CH16 Hu Be

Social Development

Learning Outcomes

• Explain the importance of attachment in early development.
• Describe the socialisation process.
• Describe the role of peer relationships in social development.
• Explain how social cognition develops across the life span.
• Distinguish between the different theories of moral development.
• Describe how social development continues throughout life.

Concept Map

• Social development includes attachment, socialisation, peer relationships and social cognition.

Attachment

• Attachment refers to the enduring emotional ties children form with their primary caregivers.
  • Includes a desire for proximity to an attached figure.
  • A sense of security derived from the person's presence.
  • Feelings of distress when the person is absent.
• Four patterns of infant attachment:
  • Secure: Seek comfort from the attachment figure.
  • Avoidant: Shut off their needs for attachment.
  • Ambivalent: Have difficulty being soothed.
  • Disorganised: Behave in contradictory ways that reflect their difficulty predicting or understanding how their attachment figures will behave.
• Attachment security in infancy predicts social competence and school grades from preschool through adolescence.

Socialisation

• Socialisation is the process by which children learn the rules, beliefs, values, skills, attitudes, and behaviour patterns of their society.
• Four parenting styles:
  • Authoritarian: High value on obedience and respect for authority.
  • Permissive: Impose minimal controls on their children.
  • Authoritative: Enforce standards but explain their views and encourage verbal give-and-take.
  • Uninvolved: Consistently place their own needs above the needs of their child.
• Cultural practices affect virtually every aspect of socialisation, such as the relative importance placed on independence and autonomy.

Peer Relationships

• Friendship patterns:
  • Develop substantially in childhood and adolescence.
  • Evolve from largely same-sex experiences involving mutual play.
  • Transition to more intimate interactions in adolescence.
• Parental behaviour with children and relationships with siblings contribute to a child's socialisation.

Development of Social Cognition

• Children develop in their social cognition, which is their understanding of themselves, others, and relationships over time.
• Throughout early childhood, children tend to think of themselves and others in relatively concrete ways, such as their age, gender, group membership, and possessions.
• Around age eight, they begin to think more about enduring personality attributes.
• By adolescence, social cognition is more subtle and abstract.
• Perspective-taking, which is the ability to understand other people's perspectives or viewpoints, increases steadily throughout childhood and adolescence.
• Gender constancy is the knowledge that a person's biological sex is generally fixed and permanent and is not altered by changes in appearance or activities.
• Gender identity is a person's internal sense of their gender and the binary categorisation of oneself as either male or female.
• Gender identities can be non-binary, and people can have gender identities outside the gender binary of male and female (e.g., gender fluid, agender, non-binary).

Moral Development

• Cognitive theories, including those of Piaget and Kohlberg, stress the role of thought and learning in moral development.
• Other theories, including the psychodynamic theory, emphasise empathy or feeling for another person who is hurting.
• Moral development probably reflects an interaction of cognitive and affective changes that allow children to understand and feel for other people as well as inhibit their own wishes and impulses.

Social Development Across the Life Span

• Erikson proposed a model of psychosocial stages which are stages in the development of the person as a social being.
  • At each of eight stages, the individual faces a developmental task, a challenge that is normative for that period of life.
    • Basic trust versus mistrust: Infants come to trust others or perceive the social world as hostile or unreliable.
    • Autonomy versus shame and doubt: Toddlers come to experience themselves as independent sources of will and power or feel insecure in their newfound skills.
    • Initiative versus guilt: Young children develop the capacity to form and carry out plans, but their emerging conscience can render them vulnerable to guilt.
    • Industry versus inferiority: School-age children develop a sense of competence but may suffer from feelings of inadequacy.
    • Identity versus identity confusion: The task in adolescence is to establish a stable sense of who one is and what one values.
    • Intimacy versus isolation: During young adulthood, the task is to establish enduring, committed relationships.
    • Generativity versus stagnation: Middle-aged individuals attempt to pass something on to the next generation.
    • Integrity versus despair: People look back on their lives with a sense of satisfaction or sadness and regret.
• 'Crises' in both adolescence and at midlife depend on individual differences and cultural and historical circumstances.
• Although older age inevitably involves many losses, the realities appear far better than the negative stereotypes of ageing seen in many technologically developed societies.

Central Questions

The nature of social development

• Genetics influence the way people develop and change in general and it also influences the way people differ from one another.

What are the roles of nature and nurture in social development?

• Consider how biology, culture and experience interconnect to shape the developing social person.

To what extent does social development depend on cognitive development?

Opening Case

• Raising children is a big challenge for everyone.
• The problem for parents is that there is no universal instruction manual on how to bring up kids, especially as they grow older and turn from loving youngsters into teenagers starting to assert their independence.
• Some parents are extremely strict and impose many restrictions.
  • Think of the movie Footloose where the local pastor leads the push to ban the town's teenagers from dancing within the city limits.
• Others have few rules and allow their children plenty of freedom.
  • Let's face it - how did Peter and Kate McCallister manage to leave their son Kevin behind in the movie Home Alone in the first place, let alone do it again in Home Alone 2?
• In between authoritarian and hands-off, there are many variations along the parental control continuum.
• But which is best?
• And how do different parenting styles impact the way children develop?

A comparison of differing parenting styles was the subject of an Australian television series that aired in 2021. The show, Parental Guidance, involved 10 sets of Australian parents with different parenting styles, including the following.

• Attachment parenting:
  • Involving early skin-to-skin contact after birth, breastfeeding, keeping the baby close in a sling and co-sleeping.
• 'French' parenting:
  • Emphasises clear boundaries between adults and children.
• Tiger parenting:
  • Involves an authoritarian style, where parents invest highly in their children's success, especially in their education.
  • This method was popularised by Chinese-American author Amy Chua (see Chua, 2011).
• Helicopter parenting:
  • Involves parents over-protecting or 'hovering' over their children to keep them safe.
• Free-range parenting:
  • Believes over-protection is not good for development and that children should be encouraged to roam freely' and engage in outdoor play unattended.
• Strict parenting:
  • Involves an authoritarian approach, where the parents are the boss, and their rules are strictly enforced (Francis, 2021).
• On the show, parents and their children were put through a series of challenges to compare the outcomes of the differing approaches.
  • This included situations such as whether a child would agree to go with a (pretend) stranger, or what would happen if children were left alone with no adult supervision for an evening with no rules.
• The show aired on a commercial network, so it was geared towards attracting viewers rather than scientifically addressing the issues.
  • However, it was praised for generating debate on important issues such as smacking children and managing screen time on devices (Francis, 2021).
• It is clear that parents take many different approaches to raising their children, and they all have their pros and cons.
  • However, an important question is why do different parents take different approaches?
  • For example, why do some take a very strict approach while others let their children have free rein?
• Are there innate differences between cultures?
  • As well as being one of the styles featured in Parental Guidance, the Asian 'Tiger parent phenomenon is also the subject of the 2020 book Aspiration and Anxiety: Asian Migrants and Australian Schooling by Christina Ho, which delves into the motivations that underpin the approach (Verghis, 2020).
  • Ho, an Associate Professor of Social and Political Sciences at UTS, says the Asian migrant juggernaut has fundamentally transformed Australian classrooms over the last 20 years.
  • For example, in New South Wales, just 5 percent of people have Chinese ancestry, but students with Chinese surnames comprise almost 25 percent of high achievers in the High School Certificate (Verghis, 2020).
  • Associate Professor Ho says children of Asian migrants are disproportionately successful in Australian schools, outperforming others in standardised tests and achieving higher rates of admission to university (Verghis, 2020).
• Is the reason simply cultural differences in approaches to parenting, especially around the importance of achieving highly in education?
  • 'It's just their culture', some non-Asian parents might say (Verghis, 2020).
  • Associate Professor Ho believes the answer is not that simple.
  • She says the twin forces of aspiration and anxiety give rise to the Tiger parent phenomenon (Verghis, 2020).
  • That is because many Asian migrants lack the 'cultural capital' that other people enjoy, such as local knowledge, contacts and social networks.
  • They fear their kids will be locked out of opportunities that others take for granted, so see educational achievement as the key to upward mobility and career advancement (Verghis, 2020).
• Whatever the motivations, parenting styles are one of the key early factors that influence our social development - changes: in interpersonal thought, feeling and behaviour throughout the life span - which is the focus of this chapter.
• We begin by discussing the earliest relationships - between an infant and their caregivers - and consider how, and how much, these relationships lay the groundwork for later relationships.
• Next, we examine how children learn the ways of their culture.
  • For example, how and when do children take on the attributes expected of their gender?
• Then we explore children's relationships with friends and siblings, their changing conceptions of themselves and others, and their developing capacity for moral judgement and action.
• We conclude by expanding the focus to the entire life span.
• Although the range of topics may seem enormous, what unites them is a focus on the types of relationships people form throughout life, from intimate attachments in infancy through to adulthood, to sibling and peer relationships; the development of beliefs and feelings about themselves and others; and the way these beliefs and feelings are expressed in different social contexts.
• Throughout, we will address two central questions.
  • The first, raised in chapter 15, has provided a consistent thread across psychological research for over a century: the question of nature and nurture.
    • What are the relative contributions of innate characteristics, culture and experience to social development?
    • How do evolutionary, biological and social pressures converge to create a social person?
  • The second question is what is the relationship between social development and cognitive development?
    • To what extent does the development of children's experience of friendship, morality or gender depend on their cognitive development?

16.1 Attachment

LEARNING OUTCOME 16.1 Explain the importance of attachment in early development.

• In the middle of the twentieth century, psychoanalysts observed that children reared in large institutional homes, with minimal stimulation and no consistent contact with a loving caregiver, often became emotionally unstable, lacking in conscience or mentally impaired.
  • Now, many of these children would be classified as suffering from reactive attachment disorder.
• These observations led to recognition of the importance of attachment, the enduring ties of affection that children form with their primary caregivers (Ainsworth & Bell, 1970; Bowlby, 1969).
  • Attachment includes a desire for proximity to an attachment figure, a sense of security derived from the person's presence and feelings of distress when the person is absent.
• Attachment is not unilateral; rather, it involves an interaction between two people who react to each other's signals.

MAKING CONNECTIONS

• Bowlby's model of attachment (discussed later in this section) relies on the concept of homoeostasis - the tendency of biological organisms to monitor variables relevant to survival, detect deviations from these goals (feedback) and respond with corrective mechanisms (chapter 13).
  • The child's goal is to remain physically close to the attachment figure.
  • When this goal is threatened, as when a toddler's mother leaves the room, the child experiences a feedback signal: distress.
  • Distress motivates the child to cry or search for their mother.
  • If either behaviour is successful, the child receives a sense of security that temporarily deactivates the attachment system.
• A similar system operates in adults.
  • For example, social anxiety is viewed as an interrupt mechanism, alerting individuals that they are behaving in ways that may jeopardise the degree to which they are included with (i.e., attached to) others.

Attachment in infancy

• For many years, psychoanalysts and behaviourists were in rare agreement on the origins of attachment behaviour, both linking it to feeding.
  • Psychoanalysts assumed that the gratification of oral needs led infants to become attached to people who satisfy those needs.
  • According to behaviourists, mothers became secondary reinforcers through their association with food, which is a primary (innate) reinforcer (chapter 9).
  • Unfortunately, the two theories were similar in one other respect: they were both wrong.
• Definitive evidence came from a series of classic experiments performed by Harry Harlow (Harlow & Zimmerman, 1959).
  • Harlow reared infant rhesus monkeys in isolation from their mothers for several months and then placed them in a cage with two inanimate surrogate 'mothers' (chapter 5).
  • One, a wire monkey that provided no warmth or softness, held a bottle from which the infant could nurse.
  • The other was covered with towelling to provide softness, but it had no bottle, so it could not provide food.
  • Baby monkeys spent much of their time clinging to the softer mother.
  • They would also run to the softer surrogate when they were frightened, but they virtually ignored the wire surrogate except when hungry.
  • Harlow's findings established that perceived security, not food, is the crucial element in forming attachment relationships in primates; he referred to the ties that bind an infant to its caregivers as contact comfort.
• Some infants and children are raised with little or no human contact.
  • These children, called feral children, basically raise themselves in the wild, often with the help of wild animals, and show predictable deficits in physical, social and language development.
    • They derive their name from the suggestion that some of these children are 'adopted' by wolves, or other animals such as monkeys or wild dogs, and raised with them.
      • Interestingly, these children also develop physical and behavioural traits of the animals that 'adopt' them.
  • One of the most famous instances of feral children is Victor of Aveyron (the Wild Boy of Aveyron).
  • There are about 100 further cases of feral children documented in recent history.
    • Among them is 'John' who survived for 3 years in the African jungle with the help of monkeys, after fleeing his home at the age of three when he witnessed his mother's violent murder at the hands of his father.
      • He was found at age six, and remarkably learned not only to speak but to sing and is now touring the world with a UK-based African choir.
  • John, and other children like him, are a testament to the resiliency of children and to the plasticity of neurological stages of development.
  • Sadly, however, many of these children do not go on to function successfully in society, and many spend their time in hospitals or treatment facilities without adjusting to life among humans. Indeed, many never learn to speak or even to eat "normally' (see DuBois, 2007).
  • This highlights the question of nature versus nurture.
    • Is it individual differences in the biological, physiological and genetic make-up of these children that allows some to re-socialise and prevents others?
    • Why do some of these children learn to talk and others not?
    • Answers to these questions can be considered by focusing on attachment theory.

Bowlby's theory of attachment

• John Bowlby (1969, 1973, 1982), who developed attachment theory, linked Harlow's findings to the psychodynamic literature on children reared in institutional settings.
  • Bowlby was both a psychoanalyst and an ethologist (a scientist interested in comparative animal behaviour), and he proposed an evolutionary theory of attachment.
  • He argued that attachment behaviour is prewired in humans, as is similar behaviour in other animal species, to keep immature animals close to their parents.
• Bowlby noted the relationship between human attachment behaviour and a phenomenon studied by the ethologist Konrad Lorenz (1935) called imprinting.
  • Imprinting is the tendency of young animals of certain species to follow an animal to which they were exposed during a sensitive period early in their lives.
  • According to Lorenz (1937), imprinting confers an evolutionary advantage:
    • A gosling that stays close to its mother or father is more likely to be fed, protected from predators and taught skills useful for survival and reproduction than a gosling that strays from its parents.
  • Bowlby argued that attachment behaviour in human infants, such as staying close to parents and crying loudly in their absence, evolved for the same reasons.
• Thus, when a child feels threatened, the attachment system "turns on', leading the child to cry or search for its attachment figure.
  • Once the child feels safe again, they are free to play or explore the environment.
  • The attachment figure thus becomes a safe base from which the child can explore (Ainsworth, 1979) and to whom they can periodically return for "emotional refuelling' (Mahler et al., 1975).
  • Toddlers who are playing happily often suddenly look around to establish the whereabouts of their attachment figures.
    • Once they locate their caregiver or even run to a comforting lap, they return to play, refuelled for the next period of time.
    • Later in life, a university student's phone calls home may serve a similar function.

The origins of attachment

• Attachment behaviour emerges gradually over the first several months of life, peaking some time during the second year and then diminishing in intensity as children become more confident in their independence (Ainsworth, 1967).
  • Among the first precursors of attachment is a general preference for social stimuli (such as faces) over other objects in the environment (Carver et al., 2003).
  • Visual recognition of the mother (the primary caregiver studied in most research) occurs at about three months (Olson, 1981); by five or six months, infants recognise and greet their mothers and other attachment figures from across the room.
• At six to seven months, infants begin to show separation anxiety, distress at separation from their attachment figures.
  • Separation anxiety emerges about the same time in children of different cultures, despite widely different child-rearing practices (Kagan, 1983; see also Kochanska et al., 2007).
  • Similarly, blind children show a comparable pattern (although the onset is a few months later), becoming anxious when they no longer hear the familiar sounds of their mother's voice or movements (Fraiberg, 1975).
  • These data suggest a maturational basis for separation anxiety.
  • In fact, separation anxiety emerges about the same time infants begin to crawl, which makes sense from an evolutionary perspective.
• Separation anxiety is increasingly being diagnosed in adults, especially those who experienced difficulties with attachment and separation anxiety in earlier life (see Coplan et al., 2011).
  • For example, Australian research has found relationships between early maternal attachment experiences, separation anxiety and depression (Eapen et al., 2014).
  • A sample of 57 Sydney mothers showed that lower oxytocin levels were associated with separation anxiety and anxious attachment styles, suggesting that biological processes may underpin attachment issues in the mother-infant relationship.
  • Related research has shown that individuals who exhibit clinical levels of anxiety in childhood are more likely to develop panic and other anxiety-related disorders as adults, and show greater resistance to treatment (see Milrod et al., 2014).
  • This has prompted a call for the inclusion of adult separation anxiety disorder in the DSM-5 (Bögels et al., 2013; Silove & Rees, 2014).
• Basic attachment mechanisms appear very similar in humans and other primates.

INTERIM SUMMARY

• Social development involves changes in interpersonal thought, feeling and behaviour throughout the life span.
• Attachment refers to the enduring ties children form with their primary caregivers; it includes a desire for proximity to an attachment figure, a sense of security derived from the person's presence and feelings of distress when the person is absent.
• John Bowlby, who developed attachment theory, argued that attachment, like imprinting (the tendency of young animals to follow another animal to which they were exposed during a sensitive period), evolved as a mechanism for keeping infants close to their parents while they are immature and vulnerable.

Individual differences in attachment patterns

• Bowlby observed that young children typically exhibit a sequence of behaviours in response to separations from their attachment figures.
  • They initially protest by crying or throwing tantrums.
  • However, they may ultimately become detached and indifferent to the attachment figure if they are gone too long.
• Attachment patterns.
  • Bowlby's colleague Mary Ainsworth recognised that children vary in their responses to separation: while some seem secure in their relationship with their attachment figure, others seem perpetually stuck in protest or detachment.
  • Ainsworth demonstrated these differences among infants using an experimental procedure called the Strange Situation.
    • In the Strange Situation, the mother leaves her young child (aged 12 to 18 months) alone in a room of toys.
    • Next, the child is joined for a brief time by a friendly stranger.
    • The mother then returns and greets the child (Ainsworth, 1973, 1979, 1991).
  • Ainsworth found that children tend to respond to their mothers' absence and return in one of three ways, one of which she called secure, and the others, insecure (see Oppenheim & Goldsmith, 2006 for a review).
    • Infants who welcome the mother's return and seek closeness to her have a secure attachment style.
    • Infants who ignore the mother when she returns display an avoidant attachment style, whereas infants who are angry and rejecting while simultaneously indicating a clear desire to be close to the mother have an ambivalent attachment style (also sometimes called anxious-ambivalent or resistant).
    • Avoidant children often seem relatively unfazed by their mother's departure, whereas ambivalent children become very upset.
  • Other research with high-risk infants, such as those who have been maltreated, has uncovered another variant of insecure attachment, called disorganised, or disorganised-disoriented (Lyons-Ruth et al., 1997; Main & Solomon, 1986; see also Lyons-Ruth & Spielman, 2004).
    • Children with a disorganised attachment style behave in contradictory ways, indicating helpless efforts to elicit soothing responses from the attachment figure.
    • Disorganised infants often approach the mother while simultaneously gazing away, or appear disoriented, as manifested in stereotyped rocking and dazed facial expressions.
    • Whereas the other attachment patterns seem organised and predictable, the disorganised child's behaviour is difficult to understand and typically comes in the context of parenting that is itself unpredictable, and hence difficult to understand from the infant's point of view (see Carlson, 1998).
    • Research suggests that at least 15 percent of infants from normal environments develop disorganised attachment behaviour, with much higher percentages likely in cases involving maltreatment (van Ijzendoorn et al., 1999).
  • Research consistently shows that some children who develop an insecure attachment style display psychopathology outcomes in later life (see Barlow et al., 2016).
    • Although parents and caregivers generally make every effort to provide the best home environments for their children, factors such as parental mental illness, lack of social support and other environmental influences can diminish the child's development of secure attachments.
    • For example, the majority of children in care have had more than one attachment figure in their lives, and unfortunately, the reality is that some experience neglect or maltreatment from early caregivers (Granqvist et al., 2017; McLean, 2016).
    • Fortunately, however, early intervention programs in infancy and early childhood can help minimise the influence of less than ideal child-rearing practices (Barlow et al., 2016).
  • Little research to date has focused on father-child attachment (Cassidy et al., 2013).
    • Meta-analytic results reveal positive associations between paternal sensitivity and secure father-child attachments (van Ijzendoorn & De Wolff, 1997; see also Brown et al., 2012); however, these associations are less modest than those evident for mother-child attachments.
    • Brown et al. (2012) showed that both father involvement and paternal sensitivity are particularly important to father-child attachment at both 13 months and 3 years of age.
    • Interestingly, there were no gender differences in attachment between fathers of boys and fathers of girls; however, fathers of girls showed greater sensitivity.
    • This research helps to inform family law legislation linked to increasing divorce rates and shared custody agreements with young children (see McIntosh, 2014).

APPLY AND DISCUSS

• Separation anxiety appears to rely on evolved mechanisms.
  • Under what environmental conditions might separation anxiety not emerge?
  • Would children in orphanages whose caregivers are inconsistent or who do not provide comfort develop separation anxiety?
• If the normal appearance of separation distress requires the presence of an attachment figure, can we call separation anxiety innate'?
  • Do innate capacities - sometimes or most of the time - require environmental input to develop?
  • Secure attachment is the most commonly observed attachment pattern around the world (see Main, 1990; van Ijzendoorn & Kroonenberg, 1988).
    • Nevertheless, the frequency of different styles of attachment differs substantially across cultures.
    • For example, infants reared on Israeli kibbutzim (collective living arrangements) are much more likely to have ambivalent attachments to their mothers than infants in the West.
  • Other research has highlighted how attachment theory is laden with Western values and meaning.
    • For example, Rothbaum, Weisz, Pott et al.'s (2000) influential work on cross-cultural studies of attachment showed three core hypotheses of attachment theory-caregiver sensitivity, competence and secure base--that are culturally specific.
    • Yeo (2003) later examined this theory with Australian Aboriginal children and showed cultural differences in the way these three core hypotheses are expressed.
    • Yeo argued that attachment in Aboriginal children should be defined in terms of the historical context, spirituality and cultural values of the Aboriginal people (see chapter 3).
  • Importantly, there is wide variation in the expression of attachments between parents and children across cultures.
    • Some cultures encourage independence and others promote interdependence (McLean, 2016).
    • Some cultures may even actively discourage dependence, appearing to those outside the culture as disinterested parents with infants who don't appear securely attached.
    • For example, Ryan (2011) suggests that Aboriginal communities teach young children to be self-reliant from an early age; they rely on peer support and extended family rather than parental caregiving for supervision.
    • This results in Aboriginal parent-infant dyads showing different attachment styles to those of non-Indigenous counterparts.
    • Aboriginal carers often use nonverbal gestures not directly observed by outsiders to respond to children's needs, and such methods are typically misunderstood and appear neglectful to non-Indigenous people.
    • However, this form of parenting should be viewed as a strength within Aboriginal child-rearing as it encourages attachments that are best suited to traditional Aboriginal kinship and cultural ties (Ryan, 2011; see also Lohoar et al., 2014).
  • Development is, notably, a lifelong process (see Noller et al., 2001).
    • However, an infant's initial emotional bond of attachment shared with a primary caregiver is of particular importance.
    • The initial infant-primary caregiver bond is pivotal in both promoting optimal relationship development during life and in maximising infant wellbeing (Ainsworth, 1991; Noller et al., 2001; Peterson, 2004).
    • Parental contributions to infants' emotional attachments have been widely studied, with Australian research (Harrison & Ungerer, 2002) showing that maternal sensitivity in the caregiving role is a key determinant of infant attachment security.
    • This research also considered how parental employment and use of childcare influence attachment formation, and a correlation between the timing of the mother's return to paid employment and attachment security was identified.
    • Australian mothers who had returned to work within five months of the birth and who were committed to their work while pregnant were more likely to have securely attached infants.

Internal working models of relationships

• Attachment does not just refer to a pattern of behaviour.
  • Bowlby proposed that infants develop internal working models, or mental representations of attachment relationships that form the basis for expectations in close relationships (Bowlby, 1969, 1982; Bretherton, 1990; Main, 1995; Stevenson-Hinde & Verschueren, 2002; see also Lamb, 2005).
    • For example, a child whose early attachment to their mother is marked by extreme anxiety resulting from inconsistent or abusive caretaking may form a working model of themself as unlovable or unworthy.
    • They may also see significant others as hostile or unpredictable.
    • Their behaviour will appear disorganised or disoriented because they cannot form a coherent working model or representation of their relationship with their mother that both makes sense and provides a feeling of security.

MAKING CONNECTIONS

• The concept of internal working models of relationships dovetails with other constructs psychologists have used to describe mental representations.
  • Mental models are representations of how things work (chapter 11).
  • Schemas are enduring ways of processing information about an object of thought, such as the self and relationships (chapters 10 and 20).
  • Object representations are representations of self, others and relationships, such as the malevolent representations of relationships that characterise individuals with borderline personality disorder, whose emotions tend to spiral out of control (chapters 14 and 18).
• The concept of internal working models may help explain why infants and toddlers who are secure with one caretaker may not be secure with another (Howes & Hamilton, 1992; Verscheuren & Marcoen, 1999).
  • A child's experience with one person, such as the mother, may feel secure, while another relationship (such as with a father or preschool teacher) may feel less comfortable or predictable because the child has different internal working models of the relationships.
  • The concept of internal working models may also help explain why attachment classification in infancy predicts not only social but cognitive variables years later, such as the ability to sustain attention: infants who feel safe and secure will have more freedom to explore t environment than insecure infants, whose time and attention are more likely to be consumed by attachment-related thoughts, feelings and motivations.

Implications of attachment for later development

• Attachment patterns that begin in infancy can persist and find expression in a wide range of social behaviours throughout the life span (Thompson, 2000; Waters et al., 2000).
  • Children rated avoidant in infancy tend to be described by their teachers as insecure and detached in preschool and to have difficulty discussing feelings about separation at age six.
  • In contrast, preschoolers who were securely attached as infants tend to have higher self-esteem, are more socially competent, show greater sensitivity to the needs of their peers and are more popular (see DeMulder et al., 2000; LaFreniere & Sroufe, 1985; Waters et al., 1979).
• Security of attachment in infancy predicts a range of behaviours as children grow older, from self-control and peer acceptance to competent behaviour in the classroom and academic achievement (Howes et al., 1998; Ruschena et al., 2005; Wong et al., 2002).
  • Children with a disorganised style in infancy tend to be rated by their teachers in early primary school as impulsive, disruptive and aggressive, particularly if they are also below average intellectually (Lyons-Ruth et al., 1997).
• Insecure attachment also negatively influences the quality of the child-teacher relationship.
  • For example, a longitudinal study by O'Conner and McCartney (2006) found that children who were insecurely attached at 36 months had lower quality relationships with their teachers than securely attached children at 54 months, in kindergarten and in first grade.
  • Conversely, those children secure in their attachments had higher self-esteem, were confident in their academic ability, were motivated to learn and had successful bonds with their teacher (O'Conner & McCartney, 2006).
• Individual differences in attachment style are also related to different patterns of response in everyday social interactions.
  • Using a diary methodology by which people describe their social interactions each day for a period of weeks, researchers found that securely attached individuals reported more satisfying daily interactions with others and felt that others were more responsive to them than insecurely attached individuals (Kafetsios & Nezlek, 2002).
  • Based on the results of this study, attachment styles affect not only long-term patterns of relating, but also daily satisfaction with those social interactions.
• The theory of internal working models helps make sense of why attachment security with parents predicts the quality of peer relationships years later, particularly close peers, as well as with later attachment figures, notably partners (Lieberman et al., 1999; see also Trebous et al., 2004).
  • Children who are secure with their parents have more positive expectations about what they can expect from relationships.
  • This security leads them to be more trusting and engaging with peers and lovers, who are then more likely to respond to them positively.
  • As a result, they then form more positive representations of peer and love relationships-creating a self-reinforcing cycle, in which positive initial working models foster good relationships, which maintain those models.

APPLY AND DISCUSS

• Research on attachment in infancy and early childhood has largely focused on patterns of attachment that children develop through interactions with their parents or other primary caregivers.
  • What role do you think close relationships with pets or the creation of imaginary friends might play in facilitating attachment behaviour in infants and young children?
  • Could children get needs for companionship and