Early attachment on later relationships

• Describe the internal working model in relation to future relationships

  • A baby whose first experience is of a loving relationship with a reliable caregiver will tend to form loving functional relationships
  • A child with bad experiences of their first attachment will likely expect poor treatment or treat others poorly in relationships
  • This may mean they struggle to form relationships in the first place or they may struggle to act appropriately in these relationships
• Describe 2 studies into relationships in childhood

  1. Kerns: securely attached babies tend to form best quality childhood friendships- insecurely attached babies may struggle to make or keep friends
  2. Wilson and Smith: assessed attachment type and bullying involvement using standard questionnaires in 196 children aged 7-11 in London- secure children were unlikely to be involved in bullying at all , insecure-avoidant were most likely to be the victims of bullying and insecure-resistant were most likely to be the bullies
• Describe the procedure and findings of McCarthy's study

  • studied 40 adult women who had been assessed when they were babies to determine their early attachment type
  • Findings: securely attached babies had best adult friendships and romantic relationships , insecure resistant had difficulties maintaining friendships and insecure-avoidant struggled with intimacy in romantic relationships
• Describe Bailey et al. study

  • wanted to test the theory that patterns of attachment are passed on through generations
  • Considered attachments of 99 mothers to their own mothers as well as their babies.
  • Mother-baby attachment was assessed using the strange situation
  • Mother's attachment to their own mother was assessed using interviews
  • Majority of women had the same attachment classification to their babies and to their mothers
• Strength of research into influence of early attachment on later relationships

  Reviews of evidence of studies on early attachment have consistently predicted later attachment, emotional well-being and attachment to own children
• Relationship between early attachment and later development

  • Depends on attachment type
  • Depends on aspects of later development
• Insecure-avoidant attachment

  Conveys fairly mild disadvantages for aspects of later development
• Disorganised attachment

  Strongly associated with later mental disorder
• Secure attachment

  Appears to convey advantages for future development
• Disorganised attachment

  Appears to seriously disadvantage children
• Describe a limitation of research into early attachments

  Validity issues with retrospective studies

  • most research assessed retrospectively-causes 2 problems:
  • relies on honesty and accurate perception of ppts
  • difficult to decide whether early attachment or adult attachment is being assessed
• Describe a limitation of research into early attachments

  Confounding variables

  • some studies do study attachment in infancy-giving validity
  • but even these studies may have validity problems because associations between attachment quality and later development may be affected by confounding variables
  • e.g parenting style affects both factors, genetically-influenced personality also affects both factors
  • we cannot be sure early attachment is affecting later development and not some other factor