Exploring the unspoken: Maternal implicit attitudes and mother-child emotional availability

The quality of the mother-child bond is vital to children's socioemotional development. A mother's attitude toward her child might be especially important in this regard; however, assessing such attitudes is difficult given strong reporting biases in close relationships and especially mother-child relationships. Implicit attitudes-thought to reflect the summary of evaluative associations developed through personal experiences with a (close) other-may be one way to circumvent such biases. We investigated the link between mothers' implicit attitudes about her child and the quality of the mother-child bond, indexed by mothers' and their child's behavior during a dyadic interaction. Child sex (male/female) was also evaluated as the dynamics of mother-son and mother-daughter dyads can differ. Between 2012 and 2015, mother-child dyads (N = 217) were recruited from a longitudinal study; dyads were videotaped during a free-play interaction, and their behavior was coded for emotional availability (EA). Mothers completed the MyChild Implicit Association Test indexing their implicit attitudes toward their child. Maternal implicit attitudes were positively associated with mothers' EA, an effect driven by mother-son dyads; these effects held when controlling for child behavior, supporting the unique role of implicit attitudes in guiding mothers' EA. Regarding the child's EA (responsivity, inclusion), mother-son and mother-daughter dyads showed the opposite pattern: Maternal implicit attitudes were positively associated with sons' EA but negatively associated with daughters' EA. These findings highlight the importance of implicit attitudes in the mother-child relationship and are among the few to link implicit attitudes to the attitude target's behavior. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).