Publications by authors named "Simon de Winter"

The breadth of children's attentional field around their mother determines whether securely or insecurely attached children are at risk to develop depressive symptoms when confronted with distress in adolescence. To test this effect longitudinally, we measured children's ( = 10.93; = 109) baseline attentional breadth around their mother, attachment status (combining attachment coherence, secure base script knowledge, and self-reported trust), and self-reported depressive symptoms.

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Trust in parental support and subsequent support seeking behavior, a hallmark of secure attachment, result from experiences with sensitive parents during distress. However, the underlying developmental mechanism remains unclear. We tested the hypothesis that trust is the result of an expectancy-learning process condtional upon contingency (the probability that caregiver support has a positive outcome).

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Recent middle childhood research suggests that children's trust in maternal support can be manipulated using Cognitive Bias Modification (CBM) aimed at changing children's interpretation of ambiguous maternal support-related behavior. The current study with 60 children (40 girls, M = 10.62, SD = 1.

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Background And Objectives: Research on the social effects of intranasal oxytocin in children is scarce. Oxytocin has been proposed to have clearer beneficial effects when added to social learning paradigms. The current study tested this proposition in middle childhood by assessing effects of cognitive bias modification (CBM) training and oxytocin on trust in maternal support.

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There is limited research examining stability and change in attachment security in middle childhood. The current study addresses this gap using data from a 3-year longitudinal study. Specifically, we examined stability and change in secure base script knowledge during middle childhood using a sample of 157 children (Wave 1 mean age [] = 10.

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Attachment theory implies the causal influence of interpretation bias on the attachment-related expectations. Previous research demonstrated that training children to interpret maternal behavior as more supportive increased their trust in maternal support. The current study explored possible training effects on two attachment script-related processes: recollection of attachment-related memories and secure base script knowledge.

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Background: Lack of trust in parental support is a transdiagnostic risk factor for the development of psychological problems throughout the lifespan. Research suggests that children's cognitive attachment representations and related information processing biases could be an important target for interventions aiming to build trust in the parent-child relationship. A paradigm that can alter these biases and increase trust is that of Cognitive Bias Modification (CBM), during which a target processing bias is systematically trained.

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Attachment theory implies that children's inclination to interpret attachment figures behavior as supportive and available causally influences children's trust in their attachment figure's availability. An experiment was conducted to test whether training children (8-12 years old) to interpret ambiguous interactions with their mothers in a more secure way increases their trust in their mother's availability. Participants (N = 49) were randomly assigned to either a secure condition to train children to interpret their mother's behavior as supportive or a neutral placebo condition, where interpretations were unrelated to maternal support.

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