AO1

• role of IWM

  • early attachment provides a blueprint for later attachment
  • affects relationships and future parenting
  • infants learn qbout relationships from experience - what they are like and how partners behave towards one another
• Relationships in early childhood

  • Kerns - attachment type is associated with the quality of peer relationships in childhood, insecure attached infants struggle and securely attached infants go on to form the best quality friendships
  • Myron-Wilson and Smith - assessed 196 childrens attachment type and bullying by questionnaire and found that:
  • insecure-avoidant infants are more likely to be bullied
  • insecure-resistant infants are most likely to be bullies
  • secure not involved
• Hazan and Shaver - procedure

  • love quiz published in a small town paper that asked questions about: current attachment experiences, attachment history and assessing attachment type by responding to one of three statements that best desrvubed them
  • questions included attitudes to love to assess the IWM
  • analysed 620 responses (205 men, 415 women)
• Hazan and shaver - findings

  • 56% secure attachment, 25% avoidant attachment and 19% resistant attachment
  • securely attached adults - certain beliefs (love is enduring), reported certain experiences (eg mutual trust) and were less likely to have been divorced
  • insecurely attached adults - felt true love was rare, fell in and out of love easily, found relationships less easy and were more likely to be divorced
• Adulthood relationships - parenting

   

  • the IWM affects the ability to parent
  • Bailey et al - continuity of attachment type between generations
  • assessed 99 mothers to their infants and to their own mothers using the strange situtation and interviews 
  • found that the majority of the mothers had the same attachment type with their infant as thier own mother 
• IWM and mental health

  • lack of an attachment during the critical period in develoment - lack of an IWM
  • attachment disorder: no preferred attachment figure, inability to interact and relate to others is evident before 5 and experience of severe neglect or change in caregivers 
  • is now a distinct psychiatric disorder in the DSM (diagnostic & statistical manual of mental disorders)