Attachment

Attachment and Parenting:

What is attachment?

Ainsworth & Bell (1970): “an affectional tie that one person or animal forms between himself and another specific one - a tie that binds them together in space and endures over time”

Attachment:

• Selective -focus on specific individuals

• Involves physical proximity-seeking

• Provides comfort and security

• Produces separation distress

• Behaviors

  • Preferential attention

  • Touching

  • Clinging

  • Crying and calling for in absence; smiling in presence

Theories of Attachment:

• Learning accounts:

  • Mother attachment reinforced by food provision

• Psychoanalytic accounts:

  • Mother as primary love object through association with oral need gratification - Freud

• Feeding

• Harry Harlow:

  • Comfort/close contact may be a more powerful basis for attachment than food provision

• Imprinting in ducklings during critical period (Konrad Lorenz)

  • Highly canalized (instinctive) mechanism found in many animals

• Ethological theory (John Bowlby):

  • Evolutionary advantage:

    • Biological adaptation of mother-infant attachment

    • Infant is biologically biased to develop attachments

The “young thieves” and maternal deprivation (1944):

• Bowlby published a paper showing that of 44 children referred to his clinic for stealing, 14 were “affectionless”, and 12 of these had been separated from their mothers for at least six months when under five years of age

• The implications of his work on women and the workplace were important, coming at the end of WW2

• Criticisms were numerous, but the fear was real

Development:

• Pre-attachment (0-2 months):

  • Preference for social stimuli (e.g., faces)

  • Indiscriminate social responsiveness

  • Crying, smiling, etc., elicits caregiver behavior

• Attachment-in-the-making (2-7 months):

  • Visual recognition (3 months); across a room (5-6 months)

  • More discrimination between career and strangers

• Clear-cut attachment (7-24 months):

  • Separation protest; stranger wariness

• Goal-corrected partnership (24 months onwards):

  • Increasingly reciprocal

  • Understanding self and others

Assessment (babies and toddlers): The Strange Situation (Mary Ainsworth and colleagues). Standardized assessment: how infant uses the caregiver as a secure base for exploration and comfort after a mildly stressful event

Does infant use the mother as a base to explore from?

How does infant behave when mother is absent?

How does infant react on reunion with mother?

Attachment (might be) predictive:

Secure attachment shown to predict:

• Oppenheim et al. (1988):

  • Curiosity and problem solving at 2 years

  • Social confidence at nursery at 3 years

  • Empathy and independence at 5 years

• Lewis et al., 1984:

  • Lack of behavioral problems at 6 years

• Warren, Huston, Egeland, and Sroufe (1997):

  • Decreased risk of anxiety disorders at 16 years

Criticisms of Strange situation:

• Often very mother based

• Attachment type commonly not the same with fathers

• Implications that mother should stay home

• Role of depression little considered (especially early work)

  • For some, linked to staying hime

• Different cultural norms can lead infants to behave differently when confronted with the strange situation

• Prediction is not always found

  • E.g., McCartney et al. (2004)

    • No prediction of behavior problems at 3 years

• Bear in mind that negative findings in research generally remain unpublished

• Poor continuity

• Early attachment doesn’t predict attachment later in development (e.g., Booth-LaForce & Roisman, 2014)

• But perhaps not surprising?

Other and older assessments:

Attachment Q-Sort (Waters & Deane, 1985; 1-5y)

• Set period of observation of children by someone familiar with that child.

• ~100 Items sorted by observer according to child’s attachment related behaviours

MCAST (Green et al., 2000; 4-8y)

Manchester Child Attachment Story Task

• Story stem vignettes with dolls (child, carer)

Child Attachment Interview (Target et al., 2003)

Adult Attachment Interview (George, Kaplan, & Main, 1984) …and others!

Overall criticisms…

• Commonly categories of attachment

• Simple causal relationship?

• What about resilience?

• Complex developmental pathways

• Dynamic processes through life course

• Insecure attachment is not neglect.

Attachment theory proposes…

Carers’ sensitive caregiving, not children’s endogenous characteristics, determine attachment security

i.e., experiences of carer (in)sensitivity are encoded by children into an internal working model encompassing views of the self, others, and the nature of relationships…

Thus, claims that early attachment should be largely independent of children’s individual characteristics

Not-so blank slates…

These days, the blank slate notion is considered doubtful!

• Nature and nurture and their interplay are so important

• Infants come into the world with reflexive, sensory, perceptual and affective capabilities…

• ...allowing them to play an important part in forming their social relationships, including relationships with carers

Infants are early social beings!

As well as being set up to attend more to social stimuli, newborns orient towards social interactions -Farroni et al. (2002)

Mutuality…

Infant’s early perceptual capacities:

• Ensure that it attends to other people

• Usually reciprocated and a mutual relationship is established

• Results in social activities which often involve synchrony and cooperation between parent and child

Reciprocity during interactions:

‘Dance’ between infant and carer (Stern, 1971; 1977) – both involved in initiation, regulation and termination of interaction

“Blossoming” of abilities at 8-9 months

• Evidence of reciprocity and intentionality

• Child initiates action and becomes an equal partner in social relationships …and not only with carer

Temperament

A precursor to personality but not directly equivalent

Rothbart (1973)

• Surgency – Similar to introversion/extraversion

• Orienting/regulation – ability to focus on parent

• Negative affect – Grumpiness, like neuroticism

Might temperament make a difference?

In part, because temperament is heritable…

Gene-environment interplay

In particular, so called evocative or reactive gene-environment correlation

• Children elicit environmental experience due to their own genetically influenced traits (e.g., temperament)

Biological bases of temperament, or social competence …also likely that there are biological bases (linked?) that relate to how easy a child finds it to develop an attachment anyway…

Origins of individual differences in early attachment

Environment:

• Maternal deprivation hypothesis (Bowlby, 1953; 1959) suggests that infants deprived of continuous relationship with mother (6 months – 3 yrs) - insecurely attached. BUT used institutional children with complex developmental delays and little social contact

• Carer’s mind-mindedness (Meins et al., 2001). Theory-of-mind for the infant assumed to allow carer to make a subtle, wide & appropriate range of infant-directed responses and comments

Attachment in Adolescence?

Scott et al. (2011)

Secure attachment was associated with diverse measures of the current parent-adolescent relationship:

• monitoring, negative expressed emotion, directly-observed parental warmth and anger

• Attachment was also associated with psychological adjustment:

• Oppositional-defiant disorder symptoms, emotional and behavioural difficulties

• Secure attachment explained unique variance, independent of parenting

Adolescent attachment and weathering stress

• Who do older children turn to?

• parents were found to be the primary sources of separation distress and preferred bases of security for participants between the ages of 6 and 17

• Increased preference to seek out peers more than parents, for comfort and emotional support, between the ages of 8 and 14

Delgado et al (2022): secure attachment predicts and promotes the creation of affective relationships with peers and friends based on communication, support, intimacy, trust, and quality

McCarthy et al (2001): Higher levels of parental attachment in young adults -> lower perceived stress and greater confidence in their ability to manage negative moods

Attachment and Resiliency

Godor et al (2024)

• Examined the relationships between attachment and resiliency, and coping

• Secure attachment is associated with resilience (r = .20 to .57; Darling Rasmussen et al., 2019)

390 primary age children assessed

• Some evidence that:

• Anxious attachment -> lower sense of mastery and self-efficacy

• Avoidant-attachment -> lower sense of relatedness, no impact on emotional reactivity

O Captain, My Captain

The quality of teacher–child relationships can influence children’s social and cognitive development

The emotional quality of adult interactions with children – as well as their frequency and consistency – is important

• A supportive relationship with a teacher may compensate for “risk” by affording students alternative support and resources (Lynch & Cicchetti, 1992; Pianta, 1999)

Attachment and adult relationships

• Conger et al (2000): Adolescents who experienced nurturing and involved parenting in 7th grade, showed less hostility and more warm and supportive behaviour towards their romantic partners at 20yrs

• McLeod et al (2020): Maladaptive support behaviors were more likely to occur when one or both members of a romantic dyad had an insecure attachment

• Individuals with an avoidant or anxious attachment were more likely to provide poor quality support, and to interpret support negatively

Touch and well-being were positively associated, and attachment avoidance was associated with lower well-being and less frequent touch (Debrot et al., 2021)

• Touch was associated with greater well-being regardless of level of attachment avoidance, and less frequent touch mediated the negative association between attachment avoidance and well-being in most analyses