The Impact of Parent–Child Attachment on Self-Injury Behavior: Negative Emotion and Emotional Coping Style as Serial Mediators

In order to explore the relationship between parent–child attachment, negative emotion, emotional coping style, and self-injury behavior, 662 junior high school students in four junior middle schools in China’s Yunnan Province were investigated using a parent–child attachment questionnaire, adolescent negative emotion questionnaire, emotional coping style scale, and adolescent self-injury behavior scale. As a result, two mediate models were created to explain how parent–child attachment affects self-injury behavior. Negative emotion and emotional coping style play serial mediating roles in mother–child and father–child attachment models, respectively. The results show that negative emotion mediates between self-injury behavior and both father–child and mother–child attachment, while emotional coping style only functions between father–child attachment and self-injury behavior. By means of bootstrap analysis, negative emotion and emotional coping style have serial mediating roles concerning the impact of parent–child attachment on self-injury behavior. By comparison, the father–child and mother–child attachment have different mediating models: the former relies on emotional coping style, while the latter is associated with emotional experiences. This implies that parent–child attachment has different mechanisms in triggering self-injury behavior, which is in line with the hypothesis of attachment specificity.