Attachment Flashcards
Harlow’s monkeys
Disproved the ‘secondary drive’ theory of love
Found that children’s emotional bond with their parents is not just a stimulus response to food but based on comfort
Attachment behavioural system
Behaviours that are activated under conditions of threat
Crying, clinging, smiling, cuddling etc
What can the threat be?
Real or potential
Being alone, strangers, pain, hunger
Attachment vs exploration see saw
Balanced on the question am I under threat right now?
If the infant is under threat?
Attachment system activated
Find their caregiver
If the infant is not under threat?
They will explore and play
Strange situation
Exposes children to threat in a lab and assess how they seek support
7 episodes consisting of a stranger, separations and reunions
Reunion shows us about the attachment
What are the attachment types?
Secure
Insecure avoidant/ anxious avoidant
Insecure resistant/ anxious ambivalent
Secure attachment
Positive view of self and others Belief in lovability of self Belief that others are trustworthy Social world is a safe place Open and engaged interaction with attachment figures Explore freely when feeling safe
What percentage of infants are classed as secure?
50-60%
Insecure avoidant attachment
Caregivers tend to be rejecting
Infants learn to suppress negative emotion
Best response is to be self reliant
Being good means not becoming upset - they still might really need the caregiver
Positive view of self
Negative view of others (untrustworthy)
Physically and emotionally avoid their attachment figure
Deny the importance of caregiver relationship
What percentage of infants are insecure avoidant?
20-25%
Insecure resistant
Caregiver is inconsistent
Best outcomes result from hyper activating negative affect
Difficult to soothe
Preoccupation with availability of caregiver
Negative view of self
Angry with others but also desire to please others
Clingy and dependent in order to gain a caring response
What percentage of infants are insecure resistant?
10-15%
Insecure attachment isn’t necessarily problematic, why?
It’s adaptive
It’s an organised strategy (it works in the given situation)
Disorganised attachment
When caregiver is frightening or frightened themselves
Presents impossible conundrum for child (biologically programmed source of care is also a source of threat)
Inconsistent or contradictory behaviours in young children
Approaching and avoiding at the same time
Who found disorganised attachment?
Main & Soloman (1990)
How many infants are classified as disorganised attachment?
10-25%
Up to 60% in high risk samples
Secure attachment to parents predicts…
Academic outcomes
Insecure toddlers tend to have ____ attention spans and _____ on cognitive tasks than secure toddlers
Shorter
Perform worse
Secure infants are more engaged in _____
Joint reading
Secure attachment infants develop _____ skills
Better pre-reading
Hazan & Shaver (1987)
Translated Ainsworth’s patterns of infant attachment into adult relationships
Newspaper advertised love quiz
Concluded that adult romantic love is an attachment process with similar observable difference as the strange situation
Experiences in close relationships scales (ECR)
Measures attachment along two dimensions of insecurity:
Avoidance of emotional intimacy (18 items)
Anxiety about abandonment (18 items)
Bartholomew and Horowitz (1991)
Split 3 styles into 4
Secure
Preoccupied (ambivalent/resistant)
Dismissing avoidant (avoid intimacy because they don’t need it)
Fearful avoidant (avoid intimacy because they’re scared)
Fraley & Shaver (airport study)
Phase 1 - observed couples leaving each other in an airport and coded these behaviours
Phase 2 - couples approached in the airport and asked to complete questionnaire about feelings about any forthcoming separation
After completion - another researcher took notes on their behaviours before departure
109 couples observed (57% separating, 43% flying together)
Fraley and Shaver (airport study) results
Separating couples (threat condition) exhibited more contact seeking, contact maintenance, avoidance, sexuality and sadness (women only) behaviours than non-separating couples
Individual differences in the airport study
- Highly avoidant people were less likely to maintain proximity and less likely to provide care and support
Women were less likely to see support - Highly anxious women reported more distress
Highly anxious men were less likely to maintain contact
Conclusions from the airport study
Functional dynamics of attachment are similar in adult romantic relationships to child-parent ones
Intra-personal correlates and consequences of attachment avoidance/anxiety
Self-esteem Mental health Coping Perceived social support Physical health Pain tolerance Emotion regulation
Inter-personal correlates and consequences of attachment avoidance/anxiety
Caregiving Parenting Empathy Prosocial behaviour Prejudice/discrimination
Because we have multiple attachment relationships in our network, we have multiple attachment…
Schema
Baldwin et al 1996
Our general attachment style is likely to be based on a whole range of experiences, and the cognitive availability and accessibility of these experiences
Collins and Read (1994)
Global/dispositional style at the top
Relationship specific styles at the bottom
Hierarchical arrangement
Why is the fact that we have different relationship schema extremely useful for researchers?
Because they can use priming paradigms
Can be relationship specific or general
Rowe & Carnelley (2003)
Effects of primed attachment styles on recall of positive and negative attachment word targets
Those primed with security remembered more positive words than those primed with the insecure styles
Carnelley and Rowe (2007)
Explored the potential for security priming to improve relationship expectations, self views, and attachment anxiety
Internal working models
Schema
Beliefs about the self and others
Internal working models are templates based on what?
A history of received caregiving experiences
Left column in Bartholomew’s model
Positive view of self
Right column in Bartholomew’s model
Negative view of self
Top row of Bartholomew’s model
Negative view of others
Bottom row of Bartholomew’s model
Positive view of others
Attachment security was _____ associated with _____
Positively
Self-esteem
Attachment anxiety was ____ associated with ______
Negatively
Self-esteem
Schmitt and Alik (2005) cross cultural study
Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale in 53 nations
49 of them found negative association between attachment anxiety and self-esteem
18 of them found negative correlation between avoidance and self-esteem
Pietromonaco & Barrett (1997) self-evaluation study
College student completed daily self-evaluations for interactions lasting over 10 minutes
Rated how worthy they felt during the interaction
Anxious students reported more negative self-evaluations after everyday interactions
Even after non-conflictual ones
Avoidant students fell between secure and anxious
Defensive self-enhancement
A person has been forced to cope with life’s difficulties without adequate mental representations of attachment security
Struggle to maintain a sense of self-worth
This is the fate of avoidant individuals
Reluctance to rely on other people encourages them to inflate their positive self-view and deny or suppress negative information about themselves
Avoidant attachment is associated with
Self-enhancement
Poor self-clarity
Mikulincer (1998) self-enhancement under threat
Used a pretend cognitive task
Some ppts told they have failed it, and some given neutral feedback
Also, some are told the electrodes are lie detectors and some told they measure muscle activity
Then asked to rate adjectives (positive and negative) on how well they describe themselves
Then given surprise memory test for the adjectives
Mikulincer (1998) self-enhancement under threat results
Anxious ppts endorsed less positive and more negative traits overall
In the failure feedback condition, anxious individuals…
Endorsed more negative traits as self-attributes
Remembered more negative words
Showed self-defeatism/helplessness
In the failure feedback condition, avoidant individuals…
Endorsed more positive traits as self-attributes
Recalled greater % positive traits
Shows self-reliance
In the failure condition, secure individuals…
Failure didn’t make a difference to them
Endorsed more positive and negative traits
No difference in recall
In the lie detector and failure condition, avoidant individuals…
No longer self-regulated
Shows that avoidant individuals will act as if they have high self-esteem, but underneath it they might actually have negative self-views
Sustaining self-related vulnerabilities
Hopeless cognitive style
Patterns of feedback seeking
Hopeless cognitive style
Self-defeating attributional style
Reinforces self-blame, hopelessness, passivity, helplessness
Perceived lack of ability needed to alter negative experiences
Risk factor for depression
Studies have found that attachment anxiety is associated with helpless cognitive style in relation to
Academic and interpersonal problems or failures to lack of ability
What are the findings for avoidant attachment style in terms of helpless cognitive style
Unclear
Could be due to measurement
Patterns of feedback seeking
We seek feedback to validate our self-knowledge
This is both good and bad
Brennan and Morris (1997) patterns of feedback seeking
Asked ppts to imagine their romantic partner being asked questions about them
Asked to rate the extent to which they would prefer the questions to evoke positive or negative information
Brennan and Morris (1997) patterns of feedback seeking results
Insecure people (anxious or avoidant), were more likely to prefer negative feedback than secure Negative views of self cause insecure individuals to keep on seeking confirmatory negative information
Attachment and view of others - others generally
Experiences with attachment figures become internalised into WMs of others
Models can be generalised across relationships
We can treat new relationship partners similarly to how we have experienced past relationships
Attachment and view of others - others generally, secure
Other people generally well intentioned providers of protection, comfort and security
Forgiving and positive explanation of others’ behaviour
Attachment and view of others - others generally, anxious
More likely to believe that…
Others are difficult to understand
They themselves have little control over their lives
Attachment and view of others - others generally, avoidant
Less likely to believe that..
Human beings are altruistic
People are willing to stand up for their beliefs
More likely to believe…
That people are able to control their lives
Insecure people tend to lack ______ and _____ of others
Esteem for
Acceptance
Insecure people have doubts of people’s _____
Trustworthiness
Therefore disrespectful towards partners
Meyer, Pilkonis, and Beevers (2004) face perception
Participants saw 10 neutral faces
Rated them for like/dislike. attractive/unattractive, friendly/unfriendly, good-natured/mean-spirited
Meyer, Pilkonis, and Beevers (2004) face perception results
Avoidance was associated with seeing more negative traits in the faces
Anxious was associated with seeing less positive traits in the faces
Insecure attachment makes us see things that aren’t there
Attachment and view of others - parents
Newspaper survey of community ppts and student sample
Secure participants described parents as respectful, responsive, caring etc
Avoidant community ppts described parents in more negative terms
Avoidant students described parents as more positive
Why is there a discrepancy between the student ppts and the community ppts?
When you are young you idealised your parents as a way of evading distressing memories
Maturity and distance from parents allows older adults to acknowledge the less positive aspects (Hazan and Shaver, 1987)
Collins and Feeney (2004) support for partner
Couples were informed that one member would have to perform an stressful task
Videoed to code for supportive behaviours
Then separated and non-speech making partner had to copy either a clearly supportive or ambiguously supportive note
Speech giver then rated supportiveness of note and supportiveness of partner before
Collins and Feeney (2004) support for partner - results
Insecure ppts rated ambiguous notes as less supportive, more upsetting and more negative than secure
Insecure ppts rated their partner’s behaviour before as less supportive than the researchers did
(Insecure ppts re-construed the previous behaviour due to the activation of the attachment related worries)
Secure ppts did not do this
Baldwin et al (1993) lexical decision task
Ppts read sentences with either an attachment context or a non-attachment context
Target strings of letter depicted either positive, negative or neutral partner behaviours, or non-words
Baldwin et al (1993) lexical decision task - results
Secure ppts had shorter RTs to words naming positive behaviours within an interpersonal context than to negative words
Insecurely attached ppts had faster RTs when responding to negative words than to positive words
Mikulincer & Shaver - control systems, what they looked at
Looked at…
The activation of attachment system and resultant primary strategy of proximity seeking
Consequences of proximity seeking - helpful or not?
Secondary strategies that can be used if the primary strategy fails
Broaden-and-build cycle of security
When attachment figures are appraised as available and responsive, individuals are able to manage their distress and recover from threat
Repeated experiences lead to positive working models of self and others
Secure base script
Procedural knowledge on how to deal with stress
What constitutes proximity seeking in adulthood?
Attachment system is activated pre-consciously
Conscious thoughts of seeking proximity, possible actions in that direction
What are emotions?
Functional, organised systems of evaluative thoughts and action tendencies
Supported by physiological tendencies
What are emotions generated by?
Appraisal of internal and external events in relation to goals and concerns
Shaver, Schwartz, Kirson & O’Connor (1987) emotion regulation model (ERM)
Facial expressions
Underlying physiology
Appraisal
Notable change or event in the internal or external world
Facial expressions
We tend to mimic facial expressions that we see
Kirkpatrick et al - underlying physiology
Women’s physiological responses to stressful events either in the presence or absence of their romantic partner
Attachment anxiety is associated with what appraisals…
Distress-intensifying appraisals
Threats are seen as extreme and coping resources as deficient
Attachment security is associated with what appraisals…
Ego-resiliency
Perceived coping resources
Positive expectations regarding the regulation of negative moods
Greater confidence in one’s ability to solve life problems
Optimistic and hopeful attitudes towards life
Hardier, more stress-resistant attitudes
Distress-aleviating appraisals
Meredith, Strong and Feeney (2005) appraisal
Cognitive appraisal of pain is critical to the experience of pain (physiological signal vs emotional response to it)
Secures found pain less threatening than dismissing or fearful
Secures catastrophised less than fearful, preoccupied and dismissing
Meredith, Strong and Feeney (2005) appraisal
Cognitive appraisal of pain is critical to the experience of pain (physiological signal vs emotional response to it)
Secures found pain less threatening than dismissing or fearful
Secures catastrophised less than fearful, preoccupied and dismissing
Appraisal in attachment avoidance
People’s coping appraisals are similar to those of secure people
For threat appraisal, avoidance is associated with appraising stressful events as highly threatening
Avoidant defences break down under cognitive load
Kirkpatrick et al - underlying physiology results
Secure women had milder physiological responses than avoidant or anxious in both conditions
Insecure women - stress responses were exacerbated by the presence of their romantic partner
Explanation for results of Kirkpatrick et al
Partner’s presence has no effect on secure women as they were able to regulate their emotions with or without the partner’s presence
Insecure women, their partner’s presence seemed to add to their distress as their partner is perceived to be overly critical or inadequately supportive in the past
Physiological responses - Diamond, Hicks and Otter-Henderson (2006)
74 cohabiting couples
ECR measured avoidance and anxiety
Skin conductance measured via electrodes on non-dominant hand
Ppts exposed to stressful tasks both attachment relevant and non-attachment relevant
Physiological responses - Diamond, Hicks and Otter-Henderson (2006) - results
Avoidance was consistently related to greater SC reactivity (this was more pronounced among female ppts)
Avoidance was related to a steeper progressive increase in reactivity from the first thought through to the fifth task
Low avoidance - self-reported distress in the subtraction task were _____ correlated
Positively
In high avoidance, there was ______ between self-reported distress and skin conductance reactivity
No relationship
Sonnby-Borgstrom and Jonsson (2004) - facial expressions
Varied the exposure times of facial expression stimuli (happy and angry)
17ms, 56ms, 2350ms
Measured corrugator activity (frowning) and zygomaticus activity (smiling responses)
Dismissing-avoidant showed normal corrugator responses to angry faces at automatic level
Dismissing-avoidant subjects showed no corrugator response and increased zygomaticus response to angry face at cognitively controlled level
