Children's emotion understanding and mother-child attachment: A meta-analysis.
Understanding emotions serves as a critical foundation for several aspects of children's social development. Secure attachment relationships, which allow for open emotion communication between the parent and child, are hypothesized to foster emotion understanding. The goal of the current meta-analysis was to determine the strength of the relationship between emotion understanding and attachment security. We conducted an electronic search using PsycINFO and identified 10 studies (N = 564 children) examining this association in children younger than 18 years of age. The meta-analysis yielded a medium and significant overall effect size of r = .33 with no significant moderators. Thus, our results demonstrated that the association between emotion understanding and security of attachment is quite robust. (PsycINFO Database Record
Department of Psychological Sciences, Kent State University.
Jessica E
JE
Cooke
Department of Psychological Sciences, Kent State University.
Kaela L
KL
Stuart-Parrigon
Department of Psychological Sciences, Kent State University.
Mahsa
M
Movahed-Abtahi
Department of Psychological Sciences, Kent State University.
Amanda J
AJ
Koehn
Department of Psychological Sciences, Kent State University.
Kathryn A
KA
Kerns
D000293:Adolescent; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D032882:Comprehension / Q000502:physiology*; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009034:Mother-Child Relations; D009035:Mothers / Q000523:psychology; D009769:Object Attachment; D002666:Psychology, Child