Although children’s security in the context of the interparental relationship has been identified as a key explanatory mechanism in pathways between family discord and child psychopathology, little is known about the inner workings of emotional security as a goal system. Accordingly, the objective of this paper is to describe how our reformulation of emotional security theory (EST-R) within an ethological and evolutionary framework may advance the characterization of the architecture and operation of emotional security and, in the process, cultivate sustainable growing points in developmental psychopathology. The first section of the paper describes how children’s security in the interparental relationship is organized around a distinctive behavioral system designed to defend against interpersonal threat. Building on this evolutionary foundation for emotional security, the paper offers an innovative taxonomy for identifying qualitatively different ways children try to preserve their security and its innovative implications for more precisely informing understanding of the mechanisms in pathways between family and developmental precursors and children’s trajectories of mental health. In the final section, the paper highlights the potential of EST-R to stimulate new generations of research on understanding how children defend against social threats in ecologies beyond the interparental dyad, including both familial and extrafamilial settings.

Emotional security theory was introduced over two decades ago to explain how and why children exposed to interparental and family conflict are at greater risk for developing psychopathology. Using developmental psychopathology as an evaluative lens, this chapter provides a review of the progress, challenges, and future directions in testing EST. After characterizing the distinctive properties of the goal system of emotional security in relation to developmental constructs outlined in other approaches, we review empirical evidence supporting the hypothesis that emotional insecurity is a unique and robust mediator of multiple pathways involving family adversity and children's adjustment problems. Next, the chapter addresses the family, contextual, developmental sources underlying the multiplicity of pathways among family discord, emotional insecurity, and children's psychological functioning. Throughout the chapter, we distinguish between two formulations of EST to adequately characterize the significant developments in the history of the theory. Finally, we conclude by outlining scientific and clinical growing points for EST.

We examined the joint role of constructive and destructive interparental conflict in predicting children’s emotional insecurity and psychological problems. In Study 1, 250 early adolescents (M = 12.6 years) and their primary caregivers completed assessments of family and child functioning. In Study 2, 201 mothers and their two-year old children participated in a multi-method, longitudinal design with three annual measurement occasions. Findings from structural equation modeling in both studies revealed that children’s emotional insecurity in the interparental relationship mediated associations between destructive interparental conflict and children’s psychological problems even after including constructive conflict and family and child covariates as predictors. Conversely, emotional insecurity was not a mediator of associations between constructive interparental conflict and children’s psychological problems when destructive interparental conflict was specified as a risk factor in the analyses. The results are consistent with the evolutionary reformulation of emotional security theory and the resulting primacy ascribed to destructive interparental conflict in accounting for individual differences in children’s emotional insecurity and its pathogenic implications (Davies & Sturge-Apple, 2007).

This multi-study paper examined the relative strength of mediational pathways involving hostile, disengaged, and uncooperative forms of interparental conflict, children’s emotional insecurity, and their externalizing problems across two longitudinal studies. Participants in Study 1 consisted of 243 preschool children (M age = 4.60 years) and their parents, whereas Study 2 consisted of 263 adolescents (M age = 12.62 years) and their parents. Both studies utilized multi-method, multi-informant assessment batteries within a longitudinal design with three measurement occasions. Across both studies, lagged, autoregressive tests of the mediational paths revealed that interparental hostility was a significantly stronger predictor of the prospective cascade of children’s insecurity and externalizing problems than interparental disengagement and low levels of interparental cooperation. Findings further indicated that interparental disengagement was a stronger predictor of the insecurity pathway than was low interparental cooperation for the sample of adolescents in Study 2. Results are discussed in relation to how they inform and advance developmental models of family risk.

Repeated exposure to interparental conflict increases children's vulnerability to a range of psychological problems by undermining their emotional security in the relationship between parents. However, emotional security theory in its original form lacks the depth and precision to guide hypotheses regarding individual differences in the nature, precursors, and sequelae of children's emotional security. In this article, we summarize a reformulated version of the theory to address this gap. Specifically, we focus on the ways in which the reformulated theory can elucidate: (a) the nature and developmental implications of systematically characterizing the inner workings of emotional security as a goal system, (b) the relative potency of family characteristics as sources of individual differences in children's emotional security, and (c) processes associated with developmental cascades that account for how and why emotional insecurity is linked to a range of psychological problems.