influence of attachment on relationships

what is the influence of early attachment

• Attachment theory: core tenet of attachment theory is that the quality of a child's connection to their primary caregiver has an impact on the child's later relationships and social interactions

• Avoidant - expect others to be dismissive of them in the future, can be aggressive in their demeanour and cause their peers to socially exclude them (Sroufe 2005, Sroufe et al 1999, Ojanen and Perry 2007)

• Anxious - more likely to engage in manipulative behaviour such as relativism

• Disorganised - more likely to withdraw or act aggressively in social situations because their caregivers are either neglectful, depressed or abusive

friendships and popularity

• Securely attached children have fewer friendship difficulties (Kerns 1994)

• Myron-Wilson and Smith 1998 attachment type and bullying - used standard questionnaires on 196 children 7-11 years old in London

  • Secure children least likely to be bullied

  • Insecure-avoidant most likely to be bullied

  • Insecure-anxious most likely to be bullies

• Minnesota study 2005 tracked people from infancy to late adolescence and discovered a link between early attachment and later emotional/social conduct

  • Later in childhood, securely attached children were rated higher for social ability, were less lonely, and were more popular than insecurely attached children

• Children with secure attachment type (Hartup et al 1993) are more popular at nursery and participate in more social contact with other children

  • Insecurely attached children are more reliant on instructors for social interaction and emotional support

romantic relationships research

• Continuity of romantic relationships: continuity between early attachment styles and the quality of later adult romantic relationships.

  • IWM influences a person’s expectation of later relationships thus affecting his attitudes toward them.

  • In other words, there will be continuity between early attachment experiences and later relationships.

 

• Hazan and Shaver 1987 - main aim was to see if partners in adult romantic relationships also experience an attachment process like an infant and their caregiver.

• To study this theory, they put together a love quiz. This love quiz ran in a local newspaper, the Rocky Mountain News, and asked people to send in their answers.

• Looked at the first 620 responses from their newspaper advertisement.

  • The participants were 205 men and 415 women between the ages of 14 and 82.

  • Of their sample size, 42% were married, and 31% were dating someone.

 

• Hazan and Shaver used the first part of the love quiz to categorise the participants’ childhood attachment styles. They sorted the participants into Ainsworth’s attachment types – secure, insecure-resistant, and insecure-avoidant.

• Assessed

  • Respondent's current or most important relationship

  • General love experiences such as number of partners

  • Attachment type by asking them to rate how much they agreed with given statements

results of this, and other research

• 56% securely attached (healthy relationships, long-lasting), 25% insecure-avoidant (fear of intimacy), 19% insecure-resistant (fear of abandonment)

• They discovered that those who were securely attached as new-borns tended to have long-term relationships; on the other hand, those who were insecurely attached as infants found adult relationships more challenging, were more likely to divorce and believed love was rare.

• The study has been criticised for its issues with reductionism (reducing complex phenomena to their simplest form), as it suggests that early relationships and behaviours will dictate adult relationships.

 

• Mcarthy's 1999 study supports evidence for influence of early attachments on future relationships, conducted a study with 40 women of adult age who shared information about their childhood, which helped determine their early attachment styles in the study

  • Women with secure attachments in childhood rated their romantic relationships more positively than women with insecure-avoidant and insecure-resistant attachment styles

  • Insecure avoidant found that they struggled with intimacy and insecure-resistant struggled with maintaining friendships

• Feeney and Noller 1992 studied university students who were in relationships and found that those with insecure-avoidant attachment styles were the most likely to engage in a breakup, but attachment styles also changed as relationship progressed to a firmer and more stable level

temperament hypothesis

• Continuity in relationships relies on this - Kagan

• Found that infants have an innate personality, which influences the quality of their attachment with caregivers and later relationships

• Suggests that attachments form due to temperament and not an innate gene for attachment which goes against Bowlby's theory

• Also suggests that attempts to develop better-quality relationships by changing people's attachment styles to more positive ones would not work

parenting of one’s own child

• Research indicates an intergenerational continuity between adult attachment types and their children, including children adopting the parenting styles of their own parents

• People tend to base their parenting style om the internal working model, so the attachment type tends to be passed on through generations of a family

• Heidi Bailey et al 2007 - considered attachments of 99 mothers to their babies and to their own mothers

• Use of Strange Situations and questionnaires and majority of mothers had the same attachment type to their baby as they did to their own mother

strengths

• Strength - research supports that early attachment and later relationships are related

  • Reviews of studies that link attachment to later development such as Fearon and Roisman 2017 show that early attachment consistently predicts later attachment, emotional well-being and attachment to own children

  • How strong the relationship between the two factors depends on the attachment type and aspect of later development

  • Insecure-avoidant seems to convey fairly mild disadvantages for any aspect of development, disorganised attachment is strongly associated with later mental disorders

  • Secure attachment as a baby appears to convey advantages for future development

weaknesses

• Weakness - not all evidence supports the existence of close links between attachment and later development (notion of continuity)

  • Regensburg longitudinal study (Becker-Stoll et al 2008) followed 43 individuals tested at 1 year old

  • At age 16 attachment was reassessed using adult attachment interview and there was no evidence of continuity

  • Not clear to what extent the quality of attachment predicts later development, may be other important social, biological and cognitive factors

• Weakness - most research studies assess attachment styles retrospectively

  • Most research is not longitudinal, instead researchers ask adolescent or adult ppts questions about their relationship with parents and identify attachment type from this

  • This causes two validity issues as questions require the honesty and accuracy from participants and it is hard to know whether what is being assessed is early attachment or adult attachment

  • Confounding factors make studies useless

• Weakness - confounding variables

  • Some studies assess attachment in infancy which means that assessment of early attachment is valid but even these studies have issues because associations between attachment quality and later development may be affected by confounding variables

  • Parenting style may influence both factors

  • Genetically-influenced personality may influence both factors

  • Never entirely sure that it is early attachment and not some other factors that affects later development

conclusion

• Balancing opportunity and risk

  • Seems likely that influence of early attachment is probabilistic (Clarke and Clarke 1998)

  • Means that insecure attachment does not invariably cause increased risk of later developmental problems - no one is inevitably going to have unsuccessful romantic relationships because of their early attachment experiences

  • May be more likely but other factors are involved

  • By knowing someone's attachment status, we have opportunity to intervene and aid development, may also become too pessimistic and create self-fulfilling prophecy