Attachment's Links With Adolescents' Social Emotions: The Roles of Negative Emotionality and Emotion Regulation

ABSTRACTRecent research has attempted to explain the mechanisms through which parental attachment affects social and emotional outcomes (e.g., Burnette, Taylor, Worthington, & Forsyth, 2007; Panfile & Laible, 2012). The authors’ goal was to examine negative emotionality and emotion regulation as mediators of the associations that attachment has with empathy, forgiveness, guilt, and jealousy. One hundred forty-eight adolescents reported their parental attachment security, general levels of negative emotionality and abilities to regulate emotional responses, and tendencies to feel empathy, forgiveness, guilt, and jealousy. Results revealed that attachment security was associated with higher levels of empathy, forgiveness, and guilt, but lower levels of jealousy. In addition, emotion regulation mediated the links attachment shared with both empathy and guilt, such that higher levels of attachment security were linked with greater levels of emotion regulation, which led to greater levels of empathy and guilt....