The purpose of this study is to examine the reliability and validity of a newly developed measure of attachment- related social information processing designed for the preschool years. The measure - the Social Information Processing Interview - Parent-Child version (SIPI-PC) - is based on two distinctive yet highly related models. The first is a key proposition of attachment theory that """"""""internal working models of attachment relationships"""""""" - founded in early attachment relationships - highly influence the individual's later social information processing and, in the case of insecure attachment relationships, may distort this processing. The second is the social information processing approach developed by Dodge and his colleagues which emphasizes a multi- component, process-oriented approach to SIP and postulates the importance of understanding the different mental processes and stages that construct one's response to social situations. The measure is designed to answer the call in the developmental community for measures of socioemotional functioning appropriate to use on large and diverse populations of children. In the SIPI-PC, children are asked to respond to different types of mother-child interaction scenarios in which a child is confronted with situations with increasing degrees of stress. Children are asked to recall the story, to interpret the mother's and child's feelings in that situation, to generate a response, and to evaluate the outcomes of a given response. We will examine whether attachment- related social information processing patterns are associated with (1) observed attachment behavior;(2) peer- related SIP;(3) sociodemographic risk;(4) parental psychosocial functioning;and (5) social behavior in preschool.
Attachment representations are thought to predict social cognition patterns in the preschool years which in turn are highly predictive of school adjustment. The new attachment-related social Information processing measure proposed in this study could advance our knowledge about the role of attachment representations within the larger context of social cognition and could lead to deeper insight into the sources of distortion in the processing of social information. Moreover, because there is increasing evidence regarding the effectiveness of social cognition based intervention programs with preschool children, this new knowledge can contribute to existing intervention protocols focusing on social cognition by adding an attachment relationships component to the intervention protocol.
