Parenting Styles and Moral Disengagement in Young Adults: The Mediating Role of Attachment Experiences

Research on parenting styles and attachment experiences has paid little attention to the dimensions of moral development. It is, therefore, interesting to explore the relationship between parenting styles, internal working models of attachment, and the development of moral skills, in terms of moral disengagement. The study involved 307 young people (aged 19-25 years), and the dimensions examined were: parental styles (measured by the PSDQ: Tagliabue et al., 2014); attachment styles (ECR: Picardi et al., 2002); moral disengagement (MDS: Caprara et al., 2006). Results showed that the authoritative parenting style is negatively correlated with the two measures of attachment styles (anxiety and avoidance) and moral disengagement. The authoritarian and permissive styles are positively correlated with the two measures of attachment styles (anxiety and avoidance) and moral disengagement. Results also revealed a significant indirect effect of the authoritative style (b = -0.433, 95% BCa, CI [-0.882, -0.090]) and authoritarian style (b = -0.661, 95% BCa, CI [.230, 1.21]) on moral disengagement through anxiety. A serial mediation of anxiety and avoidance on the relationship between permissive style and moral disengagement (b = .077, 95% BCa, CI [.0006, .206]) is significant.

Compliance or empathy-What links maternal sensitivity and toddlers' emotional helping?

Emotional helping-that is, helping based on others' emotional distress-has been suggested to be a central prosocial response to others in need. Developmental theorizing proposed that emotional helping has social origins. Whereas research indeed demonstrated a link between maternal sensitivity and children's emotional helping, developmental theories stress different mediating processes. Emotion-sharing theories claim empathic concern to be the crucial link for helping, whereas internalization theories base children's helping on children's compliance. To investigate these hypotheses, the current study explored empathy and compliance as two possible mediators for the relation between maternal sensitivity and children's emotional helping at 18 months of age. Overall, maternal sensitivity was positively related to children's empathy, children's compliance, and children's emotional helping. Interestingly, children's empathy-but not children's compliance-mediated the link between maternal sensitivity and children's emotional helping. These findings deepen our understanding of the psychological processes subserving emotional helping during infancy and support theories that stress the socioemotional origins of children's prosocial behavior.

Attachment and prosocial behavior in middle childhood: The role of emotion regulation

There is a lack of research on the development of prosocial behavior in middle childhood. The current study addressed this gap through the application of attachment theory; attachment security has been shown to promote prosocial behavior in early childhood, and emotion regulation may be an important intervening variable in this association. A sample of 199 children (aged 6-12 years) reported on their attachment internal working models for the mother-child and father-child relationships, parents reported on child emotion regulation and emotional lability/dysregulation, and children completed a sticker donation task to assess their prosocial behavior. Child emotional lability/dysregulation served as an intervening variable in the association between father-child attachment security (communication and trust) and greater sticker donation. Mother-child and father-child attachment security was also associated with child emotion regulation, but emotion regulation was not associated with sticker donation. Findings suggest that secure attachment may foster prosocial behavior toward peers in middle childhood primarily by reducing dysregulated responses to the distress of others.