influence of early attachment on later relationships

Question 1

internal working model

Answer 1

• quality of a baby’s first attachment is crucial, affects nature of future relationships
• when first attachment is loving and reliable, babies will assume this is how relationships tend to be, and will seek out functional relationships and act functionally within them
• a child with bad experiences will bring these to bear on later relationships, they may struggle to form relationships or not behave appropriately within them

Question 2

relationships in childhood (kerns and myron-wilton)

Answer 2

• attachment type associated with quality of peer attachments in childhood
• securely attached babies tend to go on to form the best quality childhood friendships, whereas insecurely attached babies later have friendship difficulties (kerns)
• bullying behaviour can be predicted - myron-wilson and smith assessed attachment type and bullying involvement using questionnaires for 196 children aged 7-11 in london
• secure children were very unlikely to be involved in bullying, insecure-avoidant children were the most likely to be victims and insecure-resistant were most likely to be bullies

Question 3

relationships in adulthood

Answer 3

• internal working models affect both adult romantic relationships and parental relationships with your children
• mccarthy studied 40 adult women who had been assessed when they were babies to assess their early attachment type
• securely attached babies had the best adult friendships and romantic relationships, insecure-resistant babies had problems maintaining friendships, insecure-avoidant babies struggled with intimacy in romantic relationships
• also affects ability to parent own children, people base parenting style on internal working model so attachment type tends to be passed on
• bailey et al considered the attachments of 99 mothers to their own mothers and their babies, assessed mother-baby using strange situation and mother-mother using an interview
• majority of women had same attachment type to babies and their own mothers

Question 4

evaluation - research support (hazen and shaver)

Answer 4

• reviews of evidence have concluded that early attachment consistently predicts later attachment, emotional well-being and attachment to own children
• how wrong this relationship between early and later attachment is depends on attachment type and the aspect of later development
• means that secure attachment as a baby conveys advantages for future development, disorganised attachment seriously disadvantages children
• hazer and shaver created a love quiz which asked 620 participants about current relationships vs general experiences vs feelings, they found that people with secure attachments tended to have longer relationships, and people with insecure-avoidant attachments commonly experienced jealousy and a fear of intimacy, supports other research and continuity hypothesis

Question 5

evaluation - validity issues with retrospective studies

Answer 5

• most research assesses early attachment retrospectively (backwards)
• most studies are not longitudinal, do not assess early attachment and then revisit the same person in later life
• usually will ask participants about their relationship with their parents and then identify attachment from this
• this relies on the honesty and accurate perceptions from participants, and it is hard to know if what is being assessed is early or later attachment
• measures may be confounded with other factors, lowering validity
• most methods are self-report, likelihood for social desirability bias
• with bailey, mothers will have to use LTM so may not remember attachments accurately

Question 6

evaluation - confounding variables

Answer 6

• influence of early attachment on later development has existence of confounding variables
• studies may have validity problems because associations may be affected by confounding variables, for example parenting style may influence both attachment quality and later development
• can never be entirely sure that it is early attachment and not some other factor that influences later development, for example neurodivergent conditions, other later relationships
• correlation so can’t establish cause and effect, not a holistic view

Question 7

continuity - links between childhood treatment and adulthood

Answer 7

lots of physical infant-caregiver contact - comfortable with physical contact and intimacy

being punished for crying - closed off, hard to show emotion

being ignored when asking questions - communication issues, hard to speak about feelings or what you want