Children's Attentional Processing of Mother and Proximity Seeking

Attachment expectations regarding the availability of mother as a source for support are supposed to influence distressed children’s support seeking behavior. Because research is needed to better understand the mechanisms related to support seeking behavior, this study tested the hypothesis that the cognitive processing of mother-related information is linked to proximity and support seeking behavior. Uncertainty in maternal support has been shown to be characterized by a biased attentional encoding of mother, reducing the breadth of children’s attentional field around her. We investigated whether this attentional bias is related to how long distressed children wait before seeking their mother’s proximity. Thirty-three children (9-11 years) participated in this study that consisted of experimental tasks to measure attentional breadth and to observe proximity seeking behavior and of questionnaires to measure confidence in maternal support and experienced distress. Results suggested that distressed children with a more narrow attentional field around their mother wait longer to seek her proximity. Key Message: These findings provide a first support for the hypothesis that the attentional processing of mother is related to children’s attachment behavior.