The Type Of Child-Parent Attachment On Parental Reference Effect

The study of self-reference and group-reference is a hot issues in the field of the social cognition, social development studies in the recent years. Among the past researches on self-reference effect, especially in those of significant others, few are concerned with child-reference as well as parental attachment. At mean time, abundant researches indicate that intimacy is a vital element to influence the reference effect of significant others; therefore, as an important index which measures the intimacy between children and adults, parental attachment is included in this research as a social and cultural variable. This research starts with children and adopts the R/K paradigm in Self-Reference Effect, in an attempt to testify whether child-reference effect exists while investigating the effect of parental attachment on parental reference, which is supposed to extend and further the research on self-reference effect.Experiment1. Utilizing the R/K paradigm in Self-Reference Effect, it sets four conditions:"self, child, mother, others", speculates on whether there exists child-reference effect, and compares differences of father and mother in the child-reference effect. The results indicate that:child-reference effect does exist, and there is no obvious divergence of father and mother in child-reference effect.Experiment2. On the basis of Experiment1, takes mothers as subjects, and sets two conditions of "child, others". It explores the effects of different types of parental attachment on child-reference effect through the Chinese version of Q-Set measurement. The results indicate that:subjects under the circumstances of safe attachment and unsafe attachment both display child-reference effect, and no obvious difference is shown between the two types of parental attachment.Experiment3take children as subjects, and sets three conditions of "mother, father, others". It adopts the model of property right which fits children of various ages, and investigates the effect of different types of parental attachment on mother-reference effect. The results show that:(1) The father/mother-reference effect exist in children as early as the age of5.(2) Children who are tested under the circumstances of safe attachment and unsafe attachment both display father/mother-reference effect, and the two types of parental attachment show little difference in free memorization rates in the conditions where fathers or mothers accompany children.The foregoing experiments draw the following conclusions:(l)Both father and mother display child-reference and there is no obvious difference in child-reference effects between fathers and mothers. This proves that the self-schema of parents includes significant others like children.(2) Children of five years old have displayed father/mother-reference effect. However,5-year-old may be not the starting age of children displaying father/mother reference effect. The starting age may be even earlier if the experiment paradigm is appropriate.(3) There exist parental-reference,and types of parental attachment have the trend of some influence on parental reference. This indicates that the intimacy of blood relatives can adjust the degree of entering the other one’s self-model through parental attachment.