influences of early attachment on later relationships

• Bowlby suggests that a babies first relationship to their primary attachment figure leads to a mental represenation of that relationship. This is the internal working model and it acts as a template for future childhood and adult relationships.
• securly attached babies go on to form stable relationships and frienships
• myron-wilson and smith assezxsed attachment type using a questionnnaire on 196 children ages 7-11 in the UK. secure attached children were unlikely to be involved in bullying, insecure avoidant were likely to be bullied and insecure resistant were likely to be bullies.
• internal working model affects most adult relationships, but in particular romantic relationships and parential relationships with their own children
• Hazan and Shaver did the love quiz, which looks at the association between attachment types and adult relationships. They analysed 620 replies from a love quiz in the newspaper. 3 sections, 1- assessing current relationships, 2- assessing previous relationships, 3- assessing attachment type.
• Hazan and Shaver found that 56% were securly attached, 25% were insecure avoidant and 19% were insecure resistant. Avoidant meant that you had jealous tendency’s and fear of intimacy. This suggests that patterns of attachment are reflected into romantic relatinoships.
• McCarthy studied 40 women who were assessed as babies what sort of attachment type they were, securely attached had stable relationships, avoidant had stuggled with intimacy in romantic relationships, resistant struggled to maintain frindships.
• Bailey et al. considered the attachment of 99 new mothers to their babies and their mothers and found that the attachment type between the 2 tends to be similar.
• a strength to researching the effects of early attachment is that there is research support. reviews of studies looking into this research have concluded that early attachment can predict later attachment and state of wellness, for example disorganised attachment is strongly associated with later mental disorders. Therefore secure attached babies have a significant advantage, whereas disorganised attached babies have a signficant disadvantage.
• HOWEVER, not all evidence supports the existence of teh close links between early attachment type and later realtionships. the extent to which early attachment determines later development is unclear
• a limitation to research on the effects of early influence is that early attachment is assessed retrospectivly. most of the research isnt longitudinal and therefore they ask participants about teh relationship with their parents. This lowers validity becuase you are expecting an accurate and truthful perception recall from participants and its hard to see whether its erly attachment or adult attachment which is being assessed. Therefore the measures of attachment may be confounded with other factors, making the results meaningless.
• another limitation is teh development of existing confounding variables. some studies assess infancy attachment but the association of early attachment and adult attachment may be affected by confounding variables. we can never be entirely sure that its early attachment and not other factors influencing later development