Risk factors for emotional- behavioral problems in residential-care and late-adopted adolescents: a pilot study with narrative interviews for attachment and alexithymia

Adolescents in residential-care and late-adopted ones resulted high-risk to emotional-behavioural problems, showing vulnerability to risk-factors as insecure/disorganized attachments and difficulties in emotional regulation, such alexithymia. Moreover, findings suggested higher risk for residential adolescents. However, there are no studies that investigated jointly the role of attachment and alexithymia with respect to emotional-behavioural problems displayed by adolescents in those high-risk groups, as we aim to do in a larger pilot study with a multi-method approach. In this preliminary report, we subsampled 20 adolescents (aged 13-17, M = 14.95, SD = 1.4; 80% boys) with traumatic past experiences, dividing 10 late-adoptees and 10 residential-care, equalling for age and gender. We used the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL 6-18) to assess emotional-behavioral problems; the Friends & Family Interview (FFI) to assess attachment representations, in terms of classifications and scales; the Toronto Structured Interview for Alexithymia (TSIA) to detect the levels of alexithymia. U-Mann Whitney confirmed that residential showed higher levels of emotional-behavioral problems - especially externalizing ones (p = .03) - less security (p = .003) and more avoidance (p = .03) in attachment and higher levels of alexithymia (p = .009) than adoptees. In the total group, correlations were found between psychopathology, less security in attachment and higher alexithymia, which also showed associations each other (p =.029). However, a stepwise regression only accounted the poor attachment’ security as predictor of 29.9% of the variance in externalizing problems (adjusted-R2 = .255, p = .019). Larger samples are needed, but both variables seem correlated to high-risk adolescent’s adjustment: in particular, attachment security resulted a key-feature to promote especially in residential-care contexts, where the adolescents seem more vulnerable than in adoptive families.