Finally, children's narrative conflict themes significantly predicted both level of externalizing and total behavior problems, even after controlling for variance explained by gender and disorganized/controlling attachment behavior. ![]() Avoidant children also depicted fewer conflict themes than disorganized/controlling children. Results indicated that secure children depicted fewer conflict themes in their narratives than did disorganized/controlling children, produced more discipline themes than avoidant children, and had higher coherence scores than ambivalent children. Two years later, these children ( N = 109) completed the Narrative Story Stem Battery (Bretherton, Oppenheim, Buchsbaum, Emde, & The MacArthur Narrative Group, 1990), and teachers rated their level of behavior problems using the Social Behavior Questionnaire (Tremblay, Vitaro, Gagnon, Piché, & Royer, 1992). Children's attachment patterns with mother were assessed at age 6 ( N = 127) using the Main and Cassidy (1988) separation-reunion classification system. The objective of the present study was to examine associations between children's attachment behavior at early school-age, dimensions of narrative performance, and behavior problems as assessed in middle childhood. The investigation adds to the corpus of knowledge regarding disturbances in the self-system functioning of maltreated children and provides support for relations between representational models of self and other and the self-organizing function that these models exert on children's lives. Despite these differences in the nature of maternal and self-representations, physically and sexually abused children both were more controlling and less responsive to the examiner. Sexually abused children manifested more positive self-representations than neglected children. In examining the differential impact of maltreatment subtype differences on maternal and self-representations, physically abused children evidenced the most negative maternal representations they also had more negative self-representations than nonmaltreated children. Maltreated children also were more controlling with and less responsive to the examiner. ![]() The narratives of maltreated children contained more negative maternal representations and more negative self-representations than did the narratives of nonmaltreated children. The MacArthur Story Stem Battery was used to examine maternal and self-representations in neglected, physically abused, sexually abused, and nonmaltreated comparison preschool children.
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