Attachment Flashcards
What is attachment?
- an emotional bond with a specific person that is enduring across space and time
What is the behaviourist view of attachment?
- pleasure derived from food is the basis of mother-infant bond
What did Harry Harlow discover with his monkey surrogates experiment?
- monkeys spent most of their time on the cloth mother
- evidence that infants needed comfort provided by the cloth mother
- it is not just about food
Who is John Bowlby?
- psychoanalyst who studied intense emotional distress of children orphaned during WWII
What did Bowlby recognize?
- distress due to separation from parents and not having emotional needs met
- behaviours observed (crying, clinging, searching) are adaptive responses to separation from an attachment figure
What is Bowlby’s attachment theory?
- children are biologically predisposed to develop attachment to caregivers as a means of increasing chances of their survival
- development and quality of child’s attachments are highly dependent on their experiences with caregivers
What is the attachment system?
- biologically based
- not always on
- distress from a threat or separation from caregiver motivates children to seek proximity to a caregiver
What happens when the attachment system is inactive?
- caregiver is close
- life is good
What happens to make the attachment system active?
- separated from caregiver
- bad event
What happens when the attachment system is active?
- seek proximity
What are the features of the attachment system?
- proximity maintenance and seeking
- separation distress
- safe haven
- secure base
What is proximity maintenance and seeking?
- children are biologically motivated to stay close to caregiver
What is separation distress?
- children become distressed when separated from caregiver
- activates attachment system, motivating child to seek proximity to caregiver
What is safe haven?
- caregiver provides comfort and a sense of safety when child feels distressed
- caregiver helps manage arousal through co regulation
- once proximity and reassurance have been achieved, attachment system deactivates
What is secure base?
- caregiver provides child with a sense of security from which they can explore the environment
- cannot explore the environment if attachment system is activated
What did Mary Ainsworth do?
- provided empirical evidence of attachment theory by developing the strange situation procedure
What is the strange situation procedure?
- paradigm designed to systematically assess children’s attachment to a specific caregiver
- caregiver with child, then stranger, then caregiver leaves room
- reaction to caregiver coming back is most important to assessing attachment
What are the attachment styles?
- secure
- avoidant
- resistant
- disorganized
What is the secure style?
- 60%
- child uses the parent as secure base, is distressed at separation, seeks the parent at reunion and is easily soothed
What is the avoidant style?
- 15%
- readily separates to explore, avoids or ignores the parent when they return after separation, and has no preference for the parent to the stranger