Insecure Attachment, Poor Self-Regulation, and Weak Empathy as Developmental Antecedents to Delinquency when Mediated by Antisocial Cognition

A base model was tested composed of insecure attachment at age 3 years, poor emotional and behavioral self-regulation at age 5 years, and weak empathy at age 9 years predicted delinquency at age 15 years with and without the intervening influence of two dimensions of antisocial cognition: moral neutralization and cognitive impulsivity, both of which were assessed at age 15 years. Participants were 1,699 youth (867 boys, 832 girls) from the Future of Families Child Wellbeing Study (FFCWS). While the base model did not predict delinquency, there was a significant indirect effect when additional mediators, moral neutralization and cognitive impulsivity, intervened between weak empathy and self-reported delinquency. This suggests that the attachment → self-regulation → empathy sequence may be a developmental pathway that moral neutralization and cognitive impulsivity share in common, expanding upon previous research which has shown that these two dimensions of antisocial cognition have divergent developmental origins.