Attachment security and peer acceptance as predictors of internal working models in middle childhood

Attachment theorists emphasize the importance of children's relationships with their parents, especially mothers, in children's social development (Bowlby, 1988). Several theorists have suggested that internal working models integrate information about other significant relationships into existing models which contain information about parental relationships (Troy & Sroufe, 1987; Cohn, 1990; Rothbard & Shaver, 1994). The nature of these other social experiences gathered throughout development may be either consistent or inconsistent with the nature of the information about parental relationships already contained in the child's developing internal working model. Many researchers have referred to these “social experiences gathered throughout development” and to “model confirming and disconfirming social experiences”, yet have not defined the nature of these social experiences, nor have they investigated the impact of different social experiences on the ways children think about relationships. One potential naturally occurring source of model-confirming and disconfirming social experiences involves children's relationships with peers. The focus of this research study is on the differential impact of these two types of relationships (attachment to parents and acceptance by peers) on the ways children interpret the behavior and intentions of others.;The subjects in this study were 126 male and female children, ages 9–11, attending the 4th and 5th grades. Children were asked to complete a series of questionnaires including peer nomination inventories, a measure of preoccupied and avoidant coping styles in their relationships with their mothers, a measure of felt security in their relationships with their mothers, and a hypothetical story measure of intent attributions.;The results indicated that children's security of attachment was the largest single predictor of hostile attributional bias in the parent and peer contexts for the entire sample. However, in post-hoc analyses, gender differences emerged in the prediction of hostile attribution bias in the peer context. It was found that boys' social preference scores significantly predicted hostile attribution bias in the peer context while the effect of attachment security was marginally significant. In contrast, it was found that attachment security was a significant predictor of hostile attribution bias for girls while the effects of social impact and physical aggression were marginally significant in the peer context. The hypothesis that model-confirming and model-disconfirming social experiences would differentially predict hostile attribution bias in the peer context was not supported. The results are discussed in terms of their contributions to attachment theory and social information-processing theory.