Impact of Parent-child attachment on socio-emotional development in Preschool children

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This dissertation is an opportunity for me to extend my regards to my research supervisor, my beloved friends and my family for their untiring support that they furnished throughout my research. I am grateful to them for their belief in me and the guidance that they provided me without which I would have never been able to work on and complete this research.

DECLARATION

I, (Your name), would like to adjudge that this entire dissertation is my individual work and I have not taken any sort of help from any external body. I am submitting this work for the very first time, and this work has never been submitted for any examination at academic or professional level before. Furthermore, I declare that this dissertation is demonstrating my personal views and opinions and they are not necessarily linked with my university.

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ABSTRACT

The purpose of this dissertation was to explore preschool children's emotional development and behavioral competencies, with an emphasis on the relation and impact of attachment representations and temperament. In particular, this study was designed to investigate the individual and combined influence of attachment representations and temperament on children's emotional development (i.e., emotion understanding and emotion regulation) and on children's behavioral competencies, broadly defined as internalizing and externalizing behavior. An abundance of evidence suggests that children's attachment representations and temperament predict internalizing and externalizing behavior. The current study also focused on the role of preschool children's emotional development on their behavior competencies. Numerous theories exist regarding emotional development, including the relational model of emotion, functionalist model of emotion, and social-constructivist model of emotion. Furthermore, research based on these models provides evidence of the relation of emotional development on other aspects of children's development. One possible explanation for these findings is that children's attachment representations might be affected by their overall development and increased social and personal experiences in complex ways. For instance, some preschool children might progressively learn to develop defenses that lead them to exclude any negative information from a story stem task to prevent the revival of intolerable feelings of insecurity. Thus, preschool children might be completing threatening story stems in a more positive manner than is true to their actual attachment representation. In addition, given their increased social and personal experiences, preschool children might have learned to respond to situations, including completing story stems, in a socially acceptable way. Several conclusions may be drawn regarding attachment representation in preschool children based on the findings of the current study. After controlling for children's age and language development, and guardian's education, several trends were noted in the correlational analyses that are consistent with the literature. Specifically, security of attachment representation was significantly positively related to greater effortful control, improved emotion understanding, and lower levels of externalizing behavior. After controlling for children's age and language development, and guardian's education, several significant relations emerged between children's temperament and their emotional development and behavior competencies. First, the effortful control factor of temperament was significantly positively related to ...