Attachment and emotional understanding in preschool children.

This study was designed to elucidate the association between attachment and emotional understanding in preschool children. Forty children between the ages of 2.5 and 6 years and their mothers participated in the study. Mothers completed the Attachment Q-set, and children took part at their preschools in both an affective perspective-taking task and a series of interviews concerning naturally occurring incidents of emotions. Overall, age and attachment security predicted a child's aggregate score on the emotional understanding tasks. However, when the score was separated by the valence of the emotion, attachment security and age predicted a child's score for only those emotions with a negative valence (e.g., sadness) and not for those emotions with a positive valence (e.g., happiness). Thus, a secure attachment relationship seems to be important in fostering a child's understanding of emotion, primarily negative emotions.