The Impact of Interparental Conflict on Children's Attention and Memory Performance

• Published date: 01 April 2021
• Author: Martina Zemp,Isabell Paetzold,Anne Milek
• Date: 01 April 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/fare.12481

M Z  I PUniversity of Mannheim

A MUniversity of Muenster

The Impact of Interparental Conict on Children’s

Attention and Memory Performance

Background: Previous research suggests that

exposure to interparental conict may affect

children’s attention and memory performance,

but few studies have examined this hypothesis

experimentally.

Objective: The goal of this study was to

address this gap by completing an experi-

mental approach using audiotaped couple

conict simulations.

Method: School classes of fth- and sixth-

graders were randomly assigned to listen to

one of the following three types of conversa-

tions: (a) an unresolved couple conict, (b) a

resolved couple conict, or (c) a neutral couple

conversation. Children’s attention and memory

performance were measured before and after

stimulus exposure by performance tasks and

their emotional insecurity was assessed by

self-report.

Results: Children’s emotional insecurity mod-

erated the impact of the simulated couple conict

University of Vienna, Department of Clinical and Health

Psychology, Renngasse 6-8, 1010 Vienna, Austria (mar-

tina.zemp@univie.ac.at).

© 2020 The Authors. Family Relations published by Wiley

Periodicals LLC on behalf of National Council on Family

Relations.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative

Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribu-

tion and reproduction in any medium, provided the original

work is properly cited.

Key Words: attention problems, cognitive functions, family

risk factors, emotional security, marital conict, schoolper-

formance.

on their memory performance but not on atten-

tion. At low levels of emotional insecurity, chil-

dren performed better in the memory task after

hearing the unresolved couple conict compared

with the control group.

Conclusion: Children’s responses to simulated

conicts differ by a child’s history of inter-

parental conict and conict characteristics,

such as whether arguments are resolved.

Implications: Consideration of the family back-

ground is warranted when studying or treating

child cognitive performance problems.

Considerable evidence supports the hypothesis

that exposure to destructive interparental con-

ict increases children’s risk for a wide array

of adjustment problems, such as externaliz-

ing and internalizing symptoms or impaired

social behavior (Cummings & Davies, 2002;

Grych & Fincham, 1990). According to the

emotional security theory (EST; Davies & Cum-

mings, 1994), maintaining a sense of security is

a pivotal precondition for children’s well-being

and healthy development. Consequently, chil-

dren’s reactivity to interparental conict is an

expression of perceived threat to their emotional

security in the family. EST holds that children

from high-conict homes likely develop high

levels of emotional insecurity over time, for

instance, loss in condence in parents’ abilities

to manage their difculties as a couple. Recently,

scholars have begun to discuss that emotional

insecurity may interfere with cognitive func-

tioning outside the home as well, for example,

Family Relations 70 (April 2021): 587–602587

DOI:10.1111/fare.12481

588 Family Relations

in school (Davies et al., 2006). Supporting this

hypothesis, children’s emotional insecurity was

identied as a primary intervening mechanism

in the longitudinal link between observational

ratings of interparental discord and children’s

school adjustment (Sturge-Apple et al., 2008).

Impact of Interparental Conict on Children’s

Cognitive Functions

The effects of interparental conict on chil-

dren is best understood by considering the

child’s perception. The cognitive–contextual

model (Grych & Fincham, 1990) places par-

ticular emphasis on children’s appraisals of

interparental conict. Hence, children do not

merely react to conict per se but to its mean-

ing for them. Two dimensions of appraisals,

perceived threat and self-blaming attributions,

have emerged as important mediators in the

link between interparental conict and child

problems (Grych et al., 2003).

Although preserving psychological (emo-

tional and cognitive) integrity in the threatening

context of interparental conict may initially

serve an adaptive function for children, it may

deteriorate their neurocognitive functioning

in the long term through (a) allostatic load

(McEwen, 1998) and (b) resource allocation

pathways (Davies et al., 2006). Within the

allostasis conception, achieving homeostasis

(allostasis) in the face of chronic stress might

erode a child’s functioning by inicting wear

and tear (allostatic load) on psychophysiologi-

cal systems (McEwen, 1998). Consistent with

this hypothesis, past research has indicated

that children’s prolonged reactivity to repeated

interparental conict disturbed various body

systems (e.g., hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal

[HPA] axis, respiratory sinus arrhythmia),

which partially explained the effects on cog-

nitive functions (Hinnant et al., 2013; Martin

et al., 2017).

Impaired cognitive performance in relation

to child exposure to interparental conict also

can be explained by resource allocation mod-

els of cognitive neuroscience indicating that

human cognitive processing is limited by a

central pool of resources (Kahneman, 1973). If

too many distracting stimuli require resources,

cognitive performance decreases (Schneider &

Fisk, 1982). Adapted to the EST framework,

threats of emotional security in the context of

destructive interparental conict may deplete

the reservoir of the cognitive resources children

need to pursue other signicant tasks because

heightened reactivity associated with emo-

tional insecurity requires considerable effort to

regulate attention, affect, and behavior (Davies

et al., 2006). Thus, the energy required to regain

security can occur at the cost of children’s

sound neuropsychological functioning, includ-

ing attention (Davies et al., 2008) or memory

performance (O’Brien & Chin, 1998).

Analog Procedures to Examine the Effects

of Interparental Conict

One of the most rigorous means to examine allo-

cation of cognitive resources in the context of

interparental conict is by experimental studies

using analog designs. Analog procedures involv-

ing child exposure to audio- or videotaped sim-

ulations of couple conicts are particularly pow-

erful in investigating causality of links between

specic conict dimensions and child reactivity

(Cummings, 1995). A number of studies have

demonstrated the ecological validity of present-

ing visual or acoustic conict scenarios in the lab

or in the classroom setting (e.g., Goeke-Morey

et al., 2003; Koss et al., 2011). It was shown that

these experimental stimuli simulated by actors

induce a reactivity pattern in children that is

similar to real interparental conicts in the home

(Cummings et al., 2007; Davies et al., 1999).

Further, children’s emotional, cognitive, behav-

ioral, and physiological responses to simulated

conict are indicative of their long-term devel-

opmental outcomes (Rhoades, 2008).

This line of experimental research has

revealed two important ndings: First, chil-

dren’s responses to experimental conict vary

depending on the specic form of conict

expression that is displayed. Conict res-

olution emerged as a critical dimension to

determine how children perceive and react

to couple interactions (Zemp, Bodenmann,

Backes et al., 2016). Analog studies reported

that unresolved conict stimuli elicited more

distress and more negative appraisals in children

than resolved conicts or neutral conversations

(Goeke-Morey et al., 2007; Shifett-Simpson

& Cummings, 1996). Children benet from

any progress toward resolution; that is, dis-

tress also is reduced when conicts are only

partially resolved (Cummings et al., 1991).

Specically, children’s negative responses

to unresolved videotaped conict scenarios