Attachment

• Attachment


  Lasting emotional tie between people such that the individual strives to maintain closeness to the object of attachment and acts to ensure the relationship continues
• Attachment

  • Individuals experience pleasure and security in the presence of others but anxiety and distress when they are gone
  • Emphasis not only on the physical presence but the "psychological availability"
• Ethology


  Study of animal behaviour focusing on importance of innate capacities
• Ethology Theory

  • Behaviour involves the formation of an attachment between infant and mother
  • Adaptive behaviour as promotes survival as leads to proximity between infant and mother
• Imprinting


  Forming attachment to the first person they see (e.g. ducks can be non-biological entities)
• Learning Theory

  Attachments are formed through classical associations when parents feed their children
• Harlow's Experiment

  • Baby monkeys fed from the wire mother but cuddled up to the soft cloth mothers and ran to her when scared
  • Attachment was not due to satisfaction of 'primary' needs (feeding)
  • Contact Comfort satisfied a primary need
• Bowlby's Attachment Theory

  Humans have an innate ability to bond with another early on in life
• Attachment Formation

  1. Phase 1: Pre-attachment (Birth - 2 months)

  2. Phase 2: Attachment-in-the-making (2-7 months)

  3. Phase 3: Specific Attachments (7 months - 2 years)

  4. Phase 4: Multiple attachments (8 months)

  5. Phase 5: Formation of a goal-corrected partnership (age 2+)
• Strange Situation

  Standardized lab experiment paradigm (18-20 months) to measure the organisation of attachment behaviours
• Attachment Types

  • Insecure-Avoidant
  • Secure
  • Insecure-Resistant/Ambivalent
  • Disorganised
• Strange Situation Results

  • Securely attached infants are more sociable with peers, better problem solvers, more persistent and enthusiastic, more socially competent, fewer behavioural problems, and more likely to remember positive emotional events
• Factors that shape attachment

  • Parental behaviour
  • Child characteristics
  • Family influences
  • Cultural differences
• Maternal sensitivity


  Ability to perceive and interpret children's attachment signals and to respond to them quickly and appropriately
• Maternal sensitivity is not a stable trait and changes from one age to another
• Temperament hypothesis


  Child's temperament plays a role in the attachment relationship
• The link between resistant attachment and neonatal irritability is unclear
• Maternal deprivation


  Separation/loss of mother also failure to develop attachment
• Privation


  Never been able to form any attachments
• Deprivation


  Loss or damage to an attachment
• Short-term effects of deprivation

  1. Protest (Crying)

  2. Despair (apathetic, no longer looking for caregiver, self-comforting)

  3. Detachment (if situation continues weeks or months, child unresponsive, may ignore caregiver on return)
• Bowlby found 86% of delinquent children had, before age of 2, been in foster homes or hospitals, often not visited by families
• Rutter found 2,000 boys aged 9-12 were four times more likely to become delinquent if separation related to family discord rather than through illness or death of their mother
• Gross early privation (psychological rather than nutritional) resulted in cognitive deficits at age 4 if it went on longer than the first 6 months of the child's life
• The evidence is clear: while there is a range of outcomes, early social experience by itself does not predestine the future
• The second stage is the attachment process, which begins around six months old when infants start showing signs of separation anxiety.
• The first stage is the pre-attachment period, where infants are not yet able to form attachments.
• Infants begin to show stranger anxiety between eight and twelve months old, where they prefer familiar people over strangers.
• Around nine months old, infants develop an understanding that objects continue to exist even when out of sight, known as object permanence.
• By ten months old, infants can distinguish familiar from unfamiliar people based on facial features.
• Neonatal

  The period immediately after birth, typically the first 28 days of an infant's life.
• Link between resistant attachment and neonatal irritability

  The relationship between an infant's irritability during the neonatal period and their ability to form secure attachments later in life.