Kim

Question 1

What is attachment?

Answer 1

• Looking at the quality of the relationship between the child and the caregiver

Question 2

What is attachment theory?

John Bowlby (1969)

Answer 2

• Infant born with behavioural mechanisms, which increase chances of survival during times of (perceived) external/internal threat
• Attachment theory is specific: children attach to their primary caregiver(s) and look to them for protection and security

Question 3

What is the difference between attachment theory and earlier theories of parent-child relationships?

Answer 3

• Unlike earlier theories of parent-child relationships, which emphasised the role of (any) caregiver in satisfying the infants physiological needs, attachment theory focuses on the selectivity of personal relationships providing protection and emotional security

Question 4

What are the 4 different attachment types?

Answer 4

1. Secure attachment - low levels of abandonment anxiety and high levels proximity seeking
2. Preoccupied attachment - high levels of fear abandonment (parents are unpredictable) and high levels of proximity seeking
3. Fearful attachment - mix between the two
4. Dismissing attachment - low levels of fear abandonment and proximity seeking

Question 5

What are the stages of interaction with caregivers in Bowlby’s attachment theory

Answer 5

• 0-5 months: babies do not seem to discriminate between people
• 5-7 months: babies start to differentiate between people, preferring certain individuals (attachment starts)
• 7-9 months: babies start to seek out and use preferred person as a source of comfort
• > 3 years: child starts accommodating parental needs, waiting when told/responding to verbal requests
• School age/older: internalised the attachment relationship (internal working model established

Question 6

How does an internal working model develop?

Answer 6

• Develops based on attachment experiences, to tell infants how acceptable they are to their environment, and what they can expect from their caregiver and environment as a result

Question 7

What are the 3 key determinants for secure attachment?

Answer 7

1. Consistency
2. Reliability
3. Timing

Question 8

What is the adult attachment interview (AAI) protocol?

George, Kaplan & Main (1985)

Answer 8

• Semi structured interview
• Adults asked to retrieve and evaluate attachment-related autobiographical memories from early childhood
• The AAI transcripts are rated for security of attachment, which depends on the participants’ discussion of their attachment biographies
• Coding based on the thoughtfulness and the coherency with which the adult is able to describe and evaluate these childhood experiences and their effects
• The interview does not assess the actual security of childhood attachments
• The AAI assesses the current state of mind with respect to attachment in general, and this state of mind is believed to determine attachment relationships with children

Question 9

Coding system of the AAI: Autonomous or secure adults

Answer 9

• Value attachment relationships and consider them important
• Able to describe attachment-related experiences coherently, whether these experiences were negative (e.g. parental rejection or over-involvement) or positive

Question 10

Coding system of the AAI: Dismissing adults

Answer 10

• Devalue the importance of attachment relationships for their own lives
• Idealise their parents to make themselves feel better without being able to support their evaluations with actual evidence
• Often can’t remember childhood experiences

Question 11

Coding system of the AAI: Preoccupied adults

Answer 11

• Preoccupied with their past attachment experiences
• Can’t seem to move on
• May express anger when discussing current relationships with their parents

Question 12

What are the consequences of secure attachment?

Answer 12

• Engage in more elaborate make-believe play
• Display greater enthusiasm
• Are flexible and persistence in problem solving
• Have higher self-esteem
• Are socially competent
• Cooperative with peers
• Empathetic
• Have closer friendships
• Have better social sklls
• Adults: Happy, stable close relationships, flexible
• Compassionate and accepting of differences

Question 13

How do primary caregivers regulate the child’s attachment?

Drake, Belsky and Fearon (2014)

Answer 13

• Constantly providing a haven of safety in times of threat provides support for the child’s effective exploration of the environment
• Child increasingly able to cognitively represent parental figures and supportive responses in their absence
• Through repeated experiences of (un)supportive care, the child (fails to) learns to regulate their emotions (self-soothe)
• Child learns to take initiative, and cope with challenge independently
• When conflict/trouble arises, deal with it (in)effectively (and) restoring to aggression
• Poor emotional self-regulation leads to greater risk of both internalising and externalising problems in later childhood and adolescence (and across the lifespan)

Question 14

What is the perverse paradox of abuse

Holmes

Answer 14

• Vicious circle where primary caregiver is booth attachment figure child turn to for protection and is the main source of threat child needs protection from
• Very confusing for a child

Question 15

What are the etiological factors common to most or all childhood/adolescent disorders?

Answer 15

• Difficult temperament
• Insecure attachment
• Ineffective parenting styles
• Emotion dysregulation

Question 16

How do people with attachment avoidance regulate their emotions?

Cassidy and Kobak (1988)

Answer 16

• Avoidant individuals’ deactivating strategies favour suppression of anger
• Fear investment in a relationship, so suppress emotions
• Avoidant people’s anger tends to be expressed only in indirect ways e.g. hostility of generally hateful attitudes

Question 17

How do people with attachment avoidance regulate their emotions?

Mikulincer (1998)

Answer 17

• No reporting of intense anger in response to provocative experiences, but aroused physiologically
• Interpreted others’ behaviour as hostile
• Rarely comfortable describing themselves as needy or angry, but react with hostility and hatred

Question 18

How do people with attachment anxiety regulate their emotions?

Mikulincer (1998)

Answer 18

• Attachment-anxious individuals experience intense distress and ruminate about distressing experiences
• Vulnerable to intense and prolonged bouts of anger
• Fear of abandonment, desire for love, and high dependency on others keeps them from expressing it –> internalising problems
• Resentment, hostility, self-criticism, fear, sadness and depression
• Reassurance-seeking and support –> withholding of frustration and anger while seeking a partner’s support
• Once the support was no longer needed, the angry feelings surfaced and were exposed

Question 19

How easy is it for attachment avoidant individuals to suppress thoughts?

Answer 19

Can suppress negative emotions but need to work hard to do so (over time, however, this might become “second nature” and therefore not feel like it’s work)

Question 20

How easy is it for attachment anxious individuals to suppress thoughts?

Answer 20

Individuals experience high levels of negative emotions and find it very difficult to suppress them

Question 21

How can you categorise insecure attachment?

Answer 21

• Poor emotion regulation
• Poor negative thought suppression
• Negative self-representation
• Increases the risk f internalising and externalising problems in childhood and adolescence

Question 22

Theories of atypical development: Parenting style

Mensha and Kuranchie (2013)

Answer 22

• Major risk factor for atypical development
• In particular harsh and inconsistent parenting –> caused by domestic violence/drug abuse/maternal depression/poverty. etc
• Significant relationship between high levels of parental warmth and lower levels of externalising behaviour problems in children
• Parents of children with antisocial behaviour are likely to be less positive, more permissive and inconsistent, and use more violent and critical discipline

Question 23

What are the four types of parenting styles?

Answer 23

1. Authoritarian - focus on obedience, punishment over discipline
2. Authoritative - create positive relationship, enforce rules
3. Permissive - don’t enforce rules, ‘kids will be kids’
4. Uninvolved - provide little guidance, nurturing, or attention

Question 24

Theories of atypical development: Social learning theory

Answer 24

• The proximal relationship of parent to child ensures that each exerts a strong influence on the other
• Child learns behaviour from interaction with significant people in their environment, and these behaviours are maintained through modelling and reinforcement
• Negative behaviours can be unintentionally reinforced by parental attention and subsequent attempts at appeasement
• Negative behavioural pattern if it goes unchallenged

Question 25

How do peer relations relate to antisocial behaviour

Answer 25

• Peer groups play a significant role in the genesis of youth antisocial behaviour
• Links between highly deviant and antisocial peers (rejected by social contexts so group together
• Youth at risk of antisocial behaviour tend to affiliate differentially with each other
• These affiliations increase the risk f antisocial behaviour
• Childhood aggression –> peer rejection –> antisocial behaviour in adolescents
• Academic failure is also relevant: peer rejection + academic failure –> gang involvement in 13/14 year olds

Question 26

What percentage of peer bystanders actively joined in with bullying

Swearer and Hymel (2015)

Answer 26

21%

Question 27

What percentage of peer bystanders only intervened in bullying incidences?

Answer 27

25%

Question 28

What percentage of peer bystanders only passively watched in bullying instances?

Answer 28

54%

Question 29

What are the contextual influences of antisocial behaviour?

Answer 29

School:

• Inappropriate teacher responses
• Poor teacher-student relationships
• Negative school climate and lack of teacher support (‘kids being kids’)

Community:

• Negative or unsafe neighbourhoods
• Exposure to violent TV and video games (SLT)
• Violence is modelled and/or condoned

Question 30

How is negative temperament relevant to antisocial behaviour?

Answer 30

• Children vary in how susceptible they are to certain environmental situations
• Children with a more ‘difficult temperament’ are more susceptible to their environment
• Therefore more likely to become at risk of both insecure attachment and subsequent atypical development

Question 31

What is heritability? (h^2)

Answer 31

• The proportion in total variance of a trait or liability to a disease that is accounted for by genes
• Heritability is a characteristic of populations, not individuals or families, which is affected by both genetic environmental effects
• The proportion of variance in the phenotype explained by genes

Question 32

What is environmentality (e^2)

Answer 32

The proportion of environmental variance in the phenotype

Question 33

How do environmentality and heritability interact?

Answer 33

• h^2 + e^2 = 1
• If the environment is 100% controlled, the % difference in IQ can only be attributed to genes
• If the environment varies more, h^2 reduces
• If the environment varies less, h^2 increases
• The proportion of the variation in behaviour that can be attributed to G depends on the population studies (and how much e^2 variability there is

Question 34

Methods used to measure heritability and environmentality: Family, adoption and twin studies

Answer 34

1. Heritability - variation explained by genetic differences
2. Shared environment - aspects of the family environment which make siblings similar irrespective of genetics (i.e. parental style)
3. Non-shared environment - environmental variation in which siblings differ (for example birth order, friends, school)

Question 35

Methods used to measure heritability and environmentality: Adoption and family studies

Answer 35

• To estimate the degree to which a trait varies in response to environmental and genetic variation
• Used in conjunction with twin studies

Question 36

What is the adoption studies method?

Answer 36

• Investigates similarities between the adoptees and their biological background and adoptive parents
• Similar to biological parents? Genetics
• Similar to adoptive parent? shared-environmental effect

Question 37

What is the family studies method?

Answer 37

• Compares non-biological siblings raised in the same household
• Similarity to non-biological siblings? shared-environment effects
• Variation that cannot be attributed to genetics or being raised in the same house-hold, down to non-shared environment effects

Question 38

Adoption study limitations

Answer 38

• These studies are not easy to undertake as information on an adoptee and their biological families may not be available
• Need to control age of adoption (ideally adoption needs to occur immediately following birth, to know whether any resemblance between adoptee and biological parents is genetic and not due to influence)
• Assumes the absence of selective placement (adoption is not a random process, children are often placed in families resembling their biological family)
• Adoption is also an unusual event, leading to a small sample size
• Few genetic main effects found, some therefore argue that genes are not involved, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t gene-environment interplay
• The effects of genes on cognitive ability and other behaviour can emerge later in childhood (Plomin et al 1997)

Question 39

Limitations with twin studies

Answer 39

• If intelligence is different, we can assume that there are tiny differences in environment (different friends, time spent studying etc) that caused the difference
• However, twins often grow up in very similar environments. If intelligence is the same it’s hard to tell if it is due to genetics or environment
• Therefore, we must take care not to over-estimate the role of heritability

Question 40

Assumptions of twin studies

Answer 40

• Only one type of genetic mechanism (additive genetic mechanisms) operating on a particular trait, when in fact most come about through multiple genes interacting with each other
• Evidence suggests that it’s interactions between genes and environment, rather than genes and environment separately which may influence many traits

Question 41

Methods used to identify specific genes relevant to behaviour: Genome-wide association studies (GWAS

Answer 41

Hypothesis driven:

• To what extent a particular gene related to a particular endo-phenotype
• In the case of psychological disorders, investigate the effect of genes on individual biomarkers (symptoms/characteristics) linked with overall disorder

Use case-control design:

• Is the risk allele present more often in those with the disorder under investigation compared to those without
• Examine linkage in families as well
• Need to make sure that you are reliably measuring the trait/behaviour that you are interested in

Question 42

What are additive genetic effects?

Answer 42

• The combined effect of alleles both within and between genes
• Total genetic effect = sum of contributions from every allele, each of which contributes independently to the phenotypic variation

Question 43

What are non-additive genetic (interactive) effects

Answer 43

Dominance

• Relationship between alleles on the same locus
• One version of the gene (dominant) masks the other (recessive)

Epistasis

• The effect of a gene is conditional upon the presence of one or more modifier genes (genetic background)
• In the case of epistasis, genes are interacting with genes

Question 44

Interactions between genes and environment

Answer 44

1. Propensity towards emotional reactivity + negative family environment = high emotionality
2. Propensity towards emotional reactivity + positive family environment = lower emotionality

• The effect of genes are conditional upon environment