Psychosocial Theories - Attachment

Personality and Psychosocial Theories

Metatheory Focus

Dispositional: Focuses on stable qualities in people.
Biological: Emphasizes biological processes as influences on behavior.
Psychoanalytic: Centers on the competition and conflict among internal psychic forces.
Neoanalytic: Highlights social relationships.
Learning: Deals with systematic behavior change resulting from experience.
Phenomenological: Focuses on subjective experience and the tendency toward self-actualization.
Cognitive Self-Regulation: Examines patterns in behavior arising from cognitive processes.

Perspectives and Focus

Trait: Stable qualities in people.
Motive: Motives that underlie behavior.
Inheritance and Evolution: Personality is genetically based.
Biological Process: Personality reflects the body and brain.
Psychoanalytic: Competition and conflict among internal forces.
Psychosocial: Social relationships are paramount.
Social Learning: Change as a result of experience.
Self-Actualization: Natural tendencies toward self-perfection.
Cognitive: The mind imposes organization on experience.
Self-Regulation: People are complex psychological systems that move toward goals.

Neoanalytic Theories

Focus on the Ego (self).
Centrality of relations with others for personality development.
Issues of ‘trust’ are significant.
Behavior/personality difficulties are often rooted in relationship issues.
- Patterns of relating to others are established in early childhood.
- These patterns recur throughout life.

Attachment Theory – History

John Bowlby (1950s) argued that the tendency to establish strong emotional bonds is an hereditary motivational system built into primate biology to ensure survival.
This tendency exists from early infancy through adulthood and into old age.
Infants are biologically programmed to seek:
- Proximity
- Promote a care-seeking-care-giving relationship with specific individuals who will provide protection and support.
Attachment theory is derived from ethology (animal behavior), developmental psychology, and psychoanalysis.

Harlow's Monkey Experiments

Harry Harlow conducted experiments with rhesus monkeys.
Infant monkeys were taken from their mothers shortly after birth and raised with two surrogate “mothers”:
- One made of bale-wire mesh.
- The other covered with terry cloth.
- Either “mother” could be equipped with a feeding nipple.
Inspired by Renee Spitz's work, which showed infants in orphanages withered away without loving attention.
Even when the bale-wire “mother” was the only one providing food, infants became more attached to the terry cloth “mother,” cuddling it, running to it when frightened, and using it as a base for explorations.
The experiment appeared to disprove the assumption that infant attachment to the mother is mainly a function of feeding.
It's important to note that experiments with monkeys cannot be directly extrapolated to human attachment.

The Strange Situation

Mary Ainsworth observed human mothers and babies at home and conducted experimental observations of the babies at 1 year old in a Baltimore lab.
Procedure:
- Mother and 1-year-old are together in a strange environment with toys to invite exploration.
- A stranger is introduced while the mother is still there, to see how the baby responds.
- Separation situation where the mother leaves the baby with the stranger.
- Observations are made of how the baby responds to the departure and, when the mother returns, how the baby responds to the reunion.
Since a stranger was present during the first departure, an episode in which the mother left the baby entirely alone was included to see whether the return of the stranger lessened distress.
Finally, another reunion with the mother.
The Strange Situation (Ainsworth et al., 1978) takes twenty minutes and is video-taped and rated, particularly focusing on the child’s response to separation and reunion.

Four Major Patterns of Response

Secure Attachment:
- Sought mothers when distressed.
- Seemed confident of her availability.
- Were upset when she left them.
- Eagerly greeted her upon her return.
- Were readily comforted by her embrace, then able to return to excited or contented play.
Insecure-Avoidant (‘A’):
- Seemed to depend less on the mother as a secure base.
- Sometimes attacked.
- Were far more clingy and demanding initially.
- Despite being openly upset by the mother’s departure, showed no interest in her when she returned.
- These children remained watchful of the mother and inhibited in play.
Insecure-Ambivalent (‘C’):
- Tended to be most overtly anxious of all children.
- Were also clingy and demanding.
- Like the secure, were upset when abandoned by the mother.
- Despite seeking contact when reunited, resisted by arching away or remaining limp in the mother’s embrace.
- Could not be soothed; continued to alternate between anger and clinging to the mother.
- Exploratory play was inhibited.
Insecure-Disorganized (‘D’):
- These children showed a diverse range of confused behaviors, including:
  - ‘Freezing’ OR
  - Stereotyped movements when reunited with parents.

Significance of the Strange Situation

Mothers of secure infants responded more promptly when they cried, looked, smiled at, and talked to their babies more and offered them more affectionate and joyful holding.
Caregivers of children later classified as insecure-avoidantly attached tended to interact less and in a more functional way.
Mothers of insecure-ambivalently attached children tended to ignore babies' signals for attention and generally be unpredictable in responsiveness.
Once researchers had identified groups of children with different styles of relating and knew what type of care-taking different groups had experienced, relating could be empirically studied.

Attachment Theory

The developing child builds up a set of models of relationship of ‘self’ and ‘others’ based on repeated patterns of interactive experience.
These form relatively fixed representational models which the child uses to predict and relate to the world (John Bowlby used the term “internal working models of attachment” (IWM)).
The measure of security of infant-mother attachment has demonstrated systematic associations between developments at the first year of life & later functioning.
Whether there has been attachment and the quality of attachment is central for later social relationships.
Key to secure attachment is active reciprocal interaction.
The quality of interaction matters more than quantity.
IWM’s are dynamic working models that not only represent the nature of past interactional experience but become a prototype for the formation of future relationships.
IWM’s built up in early years of life are enduring and difficult to modify via subsequent experience.
People who show patterns of change over time may be those who are insecure but have periods of security.
People can demonstrate different patterns for relationships in different contexts (close friends, groups).

Inter-generational Transmission

The quality of early child-rearing is also viewed as a pivotal influence on an adult’s ability to parent.
The parents' thoughts, fantasies, and feelings about their own childhood relationships (assumed to be represented mentally as IWMs) appear to determine parents’ behavior patterns with their children.
This, in turn, complements the child’s emerging sense of self in the relationship and the child’s system of attachment behaviors.

Three Central Features of Attachment

Proximity-seeking e.g., crisis
Secure base effect (exploring the world)
Separation protest (distress about potential loss)

Adult Attachment Patterns

Working models of relationships developed in childhood carry over into adulthood (Hazan and Shaver, 1987).
- Relationships of secure people:
  - More happy, friendly, trusting, longer-lasting.
  - Mental model of love: It’s real and it stays.
- Relationships of avoidant people:
  - Less accepting of lovers’ imperfections.
  - Mental model of love: Cynical, romantic love doesn’t last.
- Relationships of ambivalent people:
  - Obsessive, preoccupied, extremes of emotions, sexual attraction, and jealousy; love at first sight.
  - Mental model of love: Falling in love is easy, but doesn’t last.

Alternate Conceptualization of Adult Attachment

Bartholomew & Horowitz (1991) focused on models of ‘self’ and ‘other’ rather than a model of the relationship between oneself & another.
Two-dimensional approach:
- Self (positive vs. negative) / Other (trustworthy vs. not trustworthy)

	Trustworthy	Not Trustworthy
Positive	Secure (Secure)	Dismissing
Negative	Preoccupied (Ambivalent)	Fearful
Self\Other		(Hazan and Shaver labels)

Implications of Adult Attachment

Avoidant:
- Socialize less at work; greater desire to keep busy.
- Seek less support during stress; provide less support to stressed partners.
- Less responsive caregiving.
- Greater use of distancing coping.
Anxious Ambivalent:
- Unhappiness with job recognition and security.
- Higher levels of compulsive caregiving.
- Higher levels of self-criticism and wishful thinking coping.
Pairings:
- STABLE— Secure – Secure; Avoidant men – Ambivalent women
- UNSTABLE— Ambivalent – Ambivalent; Avoidant – Avoidant; Ambivalent men – Avoidant women

Attachment Patterns and the FFM

Strong links:
- Avoidants are introverted
- Secures are extraverted
- Ambivalents are high in neuroticism
Dimensions of attachment avoidance and attachment anxiety resemble introversion-extraversion and neuroticism.