Later

• Hazan and Shaver's 1987 love quiz found correlations between adult and child attachment types
• McCarthy's 1999 study found adults with long-lasting and secure animal friendships and romantic relationships were securely attached in infancy
• Kagan's temperament hypothesis suggests infant and adult relationships are due to inherited temperament, not attachment
• Adult early attachment research is correlational so it's impossible to establish a cause and effect relationship between early childhood attachment and later adult relationship styles
• Internal working model


  Schema about how relationships work based on experience with primary caregiver
• Infant's internal working model


  Influences later childhood and adult relationships
• Attachment styles


  • Secure
  • Insecure avoidant
  • Insecure resistant
• Secure infant attachment


  Leads to social abilities needed to develop secure adult and childhood relationships
• Insecure infant attachment


  Leads to struggles to have effective later relationships
• Securely attached adults


  Believe love is long-lasting, report more happiness and less loneliness than insecure adults
• McCarthy's research found secure infants grew into adults with long-lasting and secure relationships, while insecure infants had poor relationships
• Parenting styles low in warmth and high in neglect


  Linked to children assessed as bullies
• Parenting styles focused on punishments


  Linked to children assessed as victims
• Good early relationship with father


  Leads to more friends when child gets to nursery
• Research on link between early and later attachments relies on correlational data, so cannot establish cause and effect
• Kagan's temperament hypothesis argues babies are born with an inherited high or low reactive temperament, which influences their later relationship styles
• Kerns- quality of friendship


  Secure had the best quality friendships whilst insecure had more difficulties
• Myron-Wilson + Smith - bullying


  standard questionnaire of 196 children found:

  • secure = not involved in bullying
  • insecure a = bullied
  • insecure r = bully others
• Hazan and Shaver - love quiz


  620 replies to local newspaper

  56% = secure - long lasting

  25% = Insecure A - jealous and fear of intimacy

  19% = Insecure R
• Fearon and Roisman - early attach


  consistent predictor of well-being and attach to own children in the future
• Disorgantised attachment

  Strongly associated with future mental disorder
• Deterministic

  • believe bad attach inevitably leads to bad parenting in the future
  • there are many cases of insecurely attached children growing up and having stong happy relationships
• Simpson et al - longitudinal study


  from infancy to adulthood attach type and romantic relationships were assessed

  secure = emotionally expressive and more attached
• Retrospective studies

  relies on honesty and accuracy

  hard to check adult attachment or early attachment
• Confounding variables

  Parenting styles

  genetically influenced personality - kagan
• Clarke + Clarke - probabilistic insecure


  attchment type doesn't increase risk

  no one is doomed to be a victim of bullying
• Deterministic continued

  knowing attach type helps intervene BUT pessimism can lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy
• Fraley - early attach and success 


  conducted a meta-analysis of studies- found correlations of up to 0.50 between early attachment types and later relationships

  shows varying predictability
• Fraley - 0.5 correlation


  suggests that some attachment types are more unstable over time

  reduces the confidence in Bowlby's theories of attachment and continuity