Love, Relationships and Attachment

Does love define a relationship?

Not really because you can still love someone but then decide your boundaries and relationship differently in spite of how you feel.

Love Definition

a combination of emotions, cognitions and behaviors that play a crucial role in close relationships. It’s difficult to define because it has a different meaning across different people and across different kinds of relationships.

Voluntary vs. Involuntary Love

voluntarily (such as friends or romantic partners)

involuntarily (such as family or romantic partners in certain cultures)

True or False: shows that falling in love leads to an increase in self-efficacy and self-esteem

True

Triangular Model of Love

Each love relationship is made of three components that are present in different degrees in different couples: Intimacy, Passion and Decision/Commitment

Triangular Model of Love: Intimacy

Refers to how close two people feel and how strong is the bond that holds them together.

Couples high in intimacy are concerned with each other’s well-being and happiness, count on and understand each other.

Triangular Model of Love: Passion

The sexual motives and sexual excitement in the relationship, which are based on romance, physical attraction and sexuality.

Triangular Model of Love: Decision/Commitment

Cognitive factors such as the decision to love and be with a person and the commitment to keep the relationship on a long-term basis.

Consummate Love

When the three angles of the triangle are balanced = consummate love (which is the “ideal” form but often difficult to maintain).

Combinations of two angles from Triangular Model of Love

1. Consummate Love:

1. "We share deep emotional connection, intense attraction, and long-term commitment."

1. Liking/Friendship:

1. "We're close friends, sharing emotional intimacy but no romantic attraction or commitment."

1. Infatuation:

1. "We're passionately drawn to each other, but it's all about physical attraction with no emotional closeness or commitment."

1. Empty Love:

1. "We're committed to each other, but there's no emotional connection or passion."

1. Romantic Love:

1. "We have intense passion and emotional closeness, but we're not committed for the long term."

1. Companionate Love:

1. "We're emotionally connected and committed to each other, but the passion has faded."

1. Fatuous Love:

1. "We're passionately committed, but we lack deep emotional connection or understanding."

Meaning of Falling in love

begins as a sudden and overwhelming, all-consuming and beyond-control positive reaction to another person. This is called passionate love and it includes strong emotional arousal, desire to be physically close, intense need to be reciprocated and sexual attraction.

Passionate love

Passionate love requires three things to occur:

1. Believing that passionate love exists (some philosophers state that love is a social construct)

2. Having an appropriate (this is subjective) object of love

3. Being in a state of physiological arousal (sexual excitement, fear, anxiety…) that could be interpreted as love.

Attachment Theory

Parent-child interactions are extremely important because they’re usually the first contact we have as human beings. We come to the world ready to interact with humans but the way those interactions happen vary from person to person and family to family.

An attachment style is (how secure we feel in interpersonal relationships) based on how we related to our caregivers when we were babies.

In their first interactions with adults, infants acquire two basic attitudes:

1) Self-esteem: The behavior and emotions of the caregiver tell the infant they’re either valued, important and loved, or that they lack value, are unimportant and are not loved. - if you feel like you’re not loved youll probably end up in bad relationships that you don’t even want to be in

2) Interpersonal trust: whether the infant sees the caregiver as trustworthy, dependable and reliable, or as untrustworthy, undependable and unreliable.

Research shows that we form these attitudes long before we acquire language skills.

Secure Attachment

In infants: They feel confident that the attachment figure will be available to meet their needs. Are easily soothed by the attachment figure when upset. Develop a secure attachment when the caregiver is sensitive to their signals, and responds appropriately to their needs.

• Parents need to be emotionally available to be able to fulfill the babys needs (and they are)

• They learn the babies cries and what they need for it and pay attention to them to the point that they are always reliable

In adults: High in self-esteem and interpersonal trust, are best able to form lasting, committed and satisfying relationships through life

Anxious/ambivalent/resistant

In infants: Because they don’t feel security from the attachment figure, they show clingy and dependent behavior but reject the attachment figure when they engage in interaction. They have a hard time moving away from the attachment figure to explore new surroundings. Caregiver was possibly inconsistent.

• Is more caused by inconsistencies and NOT neglect or bad parenting

• They cling to the times when things get good because thats what they learnt to do/ wanted to do

In adults: low in self-esteem, high in interpersonal trust. They quickly get into relationships, cling to others but expect to be eventually rejected because of feeling unworthy.

• Low self-esteem because they are picking up the inconsistencies as a sign that they are unlovable and/or unworthy

Avoidant/ dismissive

In infants: are very independent of the attachment figure both physically and emotionally, don’t seek contact with caregiver when they feel distressed. Caregiver probably rejected their needs.

In adults: high in self-esteem and low in interpersonal trust, that is, they see themselves as worthy of having good relationships but are afraid of genuine closeness.

Disorganized/fearful-avoidant

In infants: It develops when the child’s caregivers – the only source of safety – become a source of fear.

In adults: low in self-esteem and interpersonal trust, have a difficult time forming close relationships.

The Strange Situation Procedure

It’s an observational research created by Mary Ainsworth in the 1970s. It observes attachment security in children in relation to their caregivers.

• Sample: 100 children from middle-class American families between 12 and 18 months.

• Procedure: A small room with one way glass to observe the infant’s behavior. A series of eight episodes lasting approximately 3 minutes each, in which the mother, the child and stranger are introduced, separated and reunited.

Criticism of Attachment Theory

The theory makes a direct correlation between the behavior of the caregivers and the child’s attachment type. Some critics think this is a reductionist approach. As in is all of the blame really on the parents, is it a direct and only correlation?

Scientist Kagan that the inborn temperament of the child leads to the different attachment types. Supporting research:

• Found that babies with an ‘Easy’ temperament (those who eat and sleep regularly, and accept new experiences) are likely to develop secure attachments and babies with a ‘slow to warm up’ temperament (those who took a while to get used to new experiences) are likely to have insecure-avoidant attachments.

• Babies with a ‘Difficult’ temperament (those who eat and sleep irregularly and who reject new experiences) are likely to have anxious-ambivalent attachments.

Belsky and Rovine (1987) also argue that the child’s attachment type is a result of both the child’s innate temperament and also how the parent responds to them (i.e., the parents’ sensitivity level).

But also additionally, the child’s innate temperament may influence the way their parent responds to them. For instance, a ‘difficult’ child would need a caregiver who is sensitive and patient to develop a secure attachment.

Sibling interactions with Interpersonal behavior

In elementary school children, the ones without siblings were less liked by their classmates, and tended to be either more aggressive or more victimized by their aggressors.

Kitzmann, Cohen and Lockwood (2002) state that this is because having siblings provides useful interpersonal learning experiences.

Sibling relationships often combine feelings of affection, hostility and rivalry