Reactive Attachment Disorder and socio-emotional development in childhood: Clinical review.

The quality of interactions experienced with primary attachment figures influence the development of emotional skills. On the other hand, we know how emotions fill a critical adaptive role for the social adjustment, in that they assume both a communicative function and an informative value.

In this research, we were particularly interested in how children’s patterns of attachment were expressed in terms of emotional regulation abilities. According to Laible & Thompson’s observations (1998), we tested the following hypothesis: insecure attachment representations are associated with a poverty of skills in decoding emotional signals. They especially would affect the perception of negative emotional expressions.

We tested this hypothesis by the meeting of five children of primary school age (5 to 8 years old) with a reactive attachment disorder and through the establishment of two methodological tools. At first, the Attachment Story Completion Task (Bretherton et al., 1990) allowed us to identify attachment representations for each child. Secondly, inspired by Pollak & al.’s study, we developed a recognition task of facial emotional expressions.

We observed in these children low average rates of identification of basic and primary emotions. Especially, the accuracy of judgments was not only a function of emotion’s valence, but was also dependant of the child’s attachment pattern. Finally, this research confirmed the observations, already showed in previous studies, that interpersonal difficulties presented by these children could be explained specifically by their inefficiency in interpreting social cues surrounding emotional events (Crick & Dodge, 1994).