Exclusion Expected? Cardiac Slowing Upon Peer Exclusion Links Preschool Parent Representations to School‐Age Peer Relationships

Abstract

Attachment theory proposes that children's representations of interactions with caregivers guide informationprocessing about others, bridging interpersonal domains. In a longitudinal study (N = 165), preschoolers (M age = 5.19 years) completed the MacArthur Story Stem Battery to assess parent representations. At schoolage (M age = 8.42 years), children played a virtual ballgame with peers who eventually excluded them to track event-related cardiac slowing, a physiological correlate of rejection, especially when unexpected. At both ages, parents and teachers reported on peer and emotional problems. During exclusion versus inclusion-related events, cardiac slowing was associated with greater positive parent representations and fewer emerging peer problems. Cardiac slowing served as a mediator between positive parent representations and peer problems, supporting a potential psychophysiological mechanism underlying the generalization of attachment-related representations to peer relationships."An unwanted child is likely not only to feel unwanted by his parents, but to believe that he is essentially unwantable, namely unwanted by anyone" (Bowlby, 1973, p. 204).How caregivers relate to children affects how children relate to others. Ample work confirms a robust effect of child-parent attachment on peer relationships (Groh, Fearon, van Ijzendoorn, Bakermans-Kranenburg, & Roisman, 2017). Yet, the issue of why these social domains inter-relate is less often subjected to empirical scrutiny (Thompson, 2016). Many theories assume that children internalize repeated interactions with caregivers, forming representations or internal working models helping them to make sense and predict the future course of interpersonal exchanges (e.g., Bowlby, 1973;Stern, 1985). Looking time studies indeed suggest that Annette M. Klein and Kai von Klitzing shared senior authorship. We are grateful to Robert N. Emde for helpful comments on an earlier draft. The authors would like to thank all families for taking part and the Public Health Department of the City of Leipzig for cooperating in this study. Grants of the German Research Foundation (DFG) to Kai von Klitzing and Annette M. Klein (Grants KL 2315/1-1, KL2315/1-2 and KL 2338/1-2) and the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) to Kai von Klitzing, Lars O. White, and Annette M. Klein (01KR1201A and 01KR1802A) supported this research.

Physiological Factors Linking Insecure Attachment to Psychopathology: A Systematic Review

“…The low number of papers selected ( n = 7; [ 68 , 88 , 89 , 90 , 91 , 92 , 93 ]) does not allow us to extend or generalize results or findings. However, we can draw a great deal of information from these studies to underscore some meaningful features and outline an agenda to move the field forward.…”

“…Attachment was assessed using self-report measures in almost all studies except in White et al [ 93 ] which used a narrative test and in Conradt et al [ 89 ] which used an experimental procedure. In terms of the attachment figures assessed as the focal points of the studies, the studies assessed romantic partners ( n = 3), mothers ( n = 3), and mothers and fathers ( n = 1).…”

“…Heart rate variability mediated the association between perception of security in current attachment relationship and peer-problems [ 93 ]. When parental representations were positive these had an effect on problems with pairs via cardiac deceleration.…”

“…The exclusion given by the experimental task comes as a greater surprise, so the physiological system is more activated in children with positive parental representations. This can be interpreted in two ways: first, some argue that cumulative experiences of sensitive and responsive relationships give rise to greater positive expectations of inclusion, or that children who are more secure in their attachment relationships show less inhibition in processing negative social information [ 93 ]. In the literature, however, it emerges that cardiac slowing is associated with negative outcomes [ 123 ].…”

Emotional maltreatment and neglect impact neural activation upon exclusion in early and mid-adolescence: An event-related fMRI study

“…Yet, unlike this work, our study employed a more ambiguous social threat (social exclusion) requiring cognitive-emotional appraisal that may afford participants more latitude for avoidant construals. Indeed, for Cyberball, psychophysiological work has recently demonstrated blunted physiological responses as a corollary of less positive internal representations of parents (White et al, 2021), in line with such an avoidant interpretive bias.…”