Chapter 11 - Attachment to Others and Development of the Self

The Caregiver-Child Attachment Relationship

• Infants require more than their physical needs met to thrive in the world.

Attachment Theory

• Attachment theory is the theory that posits that chidren are biologically predisposed to develop attachments to caregivers as a means of increasing the chances of their own survival (John Bowlby’s theory).
• Secure base refers to the idea that the presence of a trust caregivers provides an infant with a sense of security that lets the child safely explore the environment.
• Attachment enhances the infant’s chance of survival, helps the child feel emotionally secure so they can explore without fear, and serves as a form of co-regulation which helps children manage their levels of arousal and their emotions.
• The child develops an internal working model of attachment which is the child’s representation of the self, attachment figures and relationships in general in their head.
• If caregivers are accessible and response, young children expect interpersonal relationships to be gratifying and feel worthy of love.
• If figures are opposite of that however, children develop negative perceptions of relationships with others and themselves.
• Children’s internal working models of attachment are believed to influence their overall adjustment, social behaviour, perceptions of others, and development of their self-esteem and sense of self.

Measurement of Attachment Security

Ainsworth’s Strange Situation Procedure

• Mary Ainsworth provided empirical support for Bowlby’s theory, emphasizing the concept of the primary caregiver as a secure base.

• She came to the conclusion that the extent to which an infant can use the caregiver as a secure base and how the infant reacts to brief separations and reunions provides insight into the quality of the infant’s attachment to the caregiver.

• The Strange Situation is a procedure developed by Ainsworth to assess infants’ attachment to their primary caregiver.

  • Through this, Ainsworth identified three attachment categories, and that children can have different attachment with different caregivers.
  1. The first is secure attachment which is when infants have a positive and trusting relationship with their attachment figure. They might be upset when caregiver leaves and may be happy when they return.
  2. The second is insecure/resistant. In this one, infants are often clingy and tend to get very upset when the caregiver leaves, and both seek comfort and resist efforts by the caregiver to comfort them.
  3. The third is insecure/avoidant where children seem indifferent towards their caregiver and may even avoid them. If the infant gets upset when left alone, they are easily comforted by a stranger as by a parent.
  4. A small percentage do not fit into any of these categories and they are categorized as having a disorganized/disoriented attachment. It is a type of insecure attachment where children have no consistent way of coping with the stress of the procedure, and their behaviour is confused and they often appear disoriented.

Development of Attachment in Infancy and Toddlerhood

• There is similarity between infant’s behaviour in the Strange Situation and their behaviour at home.
  • Ex. securely attached infants like physical contact more, are less fussy, and use their mothers as a secure base for exploration more.
• The Strange Situation remains the standard means of measuring infant’s attachment security, but it has its flaws.
  • Needs a lot of resources, must be conducted in a lab with highly trained staff, and some argue attachment security should be measured along multiple continuous dimensions.

Sources of Individual Differences in Attachment Styles

Parenting and Attachment Styles

• Parent behaviour is a strong predictor of children’s attachment styles.
• Parental sensitivity is caregiving behaviour that involves warm and responsiveness to children when they need help or are in distress.
• The mothers of insecure/resistant infants tend to be inconsistent in early caregiving, and mothers of insecure/avoidant infants tend to be indifferent and emotionally unavailable.
• Mothers of disorganized/disoriented infants exhibit abusive, or frightening behaviour.
• What constitutes sensitive and responsive parenting differs by cultural group.
• Secure attachments are more likely when parents display sensitivity but children still develop secure attachments to parents when they are not consistently sensitive.

Genetic Influences

• Epigenetic effects play a role in the expression of attachment behaviour.
• Certain genes are associated with disorganized/disoriented attachment when infant is in a stressful situation but are associated with greater attachment security in a less stressful context.
  • Studies like this highlight the concept of differential suspectibility which is that certain genes result in children being differently susceptible to the quality of their rearing environment.
• Links between attachment security and genetic makeup have been found to last into childood.

Cultural Variations in Attachment Styles

• Attachment behaviours are similar in different cultures.

Attachment and Social-Emotional Development

• Children’s attachment status has been found to predict later social-emotional development.
• Securely attached infants experience better adjustment and more social skills than insecurely attached children.
  • This may be because children with secure attachment are more likely to develop positive and constructive internal working models of attachment which affects how they see others and themselves and essentially sets them up for success.
• Children who experience supportive parenting are associated with secure attachment and learn it is acceptable to express emotions in an appropriate way and emotional communication is always important, but nonresponsive parents teach children to inhibit emotinal expressiveness and to not seek comfort from other people.
• Securely attached children have more harmonious relationships with peers, are higher in self-regulation sociability and social competence, are less aggressive, and undrestand others’ emotions better than those were were not.
  • They also report more positive emotion and exhibit normal patterns of reactivity to stress.
• It is not yet clear if having one secure attachment (instead of two) buffers against other types of negative outcomes (anxiety, depression…) or problems in interpersonal relationships..

The Self

Self-Concept

• Self-concept is a system made up of one’s thoughts and attitudes about oneself.
• It consists of one’s own physical being, social characteristics, and internal characteristics.
• The development of the self is important because the way individuals’think of themselves influences their overall feelings of well-being and self-confidence when faced with external criticism.
• Children’s self-concept develops primarily through interactions with people in their environments.

Self-Concept in Infancy

• Self-concept starts as an appreciation of one’s physical self, which involves differentiating themselves from the environment by realizing some things are always present while some things come and go.
• Piaget and Vygotsky argue children learn by interacting with their environments & infants learn through experience that they can affect their environments.
• Self-concept becomes more distinct at around 8 months of age.
• The development of self-concept is the first necessary step in the development of attachment to a caregiver.
• By around 15 months, children can distinguish themselves and others by both gender and age.
• Cultural contexts can influence how children think about themselves and their environments.
• By age 2 many children recognize themselves in photographs and during the 3rd year, their self-awareness becomes quite clear.

Self-Concept in Childhood

• Sense of self in childhood is largely a social construction based on the direct and indirect observations and evaluations of others, particularly those of caregivers.
• Children ages 3-4 understand themselves in terms of concerete characteristics related to physical attributes, physical abilities, psychological traits, preferences, and possessions.
• Their self-appraisals are unrealistically confident because of cognitive limitations making them think they are what they want to be.
• Children refine their conceptions of self as they engage in social comparison in elemetary school (the process of comparing aspects of one’s own characteristics, behaviours and possessions to evaluate oneself).
• By middle to late elementary school, children’s conceptions of self are more integrated and cover broad things.
• The changes in older children’s sense of self reflects cognitive advances in their ability to use higher-order concepts that integrate more specific behavioural features of the self (being able to relate being popular to several behaviours).
  • This allows older children to construct more global views of themselves and to evaluate themselves as a person overall, which reuslts in a more balanced and realistic assessment of the self but can result in feelings of inferiority and helplessness.
• Children at this age are vulnerable to low self-esteem if others view them negatively or as less competent than their peers.

Self-Concept in Adolescence

• Adolescents think of themsleves in terms of abstract characteristics that encompass a variety of concrete traits and behaviours, developing multiple self (one with parents, one with friends, one in school, one at a job).
• Initially adolescents may lack the ability to integrate these different selves into a whole, resulting in internal conflict, but as they develop they can appreciate that they can act differently in different situations and still be the same person.
• Young people’s concern over their social competence and social acceptance intensifies in early adolescence.
• Adolescents can think of themselves in a variety of selves depending on the context.
• Personal fable is a form of egocentrism that involves beliefs in the uniqueness of one’s own feelings and thoughts.
  • Ex. “but you don’t know how it feels!”
  • This kind of egocentrism causes many adolescents to be preoccupied with what others think of them (having an imaginary audience).
  • This has been found to become stronger across adolescence for boys but not girls.
• In middle teens adolescents begin to agonize over contradictions in behaviour and characteristics and become more introspective and concerned with the question “who am I?”.
• In the late adolescence and early adulthood, the individual’s conception of self becomes more integrated and less determined by what others think.
• Older adolescent’s conceptions of self reflect internalized personal values, beliefs, and standards, and are more likely to have the cognitive capacity to integrate opposites of contradictions in self.
  • Variations in behaviour → “adaptive”, changes in emotions → “moody”.
  • More likely to view contradictions and inconsistencies are a normal part of being human.
• Whether older adolescnets can do this or not depends on the help they recieve from their environment and their own cognitive capacities.

Self-Esteem

• Self-esteem is a child’s overall subjective evaluation of their worth and the feelings they have about that evaluation.
• Individuals with high self-esteem feel good about themselves and hopeful whereas those with low self-esteem tend to feel wortheless and hopeless.
  • Low self-esteem is associated with anxiety, depression and bullying or being a victim of bullying.
• High-self esteem and narcissism has been associated with especially high levels of aggression in young adolescents.

Sources of Self-Esteem

• It is not constant and varies by developmental stage.
• Physical attributes are linked with it.
• Gender is another source (boys tend to have higher overall self-esteem than girls, but females have higher self-esteem than males in certain domains).
• The approval and support children receive from others is perhaps the most important influence on children’s self-esteem.
• Parent’s behaviour with and discipline of their children affect the children’s self-esteem (positively when they are supportive and accepting, negatively if they belittle or reject unacceptable behaviour).
• Parents can undermine children’s self-esteem by relying on social comparison to motivate, and can give unrealistically high self-esteem by praising too often.
• Children’s self-esteem is increasingly affected by peer acceptance over the course of childhood (how peers see them in various areas and how peers respond to them).
• Self-esteem can also be affected by their school and neighbourhood environments.
• Transition to junior high or middle school forces students to enter a new group of peers and go from the top of one school’s order to the bottom of another’s. In poor overcrowded urban schools, young adolescents often do not recieve the attention, support and friendship they need to do well, but support from teachers does promote higher self-esteem.
• Aspects of the neighbourhoods adolescents live in has been linked with self-esteem due to high levels of stress, prejudice and inadequate material and psychological resources.

Culture and Self-Esteem

• In various cultures, the sources, form and function of self-esteem may be different and the criteria used to evaluate themselves may vary accordingly.
• Scores on measures of self-esteem vary considerably across cultures due to to cultural norms.
• Culture does not appear to be a factor in gender differences related to self-esteem, but gender differences in self-esteem were largest in countries where women officially have the same freedoms as men rather than in highly patriarchal countries where gender roles are more restrictive.

Identity

• Identity is a definition of the self that is often externally imposed through membership in a group.
• Ex. student, child of someone, grandchild, friend, cowowrker, teammate, member of a religous group.
• Adolesccence is the period where children appreciate their multiple identities and begin to forge new and distinct ones.
• Identity achievement is an integration of various aspects of the self into a coherent whole that is stable over time and across events.
• After Erikson published this theory that all adolescents experience an identity crisis in part as a means of separating from their parents, some rejected it.
• James Marcia said adolescent’s identiy development is based on where an individual falls on the dimentions of identity exploration and identity commitment.
• According to him, the individual is classified into 1 of 4 categories of identity status: identity achievement, moratorium, identity foreclosure and identity diffusion.
• The modern conception of identity achivement aligns with Erikson’s original description: the individual has explored potential identities and has decided on a consolidated one (end point).
• The other three states in Marcia’s theory represent those who could have reached identity achivement but didn’t.
• Those in moratorium are exploring possible commitments to identities but have not commited to one.
• Identity foreclosure is for those who have committed too early to an identity before engaging in any real exploration.
• Identity diffusion is the period where the individual does not have firm commitments and are not making progress towards developing them.
• Over the course of adolescences and early adulthood, individuals generally progress slowly towards identity achivement: diffusion → foreclosure → achivement or diffusion → moratorium → foreclosure → achievement.
• The identity status of adolescents and young adults is related to their adjustment, social behaviour, and personality with identity achivement beign closely associated with mental health and positive social outcomes.
• Adolescents who experience warmth and support from parents tend to have a more mature identity and less identity confusion.
• Youth who are subject to parental psychological control tend to explore in breadth and are lower in making commitment to an identity.
• Identity formation is also influenced by both the larger social context and the historical context.

Ethnic and Racial Identity

• Ethnic and racial identity is the beliefs and attitudes an indvidual has about the ethnic or racial groups they belong to.
• Ethnicity refers to the relationships and experiences a child has that are linked with their cultural ancestry, religion, or native language.
• Race refers to physical characteristics, most commonly skin colour.
• Race is a social construct as there is no genetic basis for there being separate “races”.
• Children have different understandings of their ethnic and racial identity at different points of their development.
• By early school years, children know the common characteristics of their ethnic or racial group and start to have feelings about being members of the group and may have begun to form ethnically based preferences regarding foods, holidays, language use…
• Children tend to identiy themselves according to theri ethnic/racial group between the ages of 5 and 8.
• By late elementary school, minority children often have a positive view of their ethnic or racial group.
• Family and larger social environment play a major role in the development of children’s ethnic and racial identity thorugh teaching them about strengths and unique features of their culture and instilling them with pride.
• The issue of ethnic or racial identity becomes more central in adolescence as young people begin actively exploring their multiple identities.
  • Minority-group members may be faced with difficult decisions to decide to which degree they will adopt values of their ethnic group or those of their dominant culture which is espeically difficult for children of immigrants who must adjust behaviours and values from their new culture as they take on some behaviours and values of their new culture (acculturation).
• Research suggests that higher levels of ethnic and racial identity are generally associated with hig self-esteem, well-being and low levels of emotional and behavioural problems.
• Establishing a clear ethnic identification may be more difficult nad less consistent for multi-ethnic or multi-racial youth.
• In some cases, youth develop a bicultural identity that includes a comfortable identification with both the majority culture and their own ethnic culture.
• Bicultual identity can be associated with lower levels of some strengths that are part of successful identity development, such as certain traditional values as well as fidelity and wisdom.
• The study of racial and ethnic identities has almost entirely focused on children in racial or ethnic minority families.
• Although discrimination can have a negative effect on adolescent’s self-esteem, how ethnic minority children and adolescents think about themselves is influenced much more strongly by acceptance from their family, neighbours, and friends than by reactions from strangers and society.

Sexual Identity

• Sexual identity is one’s sense of oneself as a sexual being.
• It includes sexual orientation which is an individual’s romantic or erotic attraction to people of the opposite gender, same gender, both or neither.
• Sexual identity is separate from gender identity which is an individual’s awareness of themselves as a male, a female, nonbinary, or other.
• Puberty is the most common time for youth to begin experience feelings of sexual attraction to others.
• Sexual orientation is at least partly hereditary as identical twins are more likely to have similar sexual orientations than fraternal twins.
• The majority of addolescents are heterosexual.
• The minority status of non-heterosexual youth has led to concern about the well-being of sexual-minority youth (young people who experience same-sex attractions).
• Sexual-minority youth and adults face discrimination in law and in practice and are frequent targets for harrassment and violence.
• They often feel “different” and even display cross-gender behaviours from an early age
• most participants of a study say they experienced their first same-sex attraction between 10-15 but didn’t label themselves as queer until after age 15.
• Disclosure of sexual orientation didn’t occur until after age 20 likely reflecting the growing acceptance of queer identities in U.S. society.
• Females are more likely to describe themselves as bisexual or “mostly heterosexual” than males.
• Male youth who have engaged in same-sex sexual experiences shown an increasing preference for males from adolescence to early adulthood.
• Although many parents react in a supportive or slightly negative manner to children’s coming out, it is sadly not unusual for them to respond with anger, disappointment and denial, leading to sexual-minority youth to have higher reported rates of attempted suicide than heterosexual peers.
• Victimization and harrassment by peers and others in the community are commonly experienced by sexual-minority youth.
• The lives of sexual-minority youth are strongly affected by their sexual identities and related concerns may prevent them from focusing on the day-to-day issues that concern most adolescents like grades, college and money.
• Sexual-minority children are more prone to experience depression, low-self esteem, low feelings of control and report higher levels of drug usage than other youth possibly because of being kicked out because of their identity.
• Sexual-minority youth of minority race or ethnic status are a special source of concern given they may experience discrimination on two fronts which increases risk for mental health problems, and health-related problems.
• Sexual-minority children are developmentally indistinguishable from heterosexual peers because of increasingly positive messages and portrayals in media.

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