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essay on attachments from infancy all the way to adulthood...

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PSY1020 Foundation Psychology Essay 1 Cover Sheet Essay Title: Evaluate the evidence that attachments in early childhood influence the formation of relationships in adolescence and adulthood

Student number: M00694315 Word count (Excluding title and references section): 1400

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Evaluate the evidence that attachments in early childhood influence the formation of relationships in adolescence and adulthood

In this essay I will be evaluating the evidence that attachments from the first years of life influence the development of relationships throughout adolescence and adulthood. Bowlby suggested that a child forms an internal working model which gives the young child a sense of how ordinary relationships are supposed to be like, this internal working model is the prime care-giver which normally is the mother, but this isn’t always the case. The child develops traits which are often based on the responsiveness that the care giver has on the child and later on in life this will have an impact on how the child will be able to form and maintain relationships with other people. The three basic types of attachment are ambivalent, secure and insecure, these types of attachments were created by Ainsworth. John Bowlby and James Robertson discovered through their observations that children experience severe suffering and discomfort when separated from their mother. Despite of the children being fed by other caregivers their frustration and anxiety remained the same. Bowlby’s findings challenged the dominant behavioural theory of attachment which was conducted by Dollard and Miller in 1950 which underestimated a child’s bond with the mother. The ‘’Glasgow Baby Study’’ conducted by Shaffer and Emerson is a study that supports Bowlby’s idea of monotropy and a hierarchy of multiple attachments but formed one not to the person who fed them but with the caregiver who responds in a quick and sensitive manner to their needs. Shaffer and Emerson studied a total of 60 babies once each month, for a total of 18 months. Each child was studied in his own home and a pattern was identified in the development of attachment. The primary care-givers were each interviewed, the mother was given a diary to examine the evidence in the development of attachments. They discovered that from 0-6 weeks the infants are pretty much asocial, both social and non-social and they produce an approving reaction such as a laugh or smile. From 6 weeks to 7 months the young child enjoys human company they often get upset when somebody concludes an interaction with them. Between 7-9 months the child develops a preference for a single attachment figure, they start to show fear of strangers and unhappiness when separated from their prime care-giver. By 18 months each child has become increasingly independent and forms several attachments. The results of their study show that the babies usually form an attachment with the person that responds to their signals the most rather than the person which sends the most time with them. Infants who were attached to their mothers are the ones who got quick responses to their signals. Infants who weren’t attached to their mother had mothers with weak responsiveness to their child. This study highlighted that the most important fact in forming an attachment with the infant isn’t who feeds or spends the most time with the young infant, but how quickly you respond to their demands and how much you interact with the child. These kinds of attachments act as a base for all relationships and

attachments the adults would make in adulthood, as they are like a prototype for all future relationships, failing of attachments can have severe consequences on the individual’s life later on. Cindy Hazan and Philip Shaver have conducted a research which explores the possibility that romantic love is also linked to having an attachment with your primary caregiver. In their study, they designed a ‘’ Love Quiz’’ which was printed on a local newspaper. A measure of the working models was based on the beliefs of an individual on romantic love, for example if someone believed that love is easy very hard to find, or it lasts forever. The measure of attachment histories would reveal and describe their childhood attachments with their care giver or even the relationship that the parents have with each other. Through the questionnaire over half (56%) of the participants classified themselves as secure while 25% were avoidant and 19% anxious/ambivalent, of course these results did not prove that the participant’s choices were non-random but may have been affected by the types of attachments styles in infants and children. The secure group described their most important love experience happy, trusting and friendly also it shows that their relationships tend to last longer (10 years on average) compared to. The anxious group which has an average of 4.87 years and 5.97 years for the avoidant participants. The avoidant participants were characterised by fear of love and intimacy and jealousy. The anxious subjects experienced love as extreme highs and lows as well as obsession. The differences between attachment history was assessed in two ways. The participants were asked if they have been separated by their primary caregiver to what seemed like ‘’a long time’’ or whether the parents were ever divorced. They were also asked to describe how the parents behaved towards them during their childhood using adjectives such as caring, loving, and judgemental. This data can be concluded by saying that the secure participants in comparison to the insecure participants reported warmer relationships with their parents and also said that their parents were also very loving towards each other. Avoidant subjects in comparison to anxious subjects reported their prime care giver as cold and rejecting. The anxious subjects thought of their fathers specifically as being unfair.

Although this study supports expectations based on Ainsworth et al.’s (1978) studies of infant care giver attachment there are a few limitations with this study. Firstly, the results might have been biased because of self-selection. This could have an impact on the estimate of the prevalence of each of the three attachment types and distorted other possible results in undetectable ways. Another limitation of this study is that it only explored limited aspects of the participant’s mental models. In his analysis Bowlby claimed that these models involved complimentary portrayals of self and relationships. Challenging Bowlby’s theory, the learning theory claims that attachment processes are learnt through the imitation of the attachment figures meaning they aren’t innate. This can happen through classical conditioning. This is the forming of an attachment through association. This theory suggests that when an infant is born they naturally want food, when the care giver feeds the infant it automatically associates the food with the mother who is the secondary

reinforces, therefore this attachment with the mother is formed only because it associates the food with the mother. Another explanation of how attachments are learnt according to Dollard and Miller is through operant conditioning. Operant conditioning involves a reward to maintain a relationship, they stated that all babies are born with a need to reduce their hunger so when the mother feeds her baby it acts as a positive reinforcement on the behaviour of the baby. When the baby receives the reward, the infant is more likely to repeat the positive behaviour in order for them to receive that positive reinforcement again. This also created a stronger attachment bond with the infant and the mother. The learning theory provides a lot of ideas of how attachments can be formed nevertheless one problem with this theory is the fact that it is built on studies on non-human animals. Human behaviour is influenced by emotions and higher order thinking and although some animal behaviour is similar to human behaviour the test lacked validity as they used simplified examples of human behaviour. In the preceding section I have mentioned different attachment theories. Firstly John Bowlby and Ainsworth theories go hand in hand to support that attachments in the early childhood influence the formation of relationships in adolescence and adulthood also Cindy Hazan and Philip Shaver have conducted a study on Romantic Love Conceptualised as a Form of Attachment Process in a attempt to support Bowlby’s and Ainsworth’s theories although their 1st study contained many major flaws one of them being the bias of the results because of the self-selection, this alone could all the data that was being collected. The learning theory was also a very interesting theory because it provides theories of attachment which are completely different to Bowlby’s and Ainsworth theory but like any other theory it has limitations of its own the main one being that his studies are based on non-human animals.

Bibliography citation Dykas, M., & Cassidy, J. (2011). Attachment and the processing of social information across the life span: Theory and evidence. Psychological Bulletin, 137(1), 19-46. doi: 10.1037/a0021367 Hazan, C., & Shaver, P. (1987). Romantic love conceptualized as an attachment process. Journal Of Personality And Social Psychology, 52(3), 511-524. doi: 10.1037//0022-3514.52.3.511 Lounds, J., Borkowski, J., Whitman, T., Maxwell, S., & Weed, K. (2005). Adolescent Parenting and Attachment During Infancy and Early Childhood. Parenting, 5(1), 91-118. doi: 10.1207/s15327922par0501_4 Madigan, S., Bakermans-Kranenburg, M., Van Ijzendoorn, M., Moran, G., Pederson, D., & Benoit, D. (2006). Unresolved states of mind, anomalous parental behavior, and disorganized attachment: A review and meta-analysis of a transmission gap. Attachment & Human Development, 8(2), 89-111. doi: 10.1080/14616730600774458 Bowlby, J. (1979). The Bowlby-Ainsworth attachment theory. Behavioral And Brain Sciences, 2(04), 637-638. doi: 10.1017/s0140525x00064955 Nickerson, A., & Nagle, R. (2004). The Influence of Parent and Peer Attachments on Life Satisfaction in Middle Childhood and Early Adolescence. Social Indicators Research, 66(1/2), 35-60. doi: 10.1023/b:soci.0000007496.42095.2c Leerkes, E., & Siepak, K. (2006). Attachment linked predictors of women's emotional and cognitive responses to infant distress. Attachment & Human Development, 8(1), 11-32. doi: 10.1080/14616730600594450...