At the outset, I would like to thank Dante Cicchetti, Judi Smetana, and Melissa Sturge-Apple for nominating me for the Mary Ainsworth Award for Excellence in Developmental Science. I am thrilled and honored to receive this award. As a testament to her long legacy, Mary Ainsworth has heavily influenced my work. Starting back in my graduate school days, Mark Cummings and I were interested in understanding why interparental conflict posed a unique risk to children’s psychological adjustment. We eventually formulated the emotional security theory (EST), using attachment theory as a base for identifying emotion processes that underpin children’s vulnerability to interparental conflict (Davies & Cummings, 1994).
A primary assumption of EST is that witnessing interparental conflict undermines children’s goal of preserving emotional security. In building on attachment theory, EST posits that threats to emotional security are reflected in three forms of responses to interparental conflict: (1) emotional reactivity, or prolonged, intense distress reactions; (2) avoidance or involvement in parental problems; and (3) negative internal representations or appraisals of the negative implications interparental conflict have for their well-being. The new theory, however, demands new methods to test it. Influenced again by Mary Ainsworth’s successes in carefully assessing behavior, our lab developed a new survey (Davies et al., 2002), semi-structured interview (Davies et al., 2012), projective (Bascoe et al., 2009), and observational (Davies et al., 2016a) methods of assessing emotional insecurity.
Over the next two decades, results from studies using the new measures supported that premise children’s insecurity mediated pathways among interparental conflict and children’s social, emotional, and behavioral problems (Davies & Cummings, 1998; Davies et al., 2002; Davies et al., 2012; Davies et al., 2016b). However, the work also showed that emotional insecurity was not a salient risk mechanism for all children from high-conflict homes. Thus, we aimed to identify the factors that interrupted or amplified the role of emotional insecurity as a mediating mechanism. This work has revealed that there are a number of factors that moderate the role of emotional security as a mediator, including early developmental experiences, polygenic susceptibility, neurobiological functioning, attention biases to emotion cues, and family and sibling relationship attributes (Davies et al., 2020a; Davies et al., 2019; Davies et al., 2020b).
However, EST has some limitations in its lack of depth and precision in characterizing individual differences in the nature, precursors, and sequelae of children’s emotional insecurity. It also provides an insufficient account of how and why emotional security is distinct from attachment security. Inspired in part by John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth’s emphasis on behavioral systems in evolution and ethology, we developed a reformulation of EST (EST-R; Davies & Martin, 2013; 2014). A primary assumption is the behavioral system organizing children’s emotional insecurity in the interparental relationship is different from the system organizing attachment insecurity. The system (i.e., social defense system) can be distinguished by its goal (i.e., defusing threat in social groups) and the behaviors that children enlist to achieve the goal. EST-R is specifically designed to provide: (a) a clearer understanding of the inner workings of emotional security as a goal system, and (b) a more precise delineation of the early antecedents and developmental consequences of individual differences in children’s patterns of emotional insecurity. At a broader level, we are hopeful that EST-R will spur new ways of understanding the conflict in other social relationships (e.g., parent-child, peer, and sibling) and the implementation of treatment programs to optimize child health and well-being.”
References
Bascoe, S. M., Davies, P. T., Sturge-Apple, M. L., & Cummings, E. M. (2009). Children’s insecure representations of the interparental relationship and their psychological maladjustment: Children’s peer information processing as an explanatory mechanism. Developmental Psychology, 45, 1740-1751.
Davies, P. T., Cicchetti, D., Thompson, M. J., Bascoe, S. M., & Cummings, E. M. (2020a). The interplay of polygenic plasticity and adrenocortical activity as sources of variability in pathways among family adversity, youth emotional reactivity, and psychological problems. Development and Psychopathology, 32, 587-603.
Davies, P. T., & Cummings, E. M. (1994). Marital conflict and child adjustment: An emotional security hypothesis. Psychological Bulletin, 116, 387-411.
Davies, P. T., & Cummings, E. M. (1998). Exploring children's emotional security as a mediator of the link between marital relations and child adjustment. Child Development, 69, 124-139.
Davies, P. T., & Martin, M. J. (2013). The reformulation of emotional security theory: The role of children’s social defense in developmental psychopathology. Development and Psychopathology, 25, 1435- 1454.
Davies, P. T., & Martin, M. J. (2014). Children’s coping and adjustment in high conflict homes: The reformulation of emotional security theory. Child Development Perspectives, 8, 242-249.
Davies, P. T., Harold, G. T., Goeke-Morey, M., Cummings, E. M, & Shelton, K. (2002). Children’s emotional security and interparental conflict. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 67, 1-129.
Davies, P. T., Hentges, R. F., Coe, J. L., Martin, M. J., Sturge-Apple, M. L., & Cummings, E. M. (2016b). The multiple faces of interparental conflict: Implications for cascades of children’s insecurity and externalizing problems. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 125, 664-678.
Davies, P. T., Parry, L. Q., Bascoe, S. M., Martin, M. J., & Cummings, E. M. (2019). Children’s vulnerability to interparental conflict: The protective role of sibling relationship quality. Child Development, 90, 2118-2134.
Davies, P. T., Martin, M. J., & Cicchetti, D. (2012). Delineating the sequelae of destructive and constructive interparental conflict for children within an evolutionary framework. Developmental Psychology, 48, 939-955.
Davies, P. T., Martin, M. J., Sturge-Apple M. L., Ripple, M. T., & Cicchetti, D. (2016a). Delineating the sequelae of children’s coping with interparental conflict: Testing the reformulated emotional security theory. Developmental Psychology, 52, 1646-1665.
Davies, P. T., Thompson, M. J., Hentges, R. F., Coe, J. L., & Sturge-Apple, M. L. (2020b). Children’s attentional biases to emotions as sources of variability in their vulnerability to interparental conflict. Developmental Psychology, 56, 1343-1359.