early attachments & later relationships

• Supporting evidence comes from Hazan & Shaver who found a positive correlation between attachment type and love experiences.

  Secure attachments were most likely to have good and longer lasting romantic experiences. Insecure avoidant tended to show jealousy and fear of intimacy while insecure resistants 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.
• However, not all evidence supports the existence of a correlation between early attachments and later development. Regensburg's longitudinal study followed individuals from one year of age. At age 16, attachment was assessed using the adult attachment interviews and there was no evidence of continuity.

  This means that it is not clear to what extent the quality of early attachment really predicts later attachments. Later development may be affected by other important factors such as parenting styles.
• Parenting style and innate temperament, where an infant's temperament may affect the way a parent responds and could explain their issues later on in life, are confounding variables which decrease the internal validity of research into the internal working model and also counters Bowlby's view that the internal working model causes later relationship outcomes.
• A limitation of the majority of the research into the internal working model is the self-report techniques used. Internal working models are unconscious and so we are not directly aware of their influence on us which means interviews or questionnaires give us indirect evidence about the model since participants can only self-report on their relationships using their conscious understanding of those relationships. Therefore, we cannot definitively conclude that early attachment affects later relationships.
• Furthermore, adult recollections of early life may lead to inaccurate recollections.

  This may be due to social desirability bias and retrospective recall which may compromise the validity of the research. Therefore, research using self-report techniques cannot strongly support the effects of early attachment on later relationships.