Social understanding, attachment security of preschool children and maternal mental health

Studies on children's social understanding tend to assume that understandin g the minds and emotions of others are theoretically and methodologically i ndistinct. This study, however, aimed to assess differential effects, with particular reference to the quality of the attachment relationship and mate rnal mental health. The participants were 45, 40-month-old children who wer e assessed on tasks of social understanding (false belief, Bartsch & Wellma n, 1989, and emotion understanding, Denham & Auerbach, 1995); attachment se curity was assessed by a story completion task (Bretherton, Ridgeway, & Cas sidy, 1990), and maternal mental health was assessed by Beck's Depression I nventory (BDI) (Beck, Ward, Mendelson, Mock, & Erbaugh, 1961). The hypothes es were (a) that insecure children would have mothers scoring higher on the BDI than secure children and poorer performances on the social understandi ng tasks; (b) that insecure children need not be any worse than secure chil dren in mind appraisal, rather, it was anticipated that their difficulties would be with emotion appraisal. It was found that, relative to secure chil dren, insecure children had lower verbal mental ages, poorer performances o n emotion understanding and had mothers scoring higher in depression. Inter estingly, no significant effects were found for mind understanding. A regre ssion analysis showed that verbal mental age and attachment were significan t predictors of the child's emotion task performance whilst depression and SES were not. In the light of these results, this paper considers the need for a move towards an integration of theories and methods.