Session Two (Attachment) Flashcards
What is Security Theory in terms of child development?
A theory, first proposed by Mary Ainsworth but based on work by John Bowlby, that “infants and young children need to develop secure dependence on parents before launching out into unfamiliar situations on their own”
Briefly describe Robertson’s ‘Two year old goes to hospital’ study?
- Looked into how children responded when they were dropped off at hospital for an extended stay, at a time when parents weren’t allowed to stay with them.
- Robertson observed that while the child was quiet, she wasn’t happy or interested in anything around her or her toys. Showed distress at certain points.
- The recording of this experiment was central to the development of attachment theory, as well as to the reforming of hospital policy to allow parents to stay with their kids.
Briefly describe Ainsworth’s strange situation test?
Test that aimed to investigate how a child reacts to various situations with and without their mother, theorising that different reactions exemplify different types of attachments to their parents. Child was placed in a new but interesting environment with:
- Their mother and the experimenter
- Then just their mother
- Then mother and a stranger
- Then mother leaves baby and stranger alone
- Then mother returns and stranger leaves
- Then mother leaves and baby is left alone
- Stranger returns and tries to comfort child again
- Stranger leaves and mother returns.
The child’s response to separation and especially to reunion are crucial at judging attachment type.
Describe Type B attachment pattern (Secure)?
- These children have internalised representation of a caregiver who is available and responsive.
- You view your parent as there for you if you need and you value yourself as a person worthy of help.
Describe Type A attachment pattern (Insecure-Avoidant)?
- These children anticipate rejection when in need of comfort and have difficulty expressing distress at separation from parent.
- These people learn as a child that if you’re upset with something you just need to crack on.
- Self-sufficient, self-reliant.
- NON-PATHOLOGICAL
Describe Type C attachment pattern (Insecure-Ambivalent)?
- These children expect an unpredictable parent and develop a totally helpless/dependent relationship to them.
- Aka partial reinforcement.
- Child learns to essentially try and rank up their separation behaviour in the hopes they’ll eventually get a response
- Child hasn’t learned to regulate emotional response as they don’t know what response is necessary to get what they want.
- These children are typically very difficult to settle, e.g. when dropped off at school.
Describe Type D attachment pattern (Disorganised-Disorientated)?
- Response of child can be varied from freeze to intermittent freeze, avoid, cling. No strategy in face of separation, total confusion.
- Child views parent as unpredictable or frightening (common in parents with psychosis or a mood disorder)
- These individuals tend to be highly disturbed and are the main source of psych research.
- Have difficulty in adjusting to a normal social/family/work life.
- 15% of the general population, 60% of individuals with emotional disturbances.
What is Reflective Functioning and how does it relate to attachment theory?
- Reflective functioning refers to the essential human capacity to understand behaviour in light of underlying mental states and intentions.
- Parents high in RF have more secure attachment histories with their own parents and more securely attached children.
- This is likely because high RF in parents helps an infant and young child to understand other minds and other perspectives.
Why is secure attachment important? What influence does a secure attachment have on later life?
- Secure attachment with your own parents makes it more likely your kids will have secure attachments with you.
- Secure attachment is one of the best predictors of resilience in later life
- Secure attachment is associated with mentalizing skills and Theory of Mind.
- Disordered (Type D) attachment is associated with increased risk of emotional disturbances.
Briefly, how would each attachment type respond to separation in the strange situation experiment?
- B: Use mother as safe base to explore, noted anxiety when separated but settles quickly on reunion.
- A: Child will not explore much regardless of who is in the room, and will not show much emotion when mother leaves or returns. This was initially a puzzle, but further studies have shown that the child is in fact distressed but has learned to suppress this with a mask of not caring.
- C: Show either resentment towards being left by the caregiver or helpless passivity.
- D: No clear organised behaviour, child will be confused and not know what to do with themselves.
What are Internal Working Models?
Cognitive representations the child has of themselves and of their caregiver that they use to predict, interpret and plan attachment behaviour.
Develop in childhood and are clearly on display in the SST, however they remain relevant to use later in life as they effect how we form relationships throughout our life.
What did Bowlby suggest about excessive and absent separation anxiety?
Too much separation anxiety was caused by a fear of abandonment the child has developed, possibly following an adverse family event e.g. divorce or sibling death.
Too little separation anxiety was interpreted as self defence, that the child was actually upset but hiding it (this was later confirmed experimentally). He theorised that any well loved child should react adversely to separation.
Describe the Still Face experiment?
- Mother initially plays with the child, smiles at it, responds to it and generally mirrors the baby’s actions.
- Then she turns away and stares back at the baby with a blank face.
- Baby instantly realises something is wrong, tries to re-engage with the mother by using the same behaviour as possible.
- When this fails baby shows distress, body starts to tense up, lets out cries and squeals to try and get mother’s attention back.
What does the Still Face Experiment show us about human attachment development?
- Works on the process of Contingent Marked Mirroring; people like having their emotions reciprocated back to them, and feel shame and rejection when they aren’t. This is true in babies as well as in adults.
- CMM is hugely important to emotional development.
- CMM allows the child to feel understood and find its own feelings in its mother’s face.
- Mother gives the baby’s feeling life and manages to regulate the baby’s feeling.
- This ‘manageability’ is internalised by the baby and has an impact on how they regulate emotions throughout the rest of their life.
What happens when a child grows up without CMM? When they feel their emotions aren’t reciprocated (as in the still face experiment)?
- Dissociation between the child’s emotion and the mother’s response is a source of shame to the child.
- We can deal with this to an extent but if repeated throughout childhood can have a permanent effect.
- In adulthood show disordered emotional development, which may present as a Personality Disorder.
- These people tend to frequently misinterpret people’s emotions, often as more negative than they actually are, and struggle to interpret the minds of others.
- Typically form emotionally unstable relationships with high degrees of conflict and abandonment, caused by this lack of self developed in childhood.
How does Contingent Marked Mirroring help a child develop emotionally?
- Reflecting on a child’s mental state helps the child regulate their feelings.
- Mirroring the child’s feelings helps them understand the feeling, child sees his feelings reflected back at him.
- Through mirroring they ‘find’ themselves in the minds of others, and after understanding and regulating the feeling, the child learns to organise them.
- When a child experiences a negative emotion (e.g. sadness or anxiety) they lose a sense of celebration of their feelings, seek help understanding them from a parent.
- This allows the child to develop emotionally.
How does Contingent Marked Monitoring allow for affect regulation to develop in a baby?
- The baby couples the experience of distress with the experience of an other being able to understand and manage this distress.
- They retain this memory, as well as the relief that comes from this coupling.
- This lays the seed for affect regulation and forms the basis of secure future attachment relationships.
- Affect regulation is a crucial part of managing emotions and behaviour.
- Children with insecure attachments often lack in affect regulation, which presents itself as behavioural problems, commonly misdiagnosed as ADHD.
