Attachment Theory Flashcards
What is attachment?
- A special kind of relationship or bond
- Includes social, cognitive, emotional and behavioural components
- Each person in a relationship experiences emotional ties to the other and forms an internal working model of these early relationships
- This internal working model influences behaviour
- Describes a biological system whereby the child will seek proximity, they percieve as a ‘secure base’ if they feel under threat
What did john bowlby discover in 1988?
- ‘Attachment is the base from which children explore their early attachment experiences and form their concpets of self, others and the world’
- Believed that attachment begins before birth- mums awareness of baby
- Also to do with how the separation happens and how baby reacts
What is the concept of threat?
- Central to the original basis of attachment theory
- Threat can be experienced in many forms:
- Within the child- may come in the form of illness, hunger or tiredness
- Experience of a frightening or confusing event
- Within the attachment figure- uncertainty about location or behaviour from primary caregiver
Overview of ‘The Strange Situation’ case study
- Studied the behaviour of one year old childern separated from their primary caregiver and then reunited
- Identified different types of attachment behaviour in children: Positive, Aversive and Active
What is positive behaviour?
signalling to the primary caregiver in a socially appealling manner- smiling or babbling
What is aversive behaviour?
giving out distress signals to incite concern from caregiver
What is active proximity?
Seeking help by crawling towards their caregiver or reaching out their arms
What are the attachment classifications?
- Secure attachment
- Anxious-avoidant attachment
- Anxious-ambivalent attachment
- Disorganised attachment
What is secure attachment?
- Infant cried and showed distress when separated but was quickly comforted
- Play decreased when on own
- Animated when reunited
- correlated with maternal sensitivity towards baby during first year
What is anxious-avoidant attachment?
- Considered insecure
- Infant shows little distress or none when mother left
- Avoided contact when reunited
- Correlated with maternal rejection of attachment behaviour from child, child is uncertain of parents response therfore careful with their own response
What is anxious- ambivalent attahcment ?
- Infant highly distressed when left
- Resists attempts to comfort by mum when reunited
- Corelated with unpredictable maternal availability and/or carer discouraging independent initiative, these children typically struggle when being left at school
What is disorganised attachment?
- contradictory behaviour on separation
- Disorganised and contradictory behaviour when reunited
- correlates with physiclly and psychologically unsafe parenting, has been suggested that 75% of children in care have this behaviour
what is meant by attachment as a universal need?
- Whatever our social class, ethnicity etc basic attachment is a universal phenomenon
- In all cultures studied, most one year olds are shown to have secure attachment
- Cultures that value less intimate relationships- more likely to be anxious-avoidant
- Forming an insecure attachment is an adaptive short term strategy
What are the internal working models ?
- The way in which a child is supported and provided for will affect the childs internal working model of himself/herself
- A child whose needs for comfort and protection are met and whose needs for exploration is respected is likely to develop an internal working model of self as valued and self reliant and a positive view of the world
- Alternatively the child whose needs are not met will possibly develop an internal working model of self as unworthy and incompetent and a negative view of others and the world as dangerous and unreliable
- Inconsistency in parenting may lead to a fragmented internal working model of self and may lead to aggressiveness or contradictory ways of relating with others
- Too many carers may lead a child engaging too quickly with strangers
If our expectation of others is that they are trustworthy, caring and reliable then…
… we are more likely to behave appropriately towards others and recieve appropriate responses in return
