Children’s representations of family relationships, peer information processing, and school adjustment.

Abstract

This study examined children's peer information processing as an explanatory mechanism underlying the association between their insecure representations of interparental and parent-child relationships and school adjustment in a sample of 210 first-graders. Consistent with emotional security theory (EST;Davies & Cummings, 1994), results indicated that children's insecure representations of the interparental relationship were indirectly related to their academic functioning through association with their negative information processing of stressful peer events. Insecure interparental relationships were specifically linked with negative peer information processing patterns which, in turn, predicted increases in child maladjustment over a one-year period. These pathways remained robust after taking into account the roles of representations of parent-child relationships, trait measures of child negative affect, and socioeconomic characteristics as predictors in the analyses.Children's internal representations of how their parents get along with each other are theorized to play a key role in accounting for the variability in children's adaptation to interparental conflict (Davies & Cummings, 1994;Grych & Fincham, 1990). According to Emotional Security Theory (EST;Davies & Cummings, 1994), witnessing destructive conflicts between parents increases children's vulnerability to adjustment problems by amplifying children's negative internal representations of the consequences of interparental relationships for their own welfare and the stability of the marital system. Likewise, the Cognitive-Contextual Framework proposes that children's appraisal of the threat posed by interparental conflict is an intermediary process in pathways between exposure to marital conflict and child problems (Grych & Fincham, 1990). In support of this common prediction, research has repeatedly identified children's insecure representations of interparental relations as intervening mechanisms in the association between interparental and child functioning using both cross-sectional and longitudinal designs (Dadds, Atkinson, Turner, Blums, & Lendich, 1999;Davies & Cummings, 1998;Grych, Harold, & Miles, 2003; Harold, Shelton, Goeke-Morey, & Cummings, 2004). However, the question of how and why insecure representations of interparental relationships increase children's vulnerability to psychological problems remains largely unaddressed (Davies, Winter, & Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Sonnette M. Bascoe, Department of Clinical and Social Sciences in Psychology, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York, 14627. sbascoe@psych.rochester.edu. NIH Public Access Author ManuscriptDev Psychol. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2010 November 1. NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript Cicchetti, 2006). Accordingly, the present study addresses this gap in the literature by examining children's peer information processing as a mediating mechanism in pathways between their insecure r...

The multiple faces of interparental conflict: Implications for cascades of children’s insecurity and externalizing problems.

“…One possibility is that children high in emotional insecurity may adopt their highly defensive ways of defending against interparental conflict as blueprints for interpreting and responding to new or challenging social contexts outside of the interparental relationship (Johnston, Roseby, & Kuehnle, 2009). For example, hostile processing of stressful peer events has been shown to mediate the association between children’s insecurity in the interparental subsystem and school maladjustment (e.g., uncooperative behavior, attention problems) over a one-year period (Bascoe, Davies, Sturge-Apple, & Cummings, 2009). It is also possible that prolonged concerns about insecurity in the interparental relationship may increase children’s behavior problems by undermining their abilities to master approach-oriented goals (Davies et al, 2016).…”

“…For the observational component of the measurement battery, trained coders rated interparental hostility during the interparental conflict task using the Negative Escalation code from the System for Coding Interactions in Dyads (SCID; Malik & Lindahl, 2004) and the Anger code from the Interparental Conflict Expressions (ICE; e.g., Davies, Coe, Martin, Sturge-Apple, & Cummings, 2015; Davies & Sturge-Apple, 2013) Coding System. Rated along a five-point scale (1 = Very low ; 5 = High ) based on dyadic behavior, the SCID Negative Escalation code reflects the degree to which the couple reciprocates or escalates displays of anger, hostility, and negativity.…”

“…The SCID is a well-established system for coding interparental conflict with strong psychometric properties (for details, see Lindahl, Malik, Kaczynski, & Simons, 2001). As an adaptation of the SCID, the ICE codes have evidenced predictive validity, as shown by their significant associations with children’s emotional reactivity to interparental conflict, internalizing symptoms, and externalizing problems (Davies et al, 2015). …”

The role of skin conductance level reactivity in the impact of children’s exposure to interparental conflict on their attention performance

“…Presuming to serve as schemata for guiding decisions and information processing, they have emerged to be a primary intervening mechanism in the association between interparental conflict and children's academic maladjustment over two years (Sturge-Apple, Davies, Winter, Cummings, & Schermerhorn, 2008). Beyond, several studies have explored the underlying processes in the relation between children's emotional insecurity and their functioning in the school setting, including (1) the role of sleep disruptions El-Sheikh, Buckhalt, Keller, Cummings, & Acebo, 2007), (2) negative peer information processing (e.g., Bascoe, Davies, Sturge-Apple, & Cummings, 2009), and (3) attention performance (e.g., Davies et al, 2008).…”

Mental State Representation: Spatiotemporal Characteristics

“…Such an approach is typical of researchers of the procedural and dynamic aspect of mental representations and their cognitive functions (Cooper, 1990;Blatt et al, 1997;Kemp, 1998;Geller et al, 2010;Lukowitsky and Pincus, 2011). At the same time, mental representations are understood as internal structures formed during the course of human life, in which his worldview, as well as his view of the society and himself are represented (Bascoe et al, 2009;Savadori et al, 2001;Lotto et al, 2006). The mental state representation is a reflection of such an internal structure.…”