9, 10 Attachment Flashcards
Define attachment.
A relatively enduring emotional bond with another person that forms in response to exposure, interaction, and familiarity.
Characteristics: person-specific, persistent, proximity-seeking, separation protest. (*= not w/ abusive parents.)
Mentalizing
Promotes self-expression, empathy.
Ability to see oneself from the outside and others from the inside.
Perceive, reflect on and understand intention/behavior of self and others.
Core functions of attachment
Protection/survival: safe haven, secure base.
Regulation of emotional distress/physiological arousal.
Develop sense of self: role of mirroring.
Foundation for mentalizing.
Bowlby - attachment loss.
Humans designed by natural selection to resist prolonged separation/giving up primary attachment figures.
Edward Tronick Still-Face Experiment
Mentalizing. Mirroring.
Attachment Research
Relationships of attachment = context for development.
Preverbal experience = core of developing self.
Stance of self toward experience - predicts attachment security better than the facts of personal hx.
Bowlby on Attachment Loss
Creates anxiety and despair; we are designed to resist prolonged separation/giving up of primary attachment figures.
Under-recognized Loss
Child - abortion, Spouse - divorce, Perinatal losses, Infertility, Homeland/culture, Loss of physical abilities
Primary predictors of depression in adults
Heredity, Severe situational stress, Early attachment trauma
Bowlby’s Hypotheses on Attachment Styles
Behavioral patterns of seeking care and expressing emotions from from mother’s response to child.
Preferred patterns develop because child felt security.
The Strange Situation
Mary Ainsworth Experiment
Main & Solomon
Fourth attachment style - Disorganized (“Disoriented”)
Low anxiety, Low attachment
Avoidant
High anxiety, Low attachment
Disorganized
Low anxiety, High attachment
Secure
High anxiety, High attachment
Anxious-Ambivalent
Anxious ambivalent
inconsistently available caregiver, role reversals, threatened abandonment.
Child lacks trust in attachment figures, fears being alone, jealous/possessive adult.
AAI Findings: Preoccupied with details of past, overwhelmed.
Avoidant
Cold/neglectful/insensitive caregivers, abusive/rigid.
Child suppressed anger at parent, shut down.
Adult avoids intimacy, overachieve.
AAI Findings: Idealizes early relationships, describes painful experiences in detached or contradictory manner, over-regulates feelings.
Disorganized
Caregivers generate fear, abusive/dissociated, unintegrated caregiving.
Child overwhelming emotional states, dissociates mentally from parent.
Adult rapidly shifts mental states, lack of security, self-hate, emptiness.
AAI Finding: Confused or incomplete statements, lapses.
Internalized “working models” of relating
Reflect’s child’s internal representations of the relationship, quality of child-caregiver interactions, capacity to mentalize.
Single most important factor in fostering mentalizing…
Secure attachment.
Insecure attachment/Indiscriminate attachment behavior
Infants reared in institutional settings, disrupted affective communication between parent and infant
Reorganization
18mo-6yo children reorganize attachment behaviors into controlling attachment behaviors TOWARD the parent, to maintain attention of caregiver
Mary Main
Individual’s model of attachment is observable in patterns of their narrative presentations.
