Previous research suggests that insecurely attached individuals may, in some cases, have a higher risk of developing negative health symptoms than securely attached ones. We conducted two studies (Study 1, n = 191; Study 2, n = 216) aimed at broadening this finding. We analysed the relationships between two distinct dimensions of insecure attachment (anxious and avoidant) and several classes of negative physical and mental health symptoms. Additionally, we placed emotion regulation difficulties in the role of potential mediator of these relationships. Our results indicated that both anxious and avoidant attachment were positively related to health symptoms on the level of bivariate correlations. However, when both of them were controlled within one mediation model, it was only attachment anxiety, and not attachment avoidance, that proved to be a significant, positive predictor of most health symptom classes: vegetative, agoraphobic, social phobia symptoms and global symptom severity index (which reflects a broad range of negative health symptoms). These relationships were indeed mediated by emotion regulation difficulties. Our results support the notion that (1) different dimensions of insecure attachment can have differential consequences for physical and mental health, and (2) emotion regulation can be one of the mechanisms that explain the links between attachment and health.

Social sciences researchers emphasize that new technologies can overcome the limitations of small and homogenous samples. In research on early language development, which often uses parental reports, taking the testing online might be particularly compelling. Due to logistical limitations, previous studies on bilingual children have explored the language development trajectories in general (e.g., by including few and largely set apart timepoints), or focused on small, homogeneous samples. The present study protocol presents a new, on-going study which uses new technologies to collect longitudinal data continuously from parents of multilingual, bilingual, and monolingual children. Our primary aim is to establish the developmental trajectories in Polish-British English and Polish-Norwegian bilingual children and Polish monolingual children aged 0–3 years with the use of mobile and web-based applications. These tools allow parents to report their children’s language development as it progresses, and allow us to characterize children’s performance in each language (the age of reaching particular language milestones). The project’s novelty rests on its use of mobile technologies to characterize the bilingual and monolingual developmental trajectory from the very first words to broader vocabulary and multiword combinations.

Theory of mind (ToM) is crucial for social interactions. Previous research has indicated that deaf and hard-of-hearing children born into hearing families (DoH) are at risk of delayed ToM development. However, it is unclear whether this is the case for DoH children who receive cochlear implants (CIs) before and around the second year of life. The present study aimed to investigate false belief understanding (FBU) in DoH children with CIs. The relationships between false belief task (FBT) performance, sentence comprehension, age at implantation, duration of CI use, and Speech Recognition Threshold were explored. A total of 94 children with typical levels of hearing (TH) and 45 DoH children (age range: 3–8), who received their first CI between 6 and 27 months of age, were tested on the FBT and a sentence comprehension test. Results showed that 4- and 5-year-old children with CIs performed significantly worse than their peers with TH on the FBT; 6- to 8-year-old children with CIs performed similarly to age-matched children with TH. Age at implantation and duration of CI use were correlated with sentence comprehension but not with the FBT. The results indicated that FBU was delayed until the age of 6 years in most of children with CIs.

Previous studies have suggested that parents may support the development of theory of mind (ToM) in their child by talking about mental states (mental state talk; MST). However, MST has not been sufficiently explored in deaf children with cochlear implants (CIs). This study investigated ToM and availability of parental MST in deaf children with CIs (n = 39, Mage = 62.92, SD = 15.23) in comparison with their peers with typical hearing (TH; n = 52, Mage = 52.48, SD = 1.07). MST was measured during shared storybook reading. Parents’ narratives were coded for cognitive, emotional, literal, and non-mental references. ToM was measured with a parental questionnaire. Children with CIs had lower ToM scores than their peers with TH, and their parents used more literal references during shared storybook reading. There were no significant differences in the frequencies of cognitive and emotional references between groups. Parental emotional references contributed positively to children’s ToM scores when controlling for the child’s age and receptive grammar only in the CI group. These results indicated some distinctive features in parents of deaf children with CIs’ MST and highlighted the role of MST in the development of ToM abilities in this group.

Theory of mind (ToM) is the mental capacity that allows us to represent the mental states (beliefs, desires, emotions) of other people, infer them from situational cues, and predict their behavior. According to the standard view, the most important milestone in ToM development -the ability to pass the false belief test (FBT) -emerges around four years of age. FBT requires one to understand that the beliefs of others are independent from reality and from one's own beliefs, and that their behavior can be predicted by their mental states. Previous research has indicated that deaf and hard-of-hearing children born into hearing families (DoH) are at risk of delayed ToM development due to restricted social interactions. However, these findings are unclear for DoH children who receive cochlear implants (CIs) and whose hearing is partially restored. In this review, we summarize research on the development of ToM in DoH children with cochlear implants (CIs). We describe how language (vocabulary and syntax) influences ToM. Finally, we discuss the nature of social interactions that facilitate ToM development in children with typical hearing as well as in DoH children with CIs.