Attachment relationship with parents and Taiwanese middle-aged adult children’s filial anxiety: The mediating role of dual filial piety beliefs

Given the aging of the global population, the experience of adult children preparing to care for their aging parents is increasingly valued. In this article, I not only examined the associations between Taiwanese adult children’s attachment relationships with parents and their experience of filial anxiety but also took a psychocultural perspective to explore the mediating role of filial piety, the most representative value in the Chinese family. I collected survey data from 1305 middle-aged Taiwanese adults over 40 years old whose father or mother was alive and over 65 years old. The results from the first model for both father–child and mother–child datasets showed that secure attachment relationships with parents had a significant positive association with adults’ parental-welfare-focused filial anxiety B (FAB) but a significant negative association with their caregiver-role-focused filial anxiety A (FAA). The results from the second analysis indicated that secure attachment relationships with parents, for both father–child and mother–child datasets, had a significant positive association with adults’ endorsement of reciprocal filial piety beliefs, which significantly related to higher levels of FAB but lower levels of FAA. For both the father–child and mother–child datasets, secure attachment relationships with parents also had a significant positive association with their endorsement of authoritarian filial piety beliefs. Subsequently, their endorsement of authoritarian filial piety belief significantly related to a higher level of FAB in only the mother–child dataset. In conclusion, these findings broaden the understanding of adult children’s experience of filial anxiety that could be related to their attachment relationship with parents and their endorsement of reciprocal and authoritarian filial piety.

Patient’s and the Therapist’s Attachment Representations, Attachment to Therapists, and Self-Esteem-Change Through Psychotherapy

Objectives: The present naturalistic study aims to investigate the differential effects of the patient’s and the therapist’s attachment representations on the attachment to the therapist as perceived by the patient, and their impact on self-esteem-change through psychotherapy.Methods: Attachment variables of N = 573 patients as well as N = 16 therapists were assessed. Attachment representations were measured for therapists and patients via the Bielefelder Questionnaire for Client Attachment Exploration, the Relationship Specific Attachment to Therapist Scales and the Adult Attachment Interview. The patient’s attachment to therapists was evaluated and patients’ self-esteem was measured via the Frankfurter Selbstkonzeptskalen at the beginning and end of psychotherapy.Results: Although there were significant effects of the patient’s attachment representations on the perceived attachment to the therapist as well as between the perceived attachment to the therapist and the amount of self-esteem-change, the therapist’s attachment style had no significant influence on the perceived attachment to the therapist.Conclusion: Self-esteem-change through psychotherapy is influenced by the actually formed attachment relationship as perceived by the patient. The patient’s attachment representations but not the therapist’s attachment style contributes to the actual patient’s attachment to the therapist.

Leadership, Mental Toughness, and Attachment Relationship in the World Beach Volleyball Context

For a long time, competitive sport has focused only on aspects related to performance. However, studies in social psychology have indicated the importance of focusing on the human development of athletes, which can occur through training environments that promote psychological well-being. Thus, this study aimed to analyze the impact of the coach-athlete attachment style, mediated by the coach’s leadership style, on the mental toughness of athletes in the world beach volleyball context. Elite beach volleyball athletes (n = 65), participants of the World Tour 2018, were part of the study. The Coach-Athlete Attachment Scale (CAAS), Mental Toughness Index (MTI) and Leadership Scale for Sport (LSS) were used as instruments. For data analyses we used polychoric correlation and a bias-corrected factor score path analysis. Path analysis showed that perceived secure attachment was positively associated with athletes’ mental toughness (0.24; 0.31; 0.25), but leadership styles did not mediate this relationship. For athletes with anxious attachment profiles, the perception of autocratic leadership style was associated with athletes’ mental toughness (1.01; p = 0.03), when their interaction style is focused on coaching-instruction. It concludes that the secure attachment relationship can bring increases in levels of athletic mental toughness, whereas for athletes with insecure attachment, the autocratic style was shown to be associated with the highest levels of mental toughness.

Understanding the Mechanism of Social Attachment Role in Social Media: A Qualitative Analysis

Qualitative research method was used to explore the formation and development of the attachment relationship between users and social media in the process of using social media. Based on the attachment theory, this study selected three representative social media platforms, namely, TikTok, WeChat, and MicroBlog, as theoretical samples, and this study adopted NVivo12.0 to root, theorize, and construct the original data. Research shows that users are stimulated by co-creation value to stimulate changes in their psychological needs and self-expression, leading to the formation of social attachment. Among them, user participation is a prerequisite for driving the occurrence of co-creation value, creating a continuous-use scenario for the attachment relationship between individuals and social media. Further, psychological needs and self-expression play mediating roles between co-creation of value and social attachment and promote the occurrence of personal belonging to software platforms. The findings of this research better our understandings about the mechanism of developing social attachment from continuous use of social media and offer practical implications for commercial uses of social media platforms.

Questionnaire measures of adult attachment correlate with frontal hemispheric asymmetry in sleep spindle activity

Introduction: Attachment anxiety and neuroticism were proposed to be associated with relative right frontal neural activity. Since sleep spindles are argued to reflect enhanced offline neuroplasticity, higher spindle activity measured over the right frontal areas relative to the corresponding left frontal ones could index higher attachment anxiety and neuroticism.Methods: 34 healthy subjects (male = 19; Mage = 31.64; SDage = 9.5) were enrolled in our preliminary study. Second night EEG/polysomnography records and questionnaire measures of personality (Zuckermann-Kuhlman Personality Questionnaire) and adult attachment (Relationship Scales Questionnaire) were collected. Frontal slow sleep spindles were measured by the Individual Adjustment Method (IAM), whereas hemispheric asymmetry indexes of spindle occurrence rate, duration and amplitude were derived as normalized left-right differences (electrode pairs: Fp1-Fp2, F3-F4 and F7-F8).Results: Relative right lateralization of frontolateral and frontopolar slow sleep spindle density and mid-frontal slow spindle duration were associated with attachment anxiety, but spindle lateralization was less closely related to neuroticism. The relationships between frontal slow spindle laterality and attachment anxiety remained statistically significant even after controlling for the effect of neuroticism. The attachment “relationship” dimension (need for close relationships) was related to relative left dominance of frontal slow spindle activation, whereas attachment independence was not correlated with frontal slow spindle lateralization.Conclusion: Right frontal lateralization of slow sleep spindle activity can potentially serve as a marker for attachment anxiety.

Thriving Through Relationships in Sport: The Role of the Parent–Athlete and Coach–Athlete Attachment Relationship

The aim of this research was to examine whether attachment relationships to significant others, such as to parents and/or sports coaches, enable thriving and competition performance within sport. Two studies employing cross-sectional and prospective designs were carried out across different samples of athletes of varied skill levels and sports. In Study 1, we found athletes’ attachment to their sports coach was significantly associated with athlete thriving and mediated by psychological needs satisfaction. Results of Study 2 found that athletes’ secure attachment to their mother and/or father positively predicted the experience of thriving at the competition while athletes’ insecure attachment did not predict thriving. Furthermore, athletes’ attachment to both mother and father did not predict competition performance. Together, these two studies acknowledge the significant role that athletes’ secure attachment relationships with parents and coaches play in facilitating thriving in athletes. These findings have significant implications for research and practice.

Configurations of Mother-Child and Father-Child Attachment as Predictors of Internalizing and Externalizing Symptoms: An Individual Participant Data (IPD) Meta?Analysis

An unsettled question in attachment theory and research is the extent to which children’s attachment patterns with mothers and fathers jointly predict developmental outcomes. In this study, we used individual participant data meta-analysis to assess whether early attachment networks with mothers and fathers are associated with children’s internalizing and externalizing symptoms. Following a pre-registered protocol, data from 9 studies and 1,097 children (mean age: 28.67 months) with attachment classifications to both mothers and fathers were included in analyses. We used a linear mixed effects analysis to assess differences in children’s internalizing and externalizing symptoms as assessed via the average of both maternal and paternal reports based on whether children had two, one, or no insecure (or disorganized) attachments. Results indicated that children with an insecure attachment relationship with one or both parents were at higher risk for elevated internalizing symptomatology compared with children who were securely attached to both parents. Children whose attachment relationships with both parents were classified as disorganized had more externalizing symptoms compared to children with either one or no disorganized attachment relationship with their parents. Across attachment classification networks and symptoms, findings suggest (a) a multiplicative effect when children have insecure or disorganized attachment to both parents, and (b) that mother-child and father-child attachment relationships may not differ in the roles they play in children’s development of internalizing and externalizing symptoms.

Factors Associated with Parent–Adolescent Attachment Relationship Quality: A Longitudinal Study

Background: Attachment to parents during adolescence has been identified as an important indicator of psychosocial adaptation. However, the relative importance of the adolescents’ behavior problems and the larger relational context likely to influence the quality of these relationships remains relatively underexplored. The present study aims to identify the factors associated with the quality of parent–adolescent attachment relationships and to establish their relative contributions. This study also tested, as a complementary objective, the invariance of the models according to sex. Method: 706 (46.9% girls) early adolescents participated in the study at time 1 and then again, two years later. The individual (e.g., behavior problems or temperament) and contextual (e.g., parents’ behaviors, history of abuse or environment stability) associated factors were measured at time 1, while the quality of the parent–adolescent attachment relationship was measured at time 2. Results: The results showed that a history of emotional abuse, inconsistent discipline, externalized behavior problems and the adolescent’s age were negatively associated with the global attachment security score, while internalized behavior problems and peer attachment were positively associated. These variables explained 15.7% of variance. The results also demonstrated that these variables were also associated with the specific dimensions of attachment (trust, communication, alienation). Discussion: The study demonstrates the importance of several relational variables in the development of the parent–adolescent attachment relationship.