Summary: New longitudinal research finds that adolescents who were classified as insecurely attached to their mothers in toddlerhood are more likely to overestimate strangers’ trustworthiness and show reduced neural responsiveness to untrustworthy cues.
Source: University of Illinois
Interpersonal trust is fundamental to healthy social relationships. When we encounter unfamiliar people, we rapidly assess whether they seem trustworthy. This study shows that those early assessments may be shaped by the quality of a child’s relationship with their primary caregiver.
Researchers at the University of Illinois report that adolescents who had an insecure attachment to their mothers as toddlers tend to overestimate the trustworthiness of strangers. The findings come from a long-term study that links early attachment patterns to later behavioral and brain responses when evaluating unfamiliar faces.
“Our goal was to determine whether early attachment relationships with mothers predict how adolescents process trust-related cues, both in behavior and in brain activity,” explains Xiaomei Li, a doctoral student in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies and lead author on the study.
This work uses data from the Children’s Social Development Project, a longitudinal study led by HDFS professor Nancy McElwain, who is a co-author on the paper. In the first wave, researchers observed 128 toddlers and their mothers during a laboratory visit and evaluated each child’s attachment style.
About ten years later, when the children were in early adolescence, a subset returned for follow-up testing designed to measure how they evaluated the trustworthiness of unfamiliar faces. During this second wave, participants completed a trustworthiness-rating task while undergoing MRI scanning to record brain activity.
Inside the scanner, adolescents viewed photographs of neutral-faced actors and rated each face on a scale from 1 to 5 for trustworthiness. They were instructed to imagine being alone in an unfamiliar city and to consider how likely they would be to approach that person for help or directions.
The face stimuli came from an established database in which independent observers had previously judged the faces for perceived trustworthiness, producing a continuum from high to low trustworthiness.
Both groups—those with secure and insecure early attachments—tended to agree when faces appeared highly trustworthy. However, adolescents who had been classified as insecurely attached in toddlerhood were less likely to identify faces as low in trustworthiness. Their brain scans revealed reduced activation in regions involved in emotional and social processing when viewing untrustworthy faces.
“Adolescents with a secure attachment history showed greater sensitivity to untrustworthy cues than those with an insecure history,” Li says. “We saw how early caregiver–child dynamics during toddlerhood—a critical period for social-emotional development—predicted adolescent functioning both behaviorally and at the neural level.”
Attachment theory centers on whether a child trusts their primary caregiver to provide comfort and support. When caregiving is inconsistent or unreliable, children may develop patterns of insecure attachment.
“Children who experienced inconsistent care may adopt defensive strategies, such as ignoring or avoiding negative social cues, to protect themselves,” Li explains. “The lower brain activation we observed supports this interpretation: insecurely attached adolescents appear less likely to process cues that signal untrustworthiness.”
By contrast, adolescents with a secure attachment history seem more willing to attend to and evaluate negative social information.
McElwain highlights the practical implication for parenting: being open and responsive to a child’s negative emotions supports secure attachment. When parents accept and comfort a child’s distress, those moments become opportunities to teach emotional regulation. Avoiding or dismissing negative emotions can teach children that these feelings are unacceptable and may undermine their ability to process social risk later on.
McElwain stresses that early experiences do not permanently determine outcomes. “Adolescence is a period of substantial brain development and growing self-reflection,” she says. “That makes it an ideal time for interventions. Parents, teachers, and other adults can help adolescents learn to recognize and respond to negative social cues through open conversations, role-playing, and positive modeling.”
About this neurodevelopment research news
Author: Press Office
Source: University of Illinois
Contact: Press Office – University of Illinois
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Original Research: Open access. “Toddler–mother attachment moderates adolescents’ behavioral and neural evaluation of trustworthiness” by Xiaomei Li et al., published in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.
Abstract
Toddler–mother attachment moderates adolescents’ behavioral and neural evaluation of trustworthiness
This longitudinal study examined prospective associations between toddler–mother attachment and adolescents’ (n = 52; 34 boys; mean age ≈13.22 years; 90% White) behavioral and neural responses when evaluating trustworthiness from unfamiliar, emotionally neutral faces.
At 33 months, toddler–mother attachment status (secure vs. insecure) was assessed using a modified Strange Situation procedure. Results indicated that attachment moderated processing of trustworthiness cues: as faces were perceived as less trustworthy, adolescents with a secure versus insecure attachment history rated faces as progressively less trustworthy and showed increasing activation—rather than a general blunting—in brain regions implicated in trustworthiness perception (including bilateral amygdala, bilateral fusiform gyrus, right anterior insula, and right posterior superior temporal sulcus).
These findings suggest that secure child–mother attachment in toddlerhood is associated with a greater capacity or openness to process potentially negative social information at both behavioral and neural levels during adolescence.