ATTACHMENT RECOGNITION IN SCHOOL-AGE CHILDREN: A MULTIMODAL APPROACH BASED ON LANGUAGE AND PARALANGUAGE ANALYSIS

Attachment is the psychological construct accounting for whether parents address effectively physical and emotional needs of their children or not. The approach proposed in this work recognizes whether a child is secure or insecure, the two major attachment conditions an individual can belong to. The approach is based on the combination of language and paralanguage, what children say and how they say it. The experiments involved 104 children of age between 5 and 9 that were recorded while undergoing the Manchester Attachment Story Task, one of the main psychometric instruments child psychiatrists use to assess the attachment condition of children. The results show that it is possible to achieve an accuracy of up 74.6% (F1 Score 66.7%), meaning that the approach correctly identifies the attachment condition of a child three times out of four, on average.