Early Attachment on Later Relationships

• internal working model

  • a mental representation formed through a child's early experiences with their primary caregivers
  • this influences how the child interacts and builds relationships with others as they grow
  • quality of the child's first attachment is crucial which leads to the continuity hypothesis
  • children who were insecure avoidant will be uninvolved or emotionally close
  • insecure resistant children will be controlling and argumentative
  • these will then struggle to form relationships or behave inappropriately when they have them
  • internal working model can have a massive impact on childhood relationships/bullying, parent/child relationships (parenting styles) and romantic relationships as adults
• attachment types and childhood peer relationships

  • securely attached infants form the best quality friendships, are rated highest for social competence later in childhood, were less isolated, more popular and more empathetic
  • insecurely attached infants struggle and have friendship difficulties
  • explained by the internal working model - securely attached infants have higher expectations than others, are friendly and trusting, which would enable easier relationships with others
  • Myron Wilson and Smith (1998) found that insecure-avoidant infants are the most likely to be bullied while insecure-resistant infants are most likely to be bullies
• effects on romantic attachments as adults

  • McCarthy (1999) studied 40 women and those assessed as securely attached infants and had the best adult friendships and adult relationships. Adults classified as insecure-resistant as infants had problems maintaining friendships, whilst insecure-avoidant struggle with intimacy in romantic relationships
• Hazan and Shaver (1987)

  • correlation between the infant's attachment type and their future approach to romantic relationships
  • analysed 620 replied to a "love quiz" printed in an American local newspaper
  • Q1,2,3 assess attachment history
  • Q4,5,6 assess adult attachment types
  • Q7,8,9 assess mental models of relationships
  • 56% were securely attached, 25% insecure avoidant, 19% insecure resistant (consistent with Ainsworth)
  • positice correlation between attachment type and love experiences
  • secure attachments were most likely to have good and longer lasting romantic experience
  • insecure avoidant tended to reveal jealous and fear intimacy
  • insecure resistant tended to fall in love easily but found it difficult to find true love
  • these findings suggest that patterns of attachment behaviour are reflected in adult romantic relationships
• evaluation

  • deterministic
  • Zimmerman (2000) assessed infant attachment types in adolescent attachment to parents and there was very little relationships between the quality of attachment to parents and there was very little relationships between the quality of attachment - IWM lacks validity and reliability
  • lots of research uses self-report techniques on adults and to ask people to assess the quality of their relationships - demand characteristics and lying
  • research has found associations between quality of later relationships and infant attachment types the implication is that infant attachment types cause the quality of later relationships