Attachment and Autism Spectrum Disorder (Without Intellectual Disability) During Middle Childhood: In Search of the Missing Piece

Frontiers in Psychology

article

Michele Giannotti¹  Simona de Falco¹ 

[1] Department of Psychology and Cognitive Sciences, University of Trento

关键词: Autism Spectrum Disorder;    attachment representations;    internal working models;    school-age;    middle childhood;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2021.662024

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

The study of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) represents one of the most challenging areasfor attachment research in view of the complex interrelation between socio-communicationimpairments and attachment processes (McKenzie and Dallos, 2017; Vivanti and Nuske, 2017). Thefascinating debate, which focuses on whether ASD hampers the development of secure attachment,has not received sufficient attention so far. Prior studies often focused on attachment behaviors inpreschoolers with ASD, whereas the study of attachment representations in older children remainsmainly unexplored. The most recent systematic review (Teague et al., 2017) highlighted crucialunresolved questions in the study of attachment and ASD with reference to the paucity of dataabout predictors, correlates and outcomes of attachment in children with ASD. For instance, thereis mixed evidence on the association between parental sensitivity and child attachment security,which has been widely documented in typically developing children (Van IJzendoorn et al., 2007).Importantly, the need to adopt a longitudinal perspective to examine the association betweenattachment and emotional or behavioral difficulties has been also highlighted. To this aim, thestudy of attachment requires a developmental lens based on age-appropriate methods. In thisregard, research has not yet addressed the importance of investigating attachment representationsin middle childhood and adolescence. In the last decade, only a limited number of studieson attachment and ASD has been published on children without intellectual disabilities duringmiddle childhood (Bauminger et al., 2010; Chandler and Dissanayake, 2014; Keenan et al., 2016;Sivaratnam et al., 2018). The assessment of attachment in each study is based on questionnaires suchas the Inventory of Parent and Peer Attachment (IPPA, Armsden and Greenberg, 1987) and/or theSecurity Scale (Kerns et al., 1996). Age range and number of the participants vary across studies,including only children from 6 to 14 years with High-functioning ASD. ASD sample size acrossstudies was fairly small, ranging from 21 children with ASD in the Chandler and Dissanayake’sstudy to 44 children of Bauminger et al. (2010), which, however, includes participants from twocountries (24 from Israel and 20 from the United States).

【 授权许可】

CC BY