The role of attachment in children's social appraisals of hypothetical peers

This study examined whether attachment-relevant information influenced childrens' social judgments about hypothetical peers. Both peer attachment and the participants' own security were examined. Participants were 55, 8 to 10-year-old children; each was introduced to four characters in a within-subjects design. Attachment-relevant information about hypothetical peers was presented in the form of written vignettes designed to describe secure, insecure-avoidant, and insecure-ambivalent styles of attachment. Neutral vignettes which did not contain attachment relevant information, were also presented. Participating children heard four vignettes and completed a task designed to assess the participants' attributions of the ambiguous behaviour of the characters. In addition, participants completed a forced choice task designed to assess how they judged the characters' dispositions. Finally, participants completed a self-report measure of attachment security to assess their own representations of attachment relationships. Characters in the secure and neutral conditions were viewed as more sociable, less aggressive, and less isolated than ambivalent characters, and more sociable than avoidant characters. The judgments also interacted with the participants' own security as these distinctions between characters were made by secure children, but not insecure children. These results suggest that attachment relevant information plays a role in the dispositional social judgments made by children.