Katharina Buczek
Social development starts during infancy. Just after birth, newborns begin to process facial expressions and gestures first. Then, children only continue to gather and internalize social information from their parents as they grow.
And these actions and emotions that children learn through their parents are crucial to the development of healthy relationships later in life.
A new study conducted by the University of Illinois underpins this fact and actually found that toddlers who endured insecure attachment to their mothers are more likely to place too much trust in strangers during teenhood.
Xiaomei Li, the study’s lead author, described the team’s mission in conducting this study.
“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,” Li said.
Ten years ago, one hundred and twenty-eight toddlers and their mothers participated in a preliminary data collection round.
During the visit, the researchers evaluated the attachment styles of each toddler-parent pair after observing their interactions.
After the children entered early adolescence, they returned for a second round of data collection.
The researchers sought to understand how the children gauged strangers’ trustworthiness without their parents.
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