attachment - influence of attachment types on later realtionships Flashcards
What did Myron + Wilson find out about how attachment types relate to bullying?
secure - least likely to be involved.
resistant - most likely to be bully.
avoidant - most likely to be victim.
Outline McCarthy’s study into how women’s childhood attachment type affects their adult relationships
40 women assessed on quality of childhood attachment and quality of adult relationships.
Found that securely attached children had best quality adult relationships.
Resistant struggled to maintain friendships.
Avoidant struggled with intimacy in their relationships.
Internal working model
Mental representations of what attachments are supposed to be like based on our attachment with primary caregiver. Affects later relationships as perceptions are carried with us through life.
Evaluation of influence of attachment types on later relationships - retrospective
Studies use self-report or questionnaire techniques years later.
Requires respondents to be honest and have realistic views of relationships.
Lacks internal validity
Evaluation of internal working model research - conscious
Self-reports are conscious but internal working model is not, so cannot be assessed directly.
Creates problems when trying to assess continuity of internal working model as it can only be assessed indirectly.
Outline Hazen and Shaver’s study into influence of early attachment on later relationships
Analysed 620 responses from newspaper love quiz, where participants were asked about their feelings on romance.
Also asked questions to assess childhood attachment type with parents.
Found correlation between adult and childhood attachment types. Securely attached children most likely to believe relationships are long-lasting, and were less likely to get divorced.
Insecurely attached children reported more loneliness in relationships.
% of type similar to Ainsworth’s study.
Evaluation is 1) correlational, may be other reasons as to why attachments different in adulthood. 2) volunteer sample, who is type of person to respond to newspaper questionnaire? 3) self-report techniques, maybe have some bias as to how they think childhood relationships were.
Evaluation of childhood attachment on adult relationships - deterministic
The continuity hypothesis is highly deterministic.
This is because it states that the attachment someone has as an infant directly impacts their adult relationships due to the internal working model.
This puts a lot of pressure on parents to form high quality relationships with their children in their younger years, which may have an impact on working mothers for example, and can make people who had poor quality attachments with their parents feel doomed to have poor quality relationships in the future.
This is a criticism for research as results can be socially sensitive.
