The Influence of Attachment on Childhood Flashcards
What does Bowlby’s theory of attachment suggest?
-How caregivers treat their infants determines their personalities later in life
-Confident babies come from reliable quick responding mothers
-Anxious babies come from slow responding, distant mothers
What were Ainsworth’s Findings?
Type B (securely attached)
-Babies used their mothers as safe base and happy to explore and showed distress when she left
-Welcomed back with open arms and wary of the stranger and treat them very differently
Type A (insecure Avoidant)
-Babies were not mainly concerned with mother
-Weren’t concerned by mother leaving room and didn’t want her when she returned
-Didn’t want the strangers attempt at comfort
-Noticed that the mothers ignored their infants
Type C (Insecure resistant)
-Showed intense distress when mother was absent and not easily comforted
-When mother returned infant was very upset and angry and did not want comforted
-Showed mixed feelings towards stranger
-Clingy babies
What is the internal working model?
-Bowlby said later relationships are continuations of early ones as the mother’s behaviour will create an Internal Working Model for relationship
-Infant learns about relationships and what they should look like and feel like from experience
-Bowlby believed that the ways in which we relate to each other are est. in intact as either type A,B or C
-We would expect type B to form the best relationships with people and type A would avoid relationships and type C would engage in clingy controlling relationships
What was the aim of Hazan and shaver love quiz
-To investigate whether adults could be classified into types based on attachment theories
-Is attachment type in infancy linked to love in adulthood?
What was the procedure in the love quiz study?
-Tested 2 samples
-Sample 1 = 215 Men, 415 Women aged 14-82 and were randomly selected from newspaper advert
-Sample 2 = 108 students with men’s age of 18
-A love quiz was published in N’USA which asked people to write to the paper regarding 2 things
1) Which of the descriptions best fitted their feelings/experiences about romantic relationships
A) Uncomfortable being close to others, difficulty trusting, difficulty depending on people, nervous when anyone gets too close, others want me to be more intimate
B) Relatively easy getting close to people, comfortable depending on people and them depending on me, don’t worry about abandonment or people getting close
C) People are reluctant to get close to me as I would like them to, worry that partner doesn’t like me or wont want to stay with me, want to get close but it scares people away
2) Adjectives which describes their relationship with their parents
What were the findings of the love quiz study?
-Found a strong relationship with kids attachment type and adulthood relationships
-Secure B’s had good lasting relationships and almost 2x longer than the other type C and A
-Type B (secure) = 56% of adults tested, believed in lasting love, high in self esteem, happy and trusting, not afraid of closeness
-Type A (insecure avoidant) = 25% of newspaper and 23% of students, doubted true love, feared closeness, less accepting or forgiving
Type C (insecure resistant) = 19% of newspaper and 20% of students, emotional extremes of jealousy and passion, wanted to ‘merge’ with partner
What is the continuity hypothesis?
-An extended version of Bowlby’s idea that later relationships should be predictable from knowledge of individuals attachment style
What are 4 weaknesses of the love quiz study?
Findings are retrospective
-Most of the questions asked were asking about early life in order to asses infant attachment types as an infant
-Such recollections are likely to be flawed and open to errors
-Assessment also relies on self-report methods which can lead to demand characteristics
-This reduces validity as it relies on the answerers being honest and realistic
Looking back on infancy and past relationships relies on correct accurate recall which isn’t always guaranteed.
Hard to est. cause and effect
-The research is correlational and doesn’t have any clear variables so we cannot claim infancy attachment has any effect on later relationships
-Kagan proposed the temperament hypothesis that babies are difficult or easy which then determines how they attach to mothers and other caregivers
This challenges internal working model as it suggests later life relationship making has nothing to do with early attachment but more innate characteristics
Ethical issues: socially sensitive
-Participants may not be comfortable divulging information into this topic
-Self-report methods lead participants to giving what they want the observer to read and not what life was really like especially if it was unpleasant or would cause them to look bad
This means there is possibility that there is social desirability bias within the participant and they want to perceive themselves in a positive light so the validity is reduced
Internal working model is a determinist approach
-Early life definitely has an impact on adult life relationships
-However this is not the case and many researchers have found examples of adults who have experienced happy secure relationships despite having been insecurely attached as a child
