Attachment Representation and Emotion Recognition Ability in Children with ADHD and Their Parents: A Study Protocol.

Background: Few studies in clinical attachment research to date have examined children with an attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) diagnosis. This is surprising for two reasons: first, there are a number of parallels between the behaviors of children with an insecure and disorganized attachment and the behaviors of children with an ADHD diagnosis. Second, secure attachment has a positive effect on the development of skills in areas in which children with ADHD demonstrate problems (e.g., attention span, impulse control). There are currently no findings on whether or not and how insecure and disorganized attachment and ADHD affect children's emotion recognition ability. Methods: This is a cross-sectional study, part exploratory and part hypothesis-driven in the context of basic research. A clinical sample of 5- to 10-year-old children with an ADHD diagnosis and their parents is to be compared to a non-clinical unaffected control group. Over a period of 3 years, 80 subjects and their parents are to be recruited in each group for participation in the study. Discussion: This study is the first to examine links between attachment, emotion recognition ability, and ADHD. It is also the first to include not just children with ADHD but also their mothers and fathers in its design. The findings should help reduce the research gap and generate more knowledge for family interventions in the case of ADHD.

The German Multidimensional Attitude Scale Toward Persons With Disabilities (G-MAS): A factor analytical study among high-school students.

OBJECTIVE: This study investigates the psychometric properties of the Multidimensional Attitudes Scale Toward Persons with Disabilities (MAS) among German 10th graders, to advance knowledge about the situation in German classrooms with regard to attitudes toward persons with disabilities. METHOD: Four hundred twenty-one German 10th graders attending the most common regular schools of the German educational system completed the MAS. Confirmatory factor analyses, multigroup confirmatory factor analyses, multivariate analyses of variance and model based clustering were used to investigate: the factor structure, invariance of the factor structure across gender and school types, differences on the MAS between gender and school types, and the existence of groups of students with different attitudes. RESULTS: The authors reject previously proposed measurement models of the MAS, based on inadequate model fit. They identify a factor structure of the MAS with good model fit, the German MAS (G-MAS). The G-MAS, like 2 recently reported factor structures, assesses 4 dimensions: behavioral avoidance, positive cognitions, and 2 affective dimensions-calm and negative affect. The G-MAS is invariant across gender, but not across school types. The authors find no differences on these dimensions between students from different types of schools, but there are gender differences. CONCLUSIONS: Findings are discussed in light of the outcome that, of the studied sample, less than 1/3 of the students clearly expresses positive attitudes toward persons with disabilities. (PsycINFO Database Record

An attachment research perspective on ADHD.

Since the beginning of clinical attachment research in the mid-1980s the number of research projects in this area has been continuously increasing. The research questions so far can be allocated to numerous medical disciplines such as psychosomatic medicine, adult psychiatry or child and adolescent psychiatry. Recently, children with ADHD and their families have also become subjects of this branch of research. Their specific behavioral characteristics from early childhood on constitute unique challenges on the parent-child interaction. If these interactions develop in a suboptimal way, children may develop an insecure or even a disorganized attachment quality. The latter represents a risk factor for a clinically significant psychopathological development.This article initially presents basic principles of attachment theory and discusses the relevance of the cardinal symptoms of ADHD for clinical attachment research. Subsequently, it outlines and discusses the main results of existing research regarding attachment and ADHD. It concludes with a perspective on research questions that need to be addressed in the future with regard to a transgenerational model that highlights the importance of parental attachment representations to the development of children's attachment quality.

Attachment representation in mothers of children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Attachment research so far rarely has focused on attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). This study is the first to examine the distribution of the attachment representation in mothers of children with ADHD. Considering results of clinical attachment studies we formulated the following hypothesis: the prevalence of maternal insecure and unresolved attachment representations increases with the degree of severity of children's ADHD symptoms. Therefore it is highest in mothers of children with ADHD who are treated clinically (group A). It is expressed less strongly in mothers of children with ADHD symptoms without need for clinical treatment (group B). In a control group of mothers whose children have no ADHD diagnosis (group C), there is the lowest prevalence of insecure and disorganized attachment representations. Within a period of 6 months from a total of 72 recruited children and their mothers screened according to participation criteria (e.g. ICD-10: F90 Hyperkinetic disorders), 13 mothers could be assigned to group A, 19 mothers to group B, and 19 mothers to group C. The attachment representation was assessed using the Adult Attachment Projective. To test the sequence order hypothesis we used the Jonckheere-Terpstra test (u = 3.78; p < 0.001). The increasing clinical conspicuity in the groups obviously is connected to a reduced prevalence of the autonomous attachment representations as well as to an increase of the insecure and unresolved attachment representations of the mothers. We interpret this result with respect to the treatment of children with ADHD as a vote for considering the family context as well as early intervention strategies which aim at the improvement of the quality of maternal sensitivity.