Interpersonal trust is a crucial component of healthy relationships. When we interact with strangers, we quickly gage whether we can trust them. And those important social skills may be shaped by our earliest relationship with caregivers.
Adolescents who had an insecure attachment to their mothers as toddlers are more likely to overestimate the trustworthiness of strangers, according to a new study from the University of Illinois.
“The idea is to understand whether early attachment relationships with mothers have a longitudinal, predictive association with how adolescents process cues related to trustworthiness, both at the behavioral level and the brain level,” explains Xiaomei Li, doctoral student in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies (HDFS) at U of I and lead author on the paper.
The project builds on data from the Children’s Social Development Project, a longitudinal study conducted under the lead of Nancy McElwain, HDFS professor and co-author on the paper.
In the first round of data collection, 128 toddlers and their mothers participated in a laboratory visit where researchers observed their interactions and evaluated their attachment style.
Ten years later, when the children were in their early adolescence, they were invited back for a second round of studies. This time, the researchers wanted to observe how the adolescents evaluated the trustworthiness of strangers.
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Photo by Thiago Cerqueira on Unsplash
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