The Relationship Between Quality Of Child Attachment And Individual Reaction Of Social Rejection

Social rejection(social exclusion)is a normal negative event in daily life,people who experience social rejection could have negative emotion and behaviors later.However,individual difference could be find after people experienced social rejection,not only in emotions and follow-up behaviors,but also differ in the activation of brain mechanisms.The study of individual differences in social rejection responses mainly focused on the attachment styles,and mainly focused on adult,and fewer studies focused on children.In childhood,individuals not only have parents as their attachment figures,but also have peer as an new attachment figure.Research shows,mother-child attachment would most influent adolescents’ psychological advantage.And peer attachment would influent individuals’ interpersonal adaptability.However,father-child attachment would have influence on adolescences’ psychological resilience,which means when adolescences face social events,mother-child attachment would give them power to start,and peer attachment would let people have higher interpersonal adaptability.And when individuals faced challenges and difficulties,father-child attachment would give people power to fix it,it just like individual attachment figures serves as “secure base”.Otherwise,the power of “secure base” is based on quality of child attachment,which means it’s necessary to do research on quality of child attachment and individual reactions to social rejection.Starting from the function of attachment figures,and clarify which attachment figures(father,mother,peer)would influent individual reactions of social rejection in childhood,can be on the side of attachment in the individual experience to study the attachment function of the social negative events.Meanwhile,there are many researches about individuals’ brain area stress response to social rejection,such as dACC,mPFC,and insula.Researchers are focus on adult,and the children’s’ brain area stress response to social rejection is still unknown.And there are many researches about brain area,the researches about functional network connection to social rejection is less.Taken adult as participants,individuals’ SN,DMN is connected to one’s social behaviors.But the connection in SN,DMN and social negative events is still unknown.Therefore,based on the past researches achievements and insufficient,this study aims to explore the relationship between quality of child attachment and individual reactions to social rejection,and then confirm the quality of child attachment can explain the individual difference of social rejection or not.Based on this,further research focus on the three main attachment figures in childhood: father,mother and peer,try to identify which figure can explain the individual difference best,and how this difference would be reflected on the brain mechanisms.Therefore,the first purpose of this study is exploring the significant correlation between individual reactions to social rejection and quality of child attachment.First study took questionnaire as IPPA to measure quality of child attachment figures,and chose questionnaire as SES to measure children’s self-esteem.After finishing Cyberball test,children should complete NTS questionnaire for measuring their own social rejection.After then,all data were brought into correlation analysis and structural equation model analysis.The conclusion is as follows:(1)social rejection has a negative significant correlation with quality of mother attachment,quality of father attachment,quality of peer attachment.Especially for the quality of father attachment,quality of peer attachment,they got more significantly than quality of mother attachment.(2)after inducing the self-esteem as moderation effect,it turns out that self-esteem can only moderate the negative relationship between quality of father attachment and social rejection.Specifically,while the level of self-esteem below average one standard deviation,social rejection ould decrease 0.313 unit if quality of father attachment increases one unit.While the level of self-esteem above average one standard deviation,social rejection would decrease 0.059 unit if quality of father attachment increases one unit.In a word,higher self-esteem would help children with same quality of father attachment level get less social rejection,Lower self-esteem would work on opposite.The Experiment 2 use the cyberball paradigm,recording the quality of father-child attachment indiviuals’ brain imaging data.The results indicate(1)children have higher activation in ACC,Amygdala,brain regions of frontal lobe and insula in social rejection condition than social inclusion condition;(2)the higher quality of father-child attachment,the more information synchronism between SN-DMN,SN-FPN.In summary,quality of child attachment can explain the individual reactions to social rejection in childhood,which concrete expression to the quality of peer attachment,quality of mother-child attachment and quality of father-child attachment has significant negative correlation with individual difference of social rejection,and the self-esteem has moderating effect between quality of father-child attachment and individual difference of social rejection;Meanwhile,the higher quality of father-child attachment,the more information synchronism between SN-DMN,SN-FPN.What’s more,we identified father has most influence to individual difference of social rejection,and this result can be proved both in structural equation and brain mechanism.This finding helps to elucidate the difference and importance in childhood attachment figures,and it provide efficient evidence to the research about quality of childhood attachment and social behavior in the future.