Department of Clinical and Social Sciences in Psychology, University of Rochester.
Department of Psychology, University of Notre Dame.
Dev Psychol. 2018 Jan;54(1):83-97. doi: 10.1037/dev0000410. Epub 2017 Oct 23.
Although social difficulties have been identified as sequelae of children's experiences with interparental conflict and insecurity, little is known about the specific mechanisms underlying their vulnerability to social problems. Guided by emotional security theory, this study tested the hypothesis that children's emotional insecurity mediates associations between interparental conflict and their social difficulties by undermining their affiliative goals in best friendships. Participants included 235 families with the first of 5 measurement occasions over a 10-year period occurring when children were in kindergarten (mean age = 6 years). Findings from the lagged latent difference score analyses indicated that intensification of multi-method assessment of interparental conflict during the early school years predicted subsequent increases in children's emotional insecurity 5 years later in adolescence. In the latter part of the cascade, rises in emotional insecurity predicted decreases in adolescent friendship affiliation, which, in turn, were specifically associated with declines in social competence. The specificity of this cascade of changing processes in predicting social problems was supported by the robustness of the findings after the inclusion of static measures of each construct as predictors, parent-child relationship insecurity as a covariate, and increases in children's internalizing symptoms as an alternative outcome. (PsycINFO Database Record
虽然社会困难已被确定为儿童经历父母间冲突和不安全感的后遗症，但对于他们易患社会问题的具体机制知之甚少。本研究以情感安全感理论为指导，测试了这样一个假设，即儿童的情感不安全感通过破坏其最佳友谊中的亲和目标，来中介父母间冲突与其社会困难之间的关联。参与者包括 235 个家庭，在 10 年的时间里，在幼儿园（平均年龄为 6 岁）时进行了 5 次测量。滞后潜变量差异分数分析的结果表明，在小学早期，多方法评估父母间冲突的加剧预测了 5 年后青少年时期儿童情感不安全感的后续增加。在这一连串反应的后半部分，情感不安全感的上升预示着青少年友谊关系的下降，而这反过来又与社交能力的下降有特定关联。在将每个结构的静态测量值、亲子关系不安全感作为协变量以及儿童内化症状的增加作为替代结果纳入预测因素后，发现这些变化过程的连锁反应对于社会问题的预测具有稳健性，从而支持了这一连锁反应的特异性。
