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While navigating the treacherous world of dating, the concept of “attachment theory” often crops up. You can identify your own attachment style by taking online quizzes like those used to identify the Enneagram or the Myers-Briggs personality types. Unlike those quizzes, however, the theory of attachment styles is widely accepted in the academic psychology community…….Continue reading….
Source: Allure
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Critics:
The attachment behavioural system serves to achieve or maintain proximity to the attachment figure. Pre-attachment behaviours occur in the first six months of life. During the first phase (the first two months), infants smile, babble, and cry to attract the attention of potential caregivers. Although infants of this age learn to discriminate between caregivers, these behaviours are directed at anyone in the vicinity.
During the second phase (two to six months), the infant discriminates between familiar and unfamiliar adults, becoming more responsive toward the caregiver; following and clinging are added to the range of behaviours. The infant’s behaviour toward the caregiver becomes organized on a goal-directed basis to achieve the conditions that make it feel secure.
By the end of the first year, the infant is able to display a range of attachment behaviours designed to maintain proximity. These manifest as protesting the caregiver’s departure, greeting the caregiver’s return, clinging when frightened, and following when able. With the development of locomotion, the infant begins to use the caregiver or caregivers as a “safe base” from which to explore.
Infant exploration is greater when the caregiver is present because the infant’s attachment system is relaxed and it is free to explore. If the caregiver is inaccessible or unresponsive, attachment behaviour is more strongly exhibited. Anxiety, fear, illness, and fatigue will cause a child to increase attachment behaviours. After the second year, as the child begins to see the caregiver as an independent person, a more complex and goal-corrected partnership is formed.
Children begin to notice others’ goals and feelings and plan their actions accordingly. Pivotal aspects of attachment theory include the observation that infants seek proximity to attachment figures, especially during stressful situations. Secure attachments are formed when caregivers are sensitive and responsive in social interactions, and consistently present, particularly between the ages of six months and two years.
As children grow, they use these attachment figures as a secure base from which to explore the world and return to for comfort. The interactions with caregivers form patterns of attachment, which in turn create internal working models that influence future relationships. Separation anxiety or grief following the loss of an attachment figure is considered to be a normal and adaptive response for an attached infant.
Research by developmental psychologist Mary Ainsworth in the 1960s and 70s expanded on Bowlby’s work, introducing the concept of the “secure base”, impact of maternal responsiveness and sensitivity to infant distress, and identified attachment patterns in infants: secure, avoidant, anxious, and disorganized attachment. In the 1980s, attachment theory was extended to adult relationships and attachment in adults, making it applicable beyond early childhood.
Bowlby’s theory integrated concepts from evolutionary biology, object relations theory, control systems theory, ethology, and cognitive psychology, and was fully articulated in his trilogy, Attachment and Loss (1969–82). While initially criticized by academic psychologists and psychoanalysts, attachment theory has become a dominant approach to understanding early social development and has generated extensive research.
Despite some criticisms related to temperament, social complexity, and the limitations of discrete attachment patterns, the theory’s core concepts have been widely accepted and have influenced therapeutic practices and social and childcare policies. Across different cultures deviations from the Strange Situation Protocol have been observed. A Japanese study in 1986 (Takahashi) studied 60 Japanese mother-infant pairs and compared them with Ainsworth’s distributional pattern.
Although the ranges for securely attached and insecurely attached had no significant differences in proportions, the Japanese insecure group consisted of only resistant children, with no children categorized as avoidant. This may be because the Japanese child rearing philosophy stressed close mother infant bonds more so than in Western cultures.
Childhood and adolescence allows the development of an internal working model useful for forming attachments. This internal working model is related to the individual’s state of mind which develops with respect to attachment generally and explores how attachment functions in relationship dynamics based on childhood and adolescent experience.
The organization of an internal working model is generally seen as leading to more stable attachments in those who develop such a model, rather than those who rely more on the individual’s state of mind alone in forming new attachments. Age, cognitive growth, and continued social experience advance the development and complexity of the internal working model. Attachment-related behaviours lose some characteristics typical of the infant-toddler period and take on age-related tendencies.
The preschool period involves the use of negotiation and bargaining. For example, four-year-olds are not distressed by separation if they and their caregiver have already negotiated a shared plan for the separation and reunion. Ideally, these social skills become incorporated into the internal working model to be used with other children and later with adult peers.
As children move into the school years at about six years old, most develop a goal-corrected partnership with parents, in which each partner is willing to compromise in order to maintain a gratifying relationship. By middle childhood, the goal of the attachment behavioural system has changed from proximity to the attachment figure to availability.
Generally, a child is content with longer separations, provided contact—or the possibility of physically reuniting, if needed—is available. Attachment behaviours such as clinging and following decline and self-reliance increases. By middle childhood (ages 7–11), there may be a shift toward mutual coregulation of secure-base contact in which caregiver and child negotiate methods of maintaining communication and supervision as the child moves toward a greater degree of independence.
Securely attached adults have been “linked to a high need for achievement and a low fear of failure (Elliot & Reis, 2003)”. They will positively approach a task with the goal of mastering it and have an appetite for exploration in achievement settings (Elliot & Reis, 2003). Research shows that securely attached adults have a “low level of personal distress and high levels of concern for others”.
Due to their high rates of self-efficacy, securely attached adults typically do not hesitate to remove a person having a negative impact from problematic situations they are facing. This calm response is representative of the securely attached adult’s emotionally regulated response to threats that many studies have supported in the face of diverse situations. Adult secure attachment comes from an individual’s early connection with their caregiver(s), genes and their romantic experiences.
Within romantic relationships, a securely attached adult will appear in the following ways: excellent conflict resolution, mentally flexible, effective communicators, avoidance of manipulation, comfortable with closeness without fearfulness of being enmeshed, quickly forgiving, viewing sex and emotional intimacy as one, believing they can positively impact their relationship, and caring for their partner in the way they want to be cared for.
In summation, they are great partners who treat their partners very well, as they are not afraid to give positively and ask for their needs to be met. Securely attached adults believe that there are “many potential partners that would be responsive to their needs”, and if they come across an individual who is not meeting their needs, they will typically lose interest quickly.
A 2016 article from the Psychological Bulletin suggests that one’s attachment could largely be due to heredity; hence, the authors point to the need to focus research on nonshared environmental effects, requiring “behavioral genetic designs that afford differentiating heritability from shared and nonshared environmental influences”. The late Dr. Jerome Kagan was a highly respected psychologist who believed a child’s behaviour is largely due to temperament, as well as social class and culture, rather than attachment style.
A 2013 study from Utah State suggests an individual can have different attachment styles in relation to different people and that “parents’ time away from their child was not a significant predictor of attachment.” Attachment theory models are heavily focused on attachment to the mother, not other family members and peers, also noted by Rosjke Hasseldine. Salvador Minuchin suggested that attachment theory’s focus on the mother-child relation ignores the value in other familial influences:
“The entire family—not just the mother or primary caretaker—including father, siblings, grandparents, often cousins, aunts and uncles, are extremely significant in the experience of the child…And yet, when I hear attachment theorists talk, I don’t hear anything about these other important figures in a child’s life.”A 2018 paper proposes that Attachment theory represents a Western middle-class perspective, ignoring the diverse caregiving values and practices in most of the world.
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