Attachment Flashcards
WHAT IS ATTACHMENT?
Ainsworth and Bell (1970):
“an affectional tie that one person or animal forms between himself and another specific one – a tie that binds them together in space and endures over time”
4 Key characteristics: •Emotional intensity •Proximity maintenance •Specificity of attachment figure •Distress upon separation
THEORIES OF ATTACHMENT
- Learning accounts
- Food provision
- Psychoanalytic accounts
- Love object through association with oral need-gratification - Harlow
Harlow
•Harlow: contact comfort may be more powerful basis for attachment than food provision, - newborn monkey experiment - would never get ethical approval today
Ethological theory
(Bowlby)
- Imprinting in baby birds (Lorenz)
- Evolutionary advantage:proximity = safe and fed
- Biological adaptation of infant-mother attachment
- Nutrition
- Protection
- Secure base for exploration
Infants elicit parental care and protection:
- Smiling
- Crying
- Vocalising
- Moving
- Monotropy: “bias of a child to attach himself especially to one person” (Bowlby, 1969)
Bowlby in the fifties/sixties - emphasis on single caregiver - the mother, the housewife. - Bowlby - instructs father to bring home money, but children form attachment with fathers, siblings and peers
DEVELOPMENT OF ATTACHMENT
- Pre-attachment (0-6 weeks):
- Crying, smiling etc. elicits caregiver behaviour
- Preference for social stimuli (e.g., faces)
- ‘No discrimination’ - don’t mind who soothed by
- Attachment-in-the-making (*6 weeks - 6 months):
- Visual recognition (3m); across a room (5-6 m)
- More social behaviour (temperament)
- More discrimination between carer and strangers
- Scaffolding by caregivers vs. co-regulation?
- Importance of contingency - synchronicity, emotional
- Clear-cut attachment (6 months - 18 months)
- Specific figure - cues from them about strangers
- Secure base for exploration
- Separation distress
- Stranger anxiety (>around 7m)
- Coincides with locomotion and object permanence (when their caregivers are gone, it doesn’t mean they have left forever)
- Reciprocal relationships (around 18-24 months):
- Decline in separation anxiety
- Awareness of goals and plans of caregiver
- ‘Internal working model’ of self in relation to others
MEASURING ATTACHMENT
- ‘Quality’ or ‘security’ of attachment varies
- The ‘strange situation’ (Ainsworth, 1973)
- observations of mother-infant interaction in the home from birth to 54 weeks
- observations of attachment security in lab
CLASSIFICATION OF SECURITY
Secure - 65% - base for exploration, distressed or not by separation, on reunion
Ambivalent-Resistant - 20% - clingy, distressed by separation, on reuinuin anger and resitance to comforting
Insecure-Avoidant - 21% - happy to explore, not secure base, usualy not distressed by separation or on reunion
Disorganised 15% - display greatest amount of insecurity; in reunion show confuded bheaviours such as looking away qhile parent hilding them or daxed facial expressions
ANTECEDENTS TO ATTACHMENT
•Although a relationship construct, theorists have implicated mothers in individual differences found in attachment security.•In particular, accessibility and responsiveness of attachment figures are held to determine attachment security (Bowlby, 1973).
ANTECEDENTS TO ATTACHMENT: MATERNAL SENSITIVITY
Maternal Sensitivity
(Ainsworth et al., 1978).
(limited subjective assessment - in the more objective assessments using terms coding video image - they don’t show the same predictability - could be Ainsworth’s confirmation bias, or that she was feeling - hasn’t been replicated ( but I read that it predicted adult attachment style very accurately )
- Detailed, frequent, lengthy in-home observations in the first year of life.
- Narrative descriptions rated on 28 global scales of sensitivity.
- Sensitive (more responsive to infant’s cries, more affectionate, more tender, less inept, contingent face-to-face interactions) caretaking provided SUBSTANTIAL prediction of classification.
TEMPERAMENT AND ATTACHMENT
- Children’s temperamental characteristics do play a role in attachment security (Vaughn et al., 1992)
- Infants more distressed by the removal of a dummy were more likely to form insecure attachments (labelled difficult) (Bell, Weller & Waldrop, 1971).
MATERNAL SENSITIVITY AND ATTACHMENT (VAN DEN BOOM, 1994)
•Intervention study of
100 “irritable” first-born infants from low SES ( low socio-economic status) families –
50 controls,
50 experienced intervention of 3 x 2-hour home visits between
6-9 months.
- At 9 months, intervention group mothers were more responsive, stimulating, visually attentive & controlling of their infants’ behaviour.
- BUT, infant temperament had also changed! More sociable, self-soothing, and exploration; less crying than controls. Temperament is malleable and can be influenced by attuned parents.
- secure attachment formed after intervention - 62% control - 28%
.CONSEQUENCES OF ATTACHMENT
- Attachment quality- stable over time
- Secure attachment- self-esteem, self-confidence, social competence, positive affect etc.
- Lasting impacts? Resilience?
- Stability of underlying factors:
- E.g. stability in parental sensitivity?
- E.g. stability in ease
terrible attachment experiences but can stiil thrive
contingent - mother smiling, baby smiling back –incontingent - baby look away
temperament doesn’t have an effect on attachment security - ainswoth, bowlby, - but Vaughn 92 - child’s temperament does affect
