitive responses serve as the basis for the devel-opment of secure child–mother attachment (Ains-worth et al., 1978). In the years following infancy, as children’s language develops, verbal interactions become an additional important arena for emotional communication and maintenance of feelings of se-curity (Bretherton, 1990). In the early stages of lan-guage onset, mothers play an active role in the construction and elaboration of such interactions, while children’s contributions are sparse (Fivush, 1991). As children’s linguistic skills improve, they take a more active role in the construction of the conversation, but even then mothers play an im-portant role in providing guidance and support (Kuebli, Bulter, & Fivush, 1995), and feelings of se-curity are enhanced when mothers help children verbally organize, negotiate, and regulate emotional experiences (Bowlby, 1982; Grossmann, Grossmann, & Zimmermann, 1999; Main, Kaplan, & Cassidy 1985; Oppenheim & Waters, 1995; Thompson, 2000; Waters & Cummings, 2000).
r 2007 by the Society for Research in Child Development, Inc. All rights reserved. 0009-3920/2007/7801-0003
This research was supported by grants from the National In-stitute of Child Health and Human Development (Grant 1RO HD 25975) and the Israel Science Foundation (Grants 812/95 and 741/ 99.) The authors would like to thank Rachel Bransky, Yael Cohen, Galit Gross, Tirtsa Joels, Motti Gini, Yair Ziv, Ayelet Etzion-Car-asso, and Zipi Haimovich for their help in collecting and coding the data.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to David Oppenheim, Center for the Study of Child Development, University of Haifa, Haifa 31905, Israel. Electronic mail may be sent to oppenhei@psy.haifa.ac.il.
Child Development, January/February 2007, Volume 78, Number 1, Pages 38–52