The Role of Adolescents’ Parental Attachment Quality on the Relationship Between Self-Esteem and Social Anxiety

Abstract

There is limited availability of prevention and effective treatment programmes for adolescent social anxiety disorder. This research therefore focuses on researching self-esteem and parental attachment quality as contributors to the development and persistence of social anxiety in adolescents. Based on the Cognitive Model of Social Phobia, and the Attachment Theory, this study examined the expected relationship between self-esteem and social anxiety and explored the moderation role of adolescents’ parental attachment quality on this relationship. To examine this, 88 Dutch-speaking adolescents (35 boys, Mage = 15.33, range 11-18 years) filled in three self-reports to measure self-esteem, social anxiety, and adolescents’ parental attachment quality (i.e., the RSES, SAS-A, and IPPA). Through a PROCESS moderation analysis, it is found that self-esteem strongly and negatively associates with social anxiety, but that adolescents’ parental attachment quality does not significantly moderate the relationship between self-esteem and social anxiety. These findings suggest that higher self-esteem is associated with lower social anxiety, which confirms previous research and therefore strengthens the validity and generalisability of these results. Contrary to expectations, the results show no moderating effect of adolescents’ parental attachment quality on this relationship. This may suggest that other factors play a larger role in determining this relationship. Future research should focus on increasing generalisability to clinical and diverse linguistic groups, studying the effect of attachment to mothers and fathers separately, considering adolescents’ age-dependent effects of the parent-child attachment quality, and identifying other potential moderators, such as attachment to peers.