Security of Attachment as a Predictor of Symbolic and Mentalising Abilities: A Longitudinal Study

The development of symbolic and mentalising abilities was examined in 33 children whose security of attachment had been assessed in infancy. It was found that securely attached children: (i) were better able to incorporate an experimenter’s play suggestions into their sequences of symbolic play at 31 months; and (ii) performed better on a version of Wimmer and Perner’s (1983) unexpected transfer task at age 4. There was also evidence of superior mentalising abilities among the secure group at age 5, despite no group differences being found in general cognitive ability. We suggest that these security-related differences might be related to mothers’ propensity to treat their securely attached children as individuals with minds. In support of this hypothesis, mothers in the secure group adopted more sensitive tutoring strategies, and were more likely to describe their children in terms of their mental characteristics. Possible developmental pathways linking security of attachment in infancy with subsequent development were investigated using path analyses.

[1]  P. Fonagy,et al.  The relationship between belief-desire reasoning and a projective measure of attachment security (SAT) , 1997 .

[2]  J. Belsky,et al.  Assessing performance, competence, and executive capacity in infant play: Relations to home environment and security of attachment. , 1984 .

[3]  Josef Perner,et al.  Theory of mind is contagious - you catch it from your sibs , 1994 .

[4]  E. Meins.  Security of Attachment and the Social Development of Cognition. Essays in Developmental Psychology. , 1997 .

[5]  J. Perner.  Understanding the Representational Mind , 1993 .

[6]  L. Youngblade,et al.  Individual differences in young children's pretend play with mother and sibling: links to relationships and understanding of other people's feelings and beliefs. , 1995, Child development.

[7]  H. Wimmer,et al.  Beliefs about beliefs: Representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children's understanding of deception , 1983, Cognition.

[8]  E. Bates,et al.  RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN COGNITION, COMMUNICATION, AND QUALITY OF ATTACHMENT , 1979 .

[9]  J. Belsky,et al.  Temperament and attachment security in the strange situation: an empirical rapprochement. , 1987, Child development.

[10]  P. Harris.  The work of imagination , 1991 .

[11]  J. Bowlby,et al.  Responses to separation from parents: A clinical test for young children. , 1976 .

[12]  R. Hobson.  Autism and the Development of Mind , 1995 .

[13]  S. Baron-Cohen.  Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind , 1997 .

[14]  J. Bruner,et al.  The role of tutoring in problem solving. , 1976, Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines.

[15]  L. S. Vygotksy.  Mind in society: the development of higher psychological processes , 1978 .

[16]  Gregory Camilli,et al.  Testing for association in 2 × 2 contingency tables with very small sample sizes. , 1979 .

[17]  R. Meddis.  Statistics Using Ranks: A Unified Approach , 1984 .

[18]  Adriana G. Bus,et al.  Attachment, Intelligence, and Language: A Meta-analysis+ , 1995 .

[19]  E. Meins.  Security of attachment and maternal tutoring strategies: Interaction within the zone of proximal development. , 1997 .

[20]  A. Leslie.  Pretense and representation: The origins of "theory of mind." , 1987 .

[21]  D. Middleton,et al.  An Experimental Evaluation of Four Face-to-Face Teaching Strategies , 1978 .

[22]  Charles W. Mueller,et al.  Measures of socioeconomic status: Alternatives and recommendations. , 1981 .

[23]  Peter Fonagy,et al.  The theory and practice of resilience , 1994 .

[24]  J. Perner,et al.  Older (but not younger) siblings facilitate false belief understanding. , 1998, Developmental psychology.

[25]  P. Harris,et al.  Young Children's Theory of Mind and Emotion , 1989 .

[26]  L. Vygotsky.  Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes: Harvard University Press , 1978 .

[27]  J. Deese.  Principles of Psychology , 1923, Nature.

[28]  A. Anastasi.  Individual differences. , 2020, Annual review of psychology.

[29]  M. Chandler,et al.  False belief understanding goes to school: On the social-emotional consequences of coming early or late to a first theory of mind , 1995 .

[30]  Karl G. Jöreskog,et al.  Lisrel 8: User's Reference Guide , 1997 .

[31]  M. Lamb,et al.  Security of mother- and father-infant attachment and its relation to sociability with strangers in traditional and nontraditional Swedish families , 1982 .

[32]  A. P. Streissguth,et al.  Social class differences in maternal teaching strategies and speech patterns. , 1969 .

[33]  D. C. Howell.  Statistical Methods for Psychology , 1987 .

[34]  Paul L. Harris,et al.  From Simulation to Folk Psychology: The Case for Development , 1992 .

[35]  A. Leslie.  The theory of mind impairment in autism: Evidence for a modular mechanism of development? , 1991 .

[36]  R. Isabella.  Origins of attachment: maternal interactive behavior across the first year. , 1993, Child development.

[37]  M Taylor,et al.  Perspective taking and theory of mind: do children predict interpretive diversity as a function of differences in observers' knowledge? , 1991, Child development.

[38]  Charles Fernyhough,et al.  The dialogic mind: A dialogic approach to the higher mental functions , 1996 .

[39]  T. Bradley,et al.  Type I error rate of the chi-square test in independence in R × C tables that have small expected frequencies. , 1979 .

[40]  J. Boucher,et al.  Spontaneous, instructed and elicited play in relatively able autistic children , 1988 .

[41]  M. Ainsworth,et al.  Individual Differences in Strange-Situational Behaviour of One-Year-Olds. , 1969 .

[42]  L. Youngblade,et al.  Young children's understanding of other people's feelings and beliefs: individual differences and their antecedents. , 1991, Child development.

[43]  J. Astington,et al.  Theories of theories of mind: What is theoretical about the child's theory of mind?: a Vygotskian view of its development , 1996 .

[44]  Marinus H. van IJzendoorn,et al.  The Adult Attachment Interview : State of the Art , 1993 .

[45]  A. Slade.  Quality of attachment and early symbolic play. , 1987 .

[46]  A. Lillard,et al.  Pretend play skills and the child's theory of mind. , 1993, Child development.

[47]  D. Wood,et al.  A STUDY OF ASSISTED PROBLEM‐SOLVING , 1975 .

[48]  M. Main.  Metacognitive knowledge, metacognitive monitoring, and singular (coherent) vs. multiple (incoherent) model of attachment: Findings and directions for future research. , 1991 .

[49]  N. Freeman,et al.  Social influences on false belief access: specific sibling influences or general apprenticeship? , 1996, Child development.