Lecture 3 - Strange Situations

Question 1

According to Bowlby’s stance on attachment in humans, where does attachment develop from?

Answer 1

Biological preparation that is combined with learning.

Question 2

What is the sensitive period?

Answer 2

The ideal formation of an attachment in the first 2 years of human life. This is ideal, not critical.

Question 3

In the Strange Situation, why is it necessary for the stranger to enter the room and attempt to comfort the infant, rather than the mother?

Answer 3

To determine why the infant was crying. If the infant continues to cry, they miss their mother.

Question 4

Why can attachment style not be determined by the distress of an infant when their mother leaves the room?

Answer 4

Attachment style is about the relationship of the infant with the attachment figure. The mother therefore must be in the same room as the infant in order to determine how the infant acts (e.g. avoidantly, securely, etc).

Question 5

What is the gold standard for assessing attachment?

Answer 5

The strange situations task

Question 6

What is the universality hypothesis?

Answer 6

The idea that all infants will form an attachment to one or more specific caregivers, except in the most extreme circumstances.

Question 7

What is the most common form of attachment in institutions?

Answer 7

Disorganised (Cassidy, 2008).

Question 8

What is the normativity hypothesis?

Answer 8

The assumption that the majority of attachment relationships will be secure.

Question 9

How standardised are the proportions of insecure attachments across different countries/cultures?

Answer 9

Not vary. Levels of insecure attachments vary depending on the community/culture.

Question 10

What has the Strange Situations procedure for assessing attachment quality been criticised for?

Answer 10

• Unethical: creates exaggerated emotional reactions in young children.
• Generalisability: providing an assessment of infant behaviour that may not apply to home settings.
• Usefulness: limited usefulness for characterising attachments of children older than 2 years.
• Reductionist: only uses 4 types to classify attachment style.
• Validity: Just a snapshot of the relationship between mother and child

Question 11

What examples support the criticism that the strange situation procedure is an inadequate measure of attachment in different cultures?

Answer 11

• Japanese infants rarely experience separation
• Infants raised on kibbutzim rarely interact with strangers
• German infants are raised to show independence in stressful situations (cohort effects).

Question 12

What is the opposition to cross cultural limitations of the strange situations procedure?

Answer 12

• Within-culture variation is greater than between-culture variation.
• Differences in application of the procedure/whether the exact procedure is stuck to.
• Training of coders may account for differences (Archer et al., 2015).

Question 13

Why does the Strange Situations procedure reveal cultural differences in the proportion of children exhibiting a secure attachment?

Answer 13

The degree to which strange situations stresses infants varies across cultures.

Question 14

According to Goldsmith and Alansky (1987), what reasons might there be for differences in inferred attachment style?

Answer 14

• Differences in temperament (adverse reactions to separation)
• Differences in separation experiences (e.g. experience of day and other non-parental care)

Question 15

What is the effect of the need for SS to be conducted by highly trained coders?

Answer 15

• Limits the accessibility of attachment research - training is very extensive and specialist.

Question 16

What is the Attachment Q Sort?

Answer 16

An assessment of a child’s behaviour and the extent to which it correlates with the typical behaviour of a child with a secure attachment.
Cards with descriptive statements about behaviour are chosen by experts observing the child and are compiled at the end of observation into two piles; most descriptive of the child’s behaviour and least descriptive of the child’s behaviour.

Question 17

What are the advantages of the Attachment Q Sort (AQS) compared with the SSP?

Answer 17

+ Higher ecological validity as the behaviour of the child can be observed while still at home.
+ Higher cross-cultural usefulness as a result, as it is more standardised across cultures.
+ Wider age range that it is useful for (12-60 months)
+ Continuous scores (correlations) between -1.0 and +1.0, rather than distinct categories.

Question 18

How can a child be comforted if they are upset or injured and have a secure attachment?

Answer 18

Can only be comforted by the mother.

Question 19

How can a child be comforted if they are upset or injured and have an insecure attachment?

Answer 19

Can be comforted by adults other than the mother.

Question 20

What limitation of the AQS did Clarke-Stewart et al., (2001) identify?

Answer 20

No stress is elicited, so the behaviour observed may not be representative of attachment security - it is most activated under the most stressful situations.

Question 21

What did Clarke-Stewart et al., (2001) propose instead of the SSP or the AQS?

Answer 21

California Attachment Procedure.

This set-up was similar to the SSP, but subjects were presented with a mysterious loud noise after 3 minutes, a wizard walking into the room after 6 minutes and a mechanical robot after another 3 mins.

The caregiver is present throughout and attachment categories are allocated depending on how the children react.

Question 22

What are the advantages of the California Attachment Procedure compared to the SSP?

Answer 22

+ Stranger situations. A wizard walking into the room is much more extraordinary than a woman who, to the infant, may not look too different from the mother.

+ Ethics. Caregiver is present throughout, much less distress caused. Increased ethics, but also validity - attachment style can be observed throughout as the caregiver is always present.

+ More sensitive measure of stress/strange situations for children who are more accustomed to maternal separation.

Question 23

How else has behaviour on the SSP been coded, and who coded it this way?

Answer 23

Fraley and Spieker (2003) coded behaviour along scales;

• proximity seeking vs proximity avoidance: reflects the degree to which children are oriented towards proximity maintenance.
• anger and resistance: represents the amount of overt conflict and anger expressed towards the caregiver.

Question 24

How do the scale measurements of attachment on the SSP compare to the original categorical measures?

Answer 24

Scale measures by Fraley and Spieker (2003) indicate greater stability in individual differences in attachment behaviour over long spans of time, have greater statistical power and provide stronger associations with variables such as maternal responsiveness.

Question 25

What physiological/neurological evidence has been found that corresponds to attachment in children?

Answer 25

Dawson et al., (2001) measured EEG activity in children, while replicating the strange situations procedure.

Infants who were more insecurely attached had less activity in their left prefrontal cortex and more activity in their right PFC, compared to infants with secure attachments.

Question 26

According to which study, what is the left and right PFC for?

Answer 26

Coan et al., (2006) and Dawson et al., (1994) found that the left PFC is for positive emotions such as joy and interest, while the right is for expression of negative withdrawal emotions, such as distress, disgust and fear.

Question 27

What neurological evidence has been found that corresponds to attachment in adults?

Answer 27

Coan et al., (2005) - found that women with insecure-avoidant relationships with their husbands had higher activation in their right PFC when they were holding their husbands hand, compared to when they were holding a strangers’ hand.

Quirin et al., (2010) - found reduced gray matter density in the hippocampus among adults with attachment anxiety and avoidance.