The effectiveness of attachment based intervention using video feedback method on decreasing negative representations and separation anxiety of children

With regard to the importance of attachment in developing separation anxiety, the purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of attachment based intervention via video feedback on decreasing negative representations and separation anxiety problems in preschool children. The research method was semi experimental with pretest-posttest and follow up. For this, 21 mother-child dyads (11 dyads in experimental and 10 dyads in control group) were selected from 2 child counseling centers based on including criteria. The experimental group received 8 to 10 individual attachment based intervention sessions and the control group received the other relation based intervention for comparison of their effectiveness. The participants were assessed using maternal behavior Q-SORT, MacArthur story stems and child psychopathological symptoms inventory in pretest, post-test and 3 months interval follow up. The findings revealed the effectiveness of attachment-based intervention on increasing maternal sensitivity, decreasing negative representations of child and also separation anxiety symptoms in children of experimental group. The mean scores of experimental group in comparison to witness group have significantly decreased in all variables. Considering this results, it seems attachment-based intervention could increas maternal sensitivity and this change with decreasing negative representation of child via recovering interactions have a positive effect on decreasing separation anxiety problems of children.