attachment theory evaluation essay

CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS article

Back to basics: a re-evaluation of the relevance of imprinting in the genesis of bowlby’s attachment theory.

• 1 Millennium Institute for Care Research (MICARE), Santiago, Chile
• 2 Laboratoire INTERPSY, Département de Psychologie, Université de Lorraine, Nancy, France
• 3 Centre for Music and Science, Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom
• 4 Centre for Multidisciplinary and Intercultural Inquiry (CMII), Department of Health Humanities, University College London, London, United Kingdom

Attachment theory is one of the key theoretical constructs that underpin explorations of human bonding, taking its current form in John Bowlby’s amalgamation of ideas from psychoanalysis, developmental psychology and ethology. Such a period of interdisciplinary exchange, and Bowlby’s interest in Lorenz’ concept of imprinting in particular, have been subject to rather historical and biographical studies, leaving a fine-grained theoretical scrutiny of the exact relationship between imprinting and attachment still pending. This paper attempts to remedy such an omission by exploring the relationships between these two constructs. It critically reviews the theories of imprinting in general, of human imprinting in particular, and of attachment; analysis of the links between these processes bring to the foreground the distinction between supra-individual vs. individual aspects of bonding, the relevance of ‘proto-attachment’ phases before ‘proper’ Bowlbyan attachment is attained, and the role of communicative signals during such early phases. The paper outlines potential benefits of considering such elements in the study of early social cognition, particularly in respect of the study of the gaze and the infant-directed communicative register.

Introduction

Attachment theory is probably the prime contemporary scholarly construct in terms of which human bonding is conceptualized and investigated, with a vast body of literature largely– but not exclusively –focusing on the different attachment styles described by ( Ainsworth and Wittig, 1969 ) and their consequences and application in human life across the lifespan. Indeed, moving beyond Bowlby’s initial focus on childhood, attachment styles ( Ainsworth and Wittig, 1969 ; Main and Solomon, 1990 ; Bretherton, 2003 ; Rholes and Simpson, 2004 ; Pearce, 2009 ) have been used as a vehicle for studying the whole adult lifespan including early adolescence ( Hazan and Zeifman, 1994 ), adulthood ( Lopez and Gormley, 2002 ) and old age ( Karantzas and Simpson, 2015 ). Similarly, the original focus on attachment to parental figures has been expanded to encompass romantic partners, parents, siblings, children and friends ( Doherty and Feeney, 2004 ), adult relationships ( Allen and Land, 1999 ; Heffernan and Fraley, 2015 ; Overall et al., 2015 ) and the ways in which attachment influences parenting styles ( Jones et al., 2015 ; Young et al., 2017 ). The neuroscience of attachment has also been progressively developed ( Insel and Young, 2001 ; Insel and Fernald, 2004 ; Montague and Lohrenz, 2007 ; Coan, 2008 ; Neumann, 2008 ; Coan, 2010 ; Panksepp, 2011 ; Gillath, 2015 ; Feldman, 2017 ). Attachment theory is now central to research and academic agendas within clinical applications ( Fonagy and Campbell, 2015 ), adult psychopathology ( Ein-Dor and Doron, 2015 ), and more recently learning ( Luyten et al., 2017a , b ) and pedagogy ( Csibra and Gergely, 2009 ).

Part of the theory’s robustness and success can be attributed to Bowlby’s (1982) initial efforts in grounding it on contemporaneous scientific evidence, and in going to considerable lengths to create bridges across disciplines. Bowlby borrowed fundamental ideas from the ethologist Konrad Lorenz— in particular, the theory of imprinting ( Lorenz, 1935 ) —and successfully combined them with psychoanalytic developmental theories of object relating (e.g., Holmes, 1993 ; Blatt et al., 1997 ; Wachtel, 2010 ; Fonagy et al., 2018 ). This successful amalgamation was also made possible by a propitious period of interdisciplinary open-ness during the 1950s and 60s that counted with many illustrious figures spanning from ethology to psychoanalysis (see “Human imprinting”). Such a period in general, and Bowlby’s interest in Lorenz’ work in particular, have so far been highlighted and approached through partially theoretical, partially historical and biographical scopes (e.g., van der Horst, 2009 , 2011 ; Vicedo, 2009 ). In a similar fashion, the present paper aims to draw academic attention back to the intellectual roots of Bowlby’s theories by exploring ways in which the theories of imprinting and attachment can be construed as related. Not quite as previous works, however, this article does so not with a historical or biographical focus, but with a precise, theoretical one. Although literature mentioned in the previous paragraph, as well as Bowlby’s (1982) own formulation of attachment theory evidence a significant overlap between said theory and that of human imprinting, Bowlby himself did not provide an explicit, reciprocal positioning of both concepts either despite or perhaps because of their apparent overlap. This article’s simple goal is thus providing a rendering of the relationship between the two constructs that is more explicit and precise than has been so far advanced.

To this end, we trace attachment back to imprinting in three sections. The first section reviews the general theory of imprinting, with an emphasis on the literature available at the time Bowlby hatched his own theory and from which he drew several of his core ideas. The second section delves into a concept that is largely unrepresented in contemporary literature: human imprinting. A natural projection stemming from Lorenz’s initial work on non-human animals, the concept can be thought of as the prequel of attachment theory, and was eventually effectively replaced by the latter in the field of psychology. The third section is then dedicated to Bowlby’s initial formulation of attachment theory, with a particular focus on his account of the mechanisms behind its establishing, an aspect which, as will be argued in the discussion, could have been taken for granted rather than questioned. Thus, the contents in this section will— hopefully —differ from usual accounts in the literature. These three sections are integral to the present paper’s primary contribution: an in-depth analysis of both theories’ core formulations in terms of their overlaps and differences.

Providing a new perspective on the initial formulation of attachment theory and its links to imprinting should, we hope, bring a number of benefits. First, it should provide a higher degree of theoretical clarity than currently exists, useful to anyone interested in the subject. Second, returning to the basics of any theory with a fresh pair of eyes and a warranted skepticism is a healthy exercise that counters the ossification of knowledge and its potential transformation into unquestioned dogma. Although Bowlby certainly delivered a carefully-made theory, there are likely to be assumptions he did not question, and possibilities he dismissed in favor of the ones that made it to the canonical version of attachment theory. Third, the paper revisits a corpus of literature seldom cited today that could be useful to contemporary scholars less familiar with Bowlby’s initial formulation of attachment theory. Fourth and most importantly, some elements of attachment theory— particularly its onset and early stages —that rely the most on imprinting and its focus on concrete mechanisms are likely to better resonate with contemporary empirical research than it could in the 1960s. Indeed, in the context of current research in attachment, in comparative, developmental and cognitive psychology, a revaluation of the roots of attachment theory could spark discussion about the similarities and differences between the different theoretical models and how they can complement each other. In particular, it could be of benefit to the study of early social interaction and cognition (including, for example, the functions of signals such as the gaze and Infant Directed Speech) by affording a reappraisal through the lens of attachment theory. This final subject is further unpacked in the paper’s discussion.

By the dawn of the 20th century, animal behavior was explained fundamentally through the concept of ‘instinct’. Although Charles Darwin (1871) had convincingly portrayed the construct as a set of inherited, unlearned behavioral patterns of high adaptive value, clear and extensive understanding and description of what it implied was still missing ( Van der Horst, 2011 ). In this context, the idea of imprinting was mainly developed by the biologists Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen, who observed how young greylag goslings and jackdaws would not recognize members of their own species directly after birth, but show a strong following response to the first moving object in their surroundings ( Lorenz, 1935 ). On the one hand, such a following response seemed to always take place in a relatively fixed manner without being taught. On the other hand, the fact that the object that would elicit such a behavior could vary implied that the behavior itself still partly depended on interaction with the environment. Thus, Lorenz (1935) coined the term ‘imprinting’, and described it as a process by which some species learn to recognize members of their own species, which enables them to become the object of subsequent behavior patterns, including mating. Imprinting largely comprised the idea that early social contact determines the character of adult social behavior.

Central to imprinting is the concept of ‘social releasers’ (or ‘releasers’): particular features of morphology or behavior that elicit instinctual behavior in the organism that perceives them ( Lorenz, 1935 ). In other words, releasers are species-specific signals, and an infant will react and engage in the imprinting process depending on the degree to which the caregiver can supply the proper signals/releasers. The reaction to a specific releaser would be mediated by activity in specific coordinating centers in the infant’s central nervous system Lorenz called ‘innate releasing mechanisms’ (IRM). At a behavioral level, the structured pattern of movements that constitute the reaction itself was conceptualized as a ‘fixed action pattern’ (FAP), which develops without conventional reward such as food. Lorenz portrayed FAPs as highly stereotyped innate movement patterns that would run to completion regardless of further stimulation, thus comprising a concrete rendering of the genetically-programmed core of a species’ typical behavior ( Van der Horst, 2011 ). On the infant’s part, Lorenz introduced the concept of paedomorphic traits (or Kindchenschema ) as an innate releasing mechanism for caretaking behavior and affective orientation toward infants. Paedomorphic traits consist of protruding cheeks, a large forehead and large eyes below the horizontal midline of the skull. Baby faces showing these features are commonly described as cute or attractive ( Sternglanz et al., 1977 ).

In Lorenz’s approach to his initial observation of goslings, the phenotypic features and caring behavior of geese parents would normally ‘release’ (trigger) in their goslings a FAP, which in this example corresponds to the unlearned response of following. In imprinting studies, the most commonly found FAP was and remains proximity-seeking behavior, which typically takes the form of approaching or clinging to the caregiver. Because of the biologically-set fit between a species’ releasers and FAPs, accidental imprinting to an object different from the biological parents is not likely to happen. Yet, Lorenz (and many other ethologists and animal psychologists after him) demonstrated that despite the rather rigid character of FAPs, goslings and other species infants could be imprinted to human beings and even inanimate objects, evidencing that imprinting also decisively depends on environmental factors. For instance, although the paedomorphic traits of an infant of a given species are fundamentally designed to influence members of its own kind, they can nevertheless be effective in other species and thus prompt imprinting. Through these concepts and evidence, Lorenz connected the internal, innate behavior patterns of animals with external stimuli, demonstrating that imprinting is a process neither instinctive nor learned ( Van der Horst, 2011 ).

There are four distinctive properties that Lorenz (1935) initially attributed to imprinting. First, that it takes place only during a brief ‘critical period’ in the life-cycle of an organism. This means, for instance, that ducklings presented to a given object between 13 and 16 h after hatching would show a consistent following response to that object. The same will not happen, however, if presented before or after that time. The chronological limits of the critical period vary from species to species (and at a finer level, from individual to individual), but the developmental events that seemed to account for its beginning and end are the infant’s capacity to generate the relevant FAP, and the onset of fear of strangers, respectively ( Gray, 1958 ). A second postulated property is that imprinting is irreversible; once fixated to an object, FAPs will be unlikely to be released by a different kind of object. In other words, if first released by a human being during its critical period, a gosling’s following response will be unlikely to be released by a member of a species other than humans. The third property is that imprinting is a form of supra-individual learning. This property will prove very important when distinguishing between imprinting and attachment, which makes it worth explaining in detail. It was previously stated that if an organism (or even an inanimate object) is presented during a gosling’s critical period for imprinting, its features will likely trigger an unlearned response in the gosling. Such features will be learned by the infant, so it can recognize them and react in the future. However, it is not the organism’s individual features (the ones that make it recognizable as a unique entity) that are learned, but generic features of its species. Accordingly, when the mother goose presents itself to the gosling during the latter’s critical period, it is not her individual features as a distinctive organism that the gosling first learns and later recognizes, but rather the general features of her species. The fourth property states that imprinting influences patterns of behavior that have not yet developed in the organism’s repertoire. This idea was already briefly mentioned and it largely rests in the supra-individual nature of imprinting: if a gosling is imprinted by one of its parents, it is geese features as a species that the infant learns, and it will be such species-specific features that will, in the future, trigger its mating behavior. Alternatively, if imprinted to a human being, the target of the goose’s future sexual drive will be human beings, and not geese.

Soon, imprinting was investigated not only in birds, but also in mammals— including human beings —and even in fish and insects ( Hess, 1959 ). Furthermore, the concept remained only briefly restricted to ethological circles and soon elicited great interest in other disciplines, prompting a rapidly growing corpus of interdisciplinary cooperation. Perhaps the most fruitful example of such cooperative projects was the Tavistock seminar series on mother-infant interaction, held between 1959 and 1963. Unsurprisingly, the interdisciplinary discussion held by psychologists, psychiatrists, obstetricians, neuroscientists, psychoanalysts and zoologists raised criticisms regarding Lorenz’s initial postulates about imprinting. Neither the critical period nor the irreversibility or the supra-individual criteria were found to be as clear as originally claimed. For instance, the ethologist Robert Hinde concluded that rather than denoting a dichotomy in development ( Hinde, 1963 ), a critical period must be understood as a change in the probability that a certain learning will take place. Accordingly, the sharpness of the limits of a critical period will depend on the detail of the criteria used in its measurement (e.g., considering the act of ‘following’ as a given species’ proximity-seeking behavior, as opposed to a further operationalized account involving measured distance, time-lapse, and so on). Additionally, the psychologist and psychoanalyst John A. Ambrose observed that each response behavior has its own critical period, rendering the idea of a ‘general’ critical period for imprinting as inaccurate ( Ambrose, 1963 ). Two categories of critical periods were distinguished: a critical period for learning behavior X which is critical for the subsequent performance of X, and a critical period for learning behavior X which is critical for subsequent performance of behavior Y. This idea will be further explained in the next section.

Imprinting research has continued until the present day. The emphasis has been largely on the nature of its underlying mechanisms, including its neuroscience (see Rogers et al., 2013 ; Montuori and Honey, 2015 ). The main thrust in imprinting research apart from the emphasis on mechanism has been individual-level recognition, first in recognizing the mother and, second, in setting up a standard against which the individual can prefer to mate with a partner that differs slightly from close kin— recognized as a result of sexual imprinting (for a review see Bateson, 2014 ). Although much more could be adduced regarding the development of this field, what remains important is to bear in mind the basic principles hereby outlined, as they largely shaped an understanding of the human case.

Human imprinting

The first comprehensive proposal for human imprinting was made by the American psychologist Philip Gray. Essentially relying on Lorenz’s work, Gray (1958) conceived it as the first form of socialization between the infant and its kind, as in most or all species where a social complex is vital for survival. Although significantly criticized, the proposal contained at least three main ideas that prompted crucial debate regarding human imprinting. Such a debate was held by an international, interdisciplinary network of scientists such as Jean Piaget and Mary Ainsworth, as well as Lorenz and Bowlby themselves, who gathered for decisive events such as the Geneva WHO study group in 1955, or the four “Ciba-symposia” (also referred to as meetings of the Tavistock study group) held in 1959, 1961, 1963 and 1965 (for an in-depth account of these meeting, see van der Horst, 2009 ). Particular authors and concepts relevant for the present paper are mentioned in this section.

Firstly, Gray proposed that humankind is an animal species whose neonates are unable to manifest any motor equivalent to the following response found in birds. His second claim was that this should have forced the evolution of a different system of releasers and FAPs for human imprinting. Particularly, the smile of human infants could be regarded as an analogous version of the following response found in birds. Thirdly, the critical period for imprinting in humans, Gray proposed, would take place from about 6 weeks to about 6 months, beginning with the onset of learning ability, continuing with the achievement of the smiling response, and ending with the development of fear of strangers.

Gray’s first assertion has proven so far irrefutable. Indeed, our species’ neonates are unable to manifest any motor equivalent to the following response found in birds. As discussed, the proximity-seeking behavior (an important case of FAP) that most avian species studied show as a response to the caregiver’s releasers is the act of following. The degree of precociality of these species implies that motor development of their neonates affords locomotion and thus the act of following. New-born primates, more altricial than the birds but still on the precocial side of the precocial-altricial continuum ( Starck, 1998 ), are mostly incapable of following the carer.

Given that imprinting is a biological and social process essential for the adult sexual behavior of an organism and thus the perpetuation of its species, selective pressures would have favored primate neonates able to generate an FAP other than following, suitable for their motor development and yet equally functional. In this respect, Bowlby (1982) points out that although the instinctive behavior of virtually all members of a species conforms to a common overall plan, the particular form it takes in any one individual is often distinctive, and may in fact be quite unusual. Thus, a bird of a species that habitually nests in trees may nest on cliffs when no trees are available, or a mammal of a species that normally gathers in flocks may be ungregarious if reared away from its kind. These cases, Bowlby argues, illustrate how the development of a behavioral system that appears to be environmentally very stable (as the act of following had so far been) may nonetheless be open to some degree to influence by the environment in which development occurs ( Bowlby, 1982 ).

The selected analogous FAP was clinging. Indeed, at birth or soon after, all primate infants— except humans —cling to their mothers (see Harlow, 1958 ; Harlow and Harlow, 1962 ). In lower members of the primate order (e.g., lemurs or marmosets) the infant must, from birth onward, cling without any assistance from its mother. In later species like Old World monkeys the infant actively clings, except in the early days of its life when its mother provides— some —support. In the most advanced apes, gorillas and human beings, clinging is included in the neonate’s behavioral equipment as a reflex, but without the necessary strength to support themselves for long ( Bowlby, 1982 ). By this token, the evolutionary shift from following to clinging as privileged proximity-seeking behavior is largely an adaptation to the selective pressures of altriciality. The human case entails yet a different intersection between motor development and FAPs, as Homo heidelbergensis infants faced an even greater challenge in their attempt to secure imprinting: secondary altriciality ( Ruff and Walker, 1993 ). Indeed, human neonates’ immaturity makes them unable to follow or indeed exert any kind of locomotion. Furthermore, as discussed by Falk (2004a) , it also prevents them from relying on clinging either, otherwise the privileged proximity-seeking behavior in primates.

The implications of secondary altriciality for human imprinting led to Gray’s second relevant claim, proposing the smile response in human infants as the motor equivalent of the following response in animals below the higher primates. In other words, he proposed the smile as an evolved, analogous FAP. This claim is not self-evident and indeed gave rise to a series of critiques within the academic community. Although Ambrose (1963) criticized Gray’s lack of arguments, he nevertheless acknowledged the suitability of the proposal in the context of human inability for locomotion. Indeed, the notion that the ‘true’ or ‘social’ smile does not appear much before 6 weeks of age had already been suggested by Darwin (1877) and is still validated by contemporary research ( Jones et al., 1991 ). Ambrose and British ethologist Robert Hinde (1963) agreed that the sensitive period for smiling is crucial, not so much specifically for later occurrences of smiling as for the development of human social responsiveness in general (which is a case for the aforementioned pattern of the critical period of behavior X being critical for the subsequent performance of behavior Y ). In other words, it is not only the immediate responses which smiling evokes from the mother that must be taken into consideration, but also the manner in which it influences her bonding experience at a higher level of integration ( Hinde, 1963 ). The smile response, although certainly crucial, remains thus only as an index among all kinds of bodily movements and sounds which stand as attempts to form social interaction.

It is therefore in the multimodal context of bodily activity that supra-individual learning takes place; from birth and up to about four or 6 months of age, a human infant learns the multimodal morphological and communicative characteristics of the species it is been imprinted into, ‘ gradually piecing together and building up his picture of what a human being is like’ ( Ambrose, 1963 , p.207). The close interrelation of the smile and the rest of the senses was soon confirmed by Freedman’s studies on congenitally blind children ( Freedman, 1964 ). The universal presence of smiling among cultures along with its continued appearance in congenitally blind infants led him to conclude that the facilitation of earlier smiles by a high-pitched voice can be interpreted as an ethological-type releasing mechanism. Therefore, although vision definitely facilitates smiling, no single sensory channel can be claimed as its exclusive releaser. Ambrose (1963) acknowledged that crying— the preeminent manifestation of anxiety or fear in the early months of human infants —works just as effectively as a proximity-seeking behavior as smiling does. Furthermore, he noted that in an important number of cases smiling can take place only once crying has succeeded in achieving proximity and thus ensured the basics for survival. Although Ambrose did not go into greater detail regarding the role of infant cry in human imprinting, as will be addressed in the next sections, his observation proved to be highly relevant for attachment theory and the study of infant cry in general. Thus, although there may not be a privileged FAP in human imprinting, it is clear that neonatal crying and the myriad of behaviors that constitute proto-conversation allow for it to take place. More importantly, the exclusion of following and clinging implies that human imprinting concentrates in communicative behavior like no other mammalian species does.

Gray’s third claim, concerning the limits of the critical period for human imprinting, also gave rise to a series of critiques within the academic community. Regarding the start, Gray held the working hypothesis that in species not born at an advanced stage of neural and motor maturation there is a pre-learning period where the ‘higher’ parts of the brain are deemed immature and thus conditioning would not be possible. Such a claim was soon dismissed by American psychologist Howard Moltz, who argued that imprinting develops rather independently of conventional reward, such as food and thus could not be considered a form of conditioning ( Moltz, 1960 ). Furthermore, Gray’s claim works against an enormous corpus of investigation on infant learning. As an example, recent research shows that newborns’ cry melody evidences vocal learning partially based on the influence of surrounding speech prosody ( Mampe et al., 2009 ). Such learning processes occur during the first 2–5 days of life, in other words, during the ‘pre-learning’ period proposed by Gray.

Since the issue of the role of smiling has already been discussed, what remains of this section will focus on the end phase of human imprinting. American psychologist Eckhard Hess’s early hypothesis that the onset of fear marks the end of the critical period for imprinting seems to have only partially survived further evidence ( Hess, 1959 ). In both human and non-human animal development there is an initial period following birth during which no fear reactions to strangers can be found. This makes imprinting possible in the first place, since fear responses would prevent an infant from engaging in the kind of social behavior necessary for imprinting to take place, avoiding rather than seeking proximity toward a potential imprinting object ( Gray, 1958 ). Conversely, fear of strangers prevents the infant from imprinting onto an endless list of individuals and their corresponding species. The onset of fearful behavior was initially explained in purely maturational terms ( Gessel and Thompson, 1934 ), but rather became considered as a function of the individual’s perceptual experiences; fear in human infants would arise when an object is familiar enough to activate habitual processes of perception whilst at the same time sufficiently dissimilar to arouse incompatible ones, and thereby disrupt the central neural patterns laid down by previous stimulation ( Hebb, 1946 ). Thus, an initial period of experience is a necessary prerequisite in order to establish the notion of the familiar and give rise to the feeling of discrepancy with new patterns of sensory input. German child psychologist H. R. Schaffer added that the fear of strangers relies on the ability to distinguish familiar from unfamiliar individuals, a faculty which develops in the months preceding the onset of fear ( Schaffer, 1966 ). In concrete terms, Schaffer postulated that it is a change in cognitive structure, the establishment of the object concept ( Piaget, 1955 ), that allows the infant to go beyond a stage where it experiences only a series of images which may be recognized, but have no continuity or substance. Through this change in cognitive structure the infant becomes ‘object-oriented’ rather than ‘stimulus-oriented’ ( Schaffer, 1966 , p.103). It has more recently been argued that what emerges between 5 and 12 months is the ability to demonstrate an understanding of object concept, with the understanding itself already having been acquired ( Diamond, 1991 ). Hebb’s and Schaffer’s theories are compatible and underlie the importance of both the supra-individual and individual aspects of imprinting, as well as their interrelation. The supra-individual phase of imprinting, during which the infant learns the multimodal morphological characteristics of the carer’s species, affords the achievement of a sense of the familiar. The infant gradually becomes familiar with stimuli such as features and behavior, but these stimuli would not be associated with any particular subject. Nevertheless, as Ambrose’s (1963) observations on human infants and Harlow’s experiments on non-human primates ( Harlow and Harlow, 1962 ) pointed out, the carer shows more than morphological characteristics; it shows caring behavior, which progressively distinguishes it from just any other member of the group and the species. Such a dyadic process, added to the cognitive development of an object concept, would thus enable the infant to organize familiar features into particular subjects. Consequently, other subjects become unfamiliar and the infant begins to fear them. Bowlby (1982) even argued that it is not only fear itself, but rather the recognition of the carer(s) at an individual level, which sets the end of the imprinting process. He also observed that the stronger the original imprinting, the more persistent the avoidance of anything new. However, if a young animal is forcibly kept in the presence of a new object, the fear response may be partially or wholly habituated. By this token, Lorenz’s initial claim of imprinting as a kind of supra-individual learning has had to be nuanced in order to embrace the parallel development of an individual-specific dimension.

Attachment theory

By now, any reader familiarized with attachment theory should have a sense of its substantial overlap with that of human imprinting. As it will become obvious after the next sections, these discussions and most of the research program on human imprinting were, in respect of human development, largely replaced by the more psychology-oriented scope of attachment theory. Because readers are probably far more familiar with the latter than the former, this section will be less comprehensive. It will instead focus on Bowlby’s initial formulations, exclusively stemming from the first volume of his classic trilogy, that prove essential for the article’s discussion.

As mentioned in previous sections, mutual influence in the development of imprinting and attachment theories is fairly well documented. Freud had emphasized the central role of child-caregiver early interaction on the former’s adult life— including their sexual behavior —when Lorenz and Tinbergen hatched the idea of imprinting in birds ( Vicedo, 2009 ). Consequently, child analysts from various psychoanalytical schools were at the time the link between an infant’s tie to its mother on their adult personality. In this context, John Bowlby started following Lorenz’s work and gained interest in ethology. Bowlby had amassed a body of observational data, nevertheless, his findings were not yet conclusive, partly due to a lack of experimental examination as well as a comprehensive theoretical framework ( Van der Horst, 2011 ). Lorenz in turn became interested in Bowlby’s research, which largely supported his own ideas.

Bowlby (1982) described attachment roughly as a category of social behavior leading children to maintain proximity to their mother-figure. Attachment behavior comprised two core elements: maintaining or restoring proximity to someone, and the specificity of that someone. As an alternative to the idea of instinct and in line with contemporary ethology, analytical biology, and control theory and cybernetics, Bowlby approached the bond between a child and their mother as the result of several behavioral systems that hold proximity as a predictable goal. The main element that would allow an organism to fulfill such an adaptive, goal-directed system is the idea of feedback. Though borrowed from disciplines beyond the study of organisms, Bowlby considered fit applying such principles to living organisms including human beings, who simply evolved in and for their own ‘environment of evolutionary adaptedness’. Following Hinde’s (1959) ideas and as a substitute for the controversial idea of instinct, any biological character that in its development is little influenced by variations of environment was considered ‘environmentally stable’ (as opposed to ‘labile’). Such an approach applies to above mentioned FAPs such as the clinging, following, or smiling. Similarly, a system’s sensitivity to its environment can fluctuate through time. Thus, Bowlby favored the notion of ‘sensitive periods’ over Lorenz’s original ‘critical periods’.

As previously mentioned, following Bowlby’s definition, an infant’s capability for seeking proximity (the first element) cannot be properly labeled as attachment behavior until it is preferentially aimed at a specific individual (the second element). Regarding the first component he observed that human infants are endowed with a number of behavioral systems out from birth. First, there is a perceptual apparatus that orients the infant toward their caregivers. In addition, effectors such as hands, feet, head and mouth further facilitate interpersonal contact. Thirdly, neonates have what Bowlby considered as ‘signaling equipment’— voicing, neonatal crying, and limb gestures. Such behaviors were deemed essential during the attachment process’ first phase, characterized by orientation and signals with limited discrimination of a figure. Delineated between birth and around eight and 12 weeks of age, in this phase the child’s ability to differentiate individuals is restricted to smell and touch. Typical behavior includes orientation toward people, grasping and reaching, eye tracking, as well as babbling and smiling. As a whole, such behavior is meant to maximize the chances and duration of proximity, by influencing the caregiver.

In theory, a next attachment phase is attained once orientation and signaling stably narrow down toward one or more discriminated individuals, with sensitivity to auditory stimuli being evident earlier than those involving the vision. The upper limit of such a second stage was theoretically set at around6 months of age. By then, two key changes determine a third phase. On the one hand, proximity-seeking visibly narrows down to one individual. On the other hand, major progress in locomotion means that proximity is at last no longer reduced to signals. Behavioral repertoire thus expands to encompass following someone, greeting in return, and using the attachment figure as a base for exploration. Bowlby identified two main reasons behind the specification of proximity-seeking. In an affiliative motion, a consolidation in the knowledge of the individual features of an attachment figure, as opposed to the supra-individual characteristics shared by human beings as a kind. In contrary, phobic motion, fear and withdrawal progressively become a spontaneous reaction to any unknown persons. The connexion between these two complementary processes, or their relative importance or mutual causation, were not discussed by Bowlby. Moreover, roughly between nine and 18 months of life, all above mentioned systems (perception, signaling, locomotion) mediating a toddler’s behavior to their attachment figure become organized on a goal-corrected basis, becomes evident for any spectator. During this final, fourth phase by watching the main caregiver’s behavior and environment, the toddler gradually infers their goals and means for execution, establishing a goal-corrected partnership.

In the initial formulation contained in his trilogy, Bowlby systematically covered the different angles his theory entailed, a relevant one being the affective dimension of attachment. Some essential elements of such dimension are the dyadic regulation processes that lead to the infant’s feeling of ‘perceived safety’ or separation anxiety, their sedimentation into what was later on called attachment styles, as well as their consequences up until old age. However, these elements, most of which were mentioned in the introduction, do not fall into the article’s focus.

In his discussion of the term presented in the first volume of Attachment and Loss, Bowlby initially acknowledged the diverse uses of the term “imprinting” by different disciplines and from different approaches. Bowlby argued that the knowledge of the development of attachment behavior in humans could be summarized briefly under the same heads that describe imprinting in birds. Such an argument rather depicts both constructs as equivalent in the sense of belonging to the same category. Furthermore, after problematizing the convergent evolution of imprinting in birds and mammals, he immediately attributed imprinting’s main characteristics to attachment behavior, tacitly implying an analogous status.

However, after the evidence and arguments presented in the previous sections, it can be posited that Bowlby in fact used the word ‘attachment’ to refer to two intimately related yet distinct phenomena. On the one hand, the word mainly refers to proximity-seeking behavior that is directed toward a discriminated figure and integrated into a goal-corrected system: in other words, ‘proper’ attachment, or attachment in the strict sense. On the other hand, it refers to proximity-seeking behavior that can be found— in human beings, mammals and birds alike —before ‘proper’ attachment has been achieved, somewhere around its third phase. For the sake of clarity, let us henceforth refer to ‘proper’ Bowlbyan attachment simply as ‘attachment’, and to preliminary bonding phenomena as ‘proto-attachment’.

For clarity sake, let us try to accurately position both attachment and proto-attachment behaviors in respect to imprinting. Proto-attachment behavior largely corresponds to the supra-individual phase of imprinting. Any new-born organism that learns the supra-individual features of the carer figure will engage in some kind of proximity-seeking behavior toward members of the latter’s kind. This proximity-seeking behavior can be regarded as a form of proto-attachment, triggered by and directed toward particular releasers (signals): morphology (i.e., general size and shape), particular features (i.e., feather coloring,), acoustic signals (i.e., a loving, soothing voice), etc. ‘Proper’ Bowlbyan attachment is a process that has successful supra-individual and individual learning as prerequisites, but that develops into further distinctive stages which culminate with inherently dyadic and affective dynamics that can be said to be beyond the scope of imprinting theory.

Implications of the imprinting/attachment scrutiny

Bowlby’s claim that humankind is the slowest species in terms of the attainment of (‘proper’) attachment has at least three implications that will be critically addressed here. These concern the nature of proto-attachment, the exact transition from proto-attachment to attachment, and the role of the infant’s signaling repertoire during proto-attachment.

Regarding the first issue, Bowlby sets the achievement of individual discrimination as a prerequisite for ‘proper’ attachment, whilst at the same time acknowledging that some degree of discrimination is present from the start. Such early discrimination mainly concerns human features: the auditory stimuli that characterize the human voice, visual features of a human face, as well as the tactile and kinaesthetic stimuli proper of human arms and body. Furthermore, he recognized that human stimuli do prompt behavior in the infant that, although not yet integrated into the goal-corrected attachment system, does result in achieving proximity. Hence, in setting individual discrimination as a prerequisite for ‘proper’ attachment, Bowlby discussed but did not further focus on the supra-individual attachment behavior that takes place during the first phase of attachment and is superseded by further sophisticated individual discrimination at some point during the second phase. The notion of supra-individual attachment behavior— or proximity-seeking behavior that is not directed toward discriminated objects but to classes of objects (any human being) —is largely what imprinting originally entailed: a process by which some species learn to recognize members of their own species and direct toward them a series of fundamental behaviors that start with proximity seeking, to later add others such as mating. Bowlby could have further approached supra-individual (proto-)attachment behavior by drawing on the literature on imprinting that explicitly dealt with this issue. However, his research interests and the effect these exerted on his own understanding of imprinting led him in another direction.

The second issue concerns the task of locating the onset of human attachment (as opposed to proto-attachment) through a given behavioral or developmental landmark, or at least within a reasonably delimited period. Bowlby opted for the latter. Whilst acknowledging an inevitable degree of arbitrariness, he still aimed to locate such an onset within one of the four phases of attachment he proposed. An infant would not yet be attached during the first phase, and already attached when entering phase three. Therefore, whether and to what extent an infant can be said to be ‘properly’ attached during the second phase is a matter of how attachment is defined. Unfortunately, Bowlby did not proceed to explicitly deal with the implications of his own definition of attachment on this issue. Nevertheless, by observing that human infants are able to distinguish their mother-figure before they can either cling or move, Bowlby did take a position— even if implicitly. The resulting sequence can be reconstructed as follows: individual discrimination is slowly but firmly acquired from the beginning, motor skills (such as clinging and locomotion) being added only later, and finally both behavioral systems are organized in the goal-corrected system of attachment.

Finally, in any case Bowlby did consider gross (limb) motor skills as a hallmark of the third attachment phase at which he deemed the infant to be already attached, revealing the importance he attributed to such behaviors. Given that in all other studied species proximity-seeking behaviors take the form of some kind of gross motor skill, it is unsurprising that Bowlby did not consider the human case of attachment complete without them. A tacit assumption, therefore, is that all the signaling repertoire (neonatal crying, vocalization, and gestures) that human infants are born with and that quickly develops is not integrated along with the capacity for individual recognition into the full-blown, goal-corrected (‘proper’) attachment system until the mastering of limb motor skills is added. Accordingly, before the rather vaguely-defined moment during the second phase of attachment in which the infant is supposed to ‘become attached’, the infant’s signaling equipment is essentially considered as no more than ‘building-bricks’ for the later development of attachment: a set of behavioral systems to become elaborated and to be superseded by more sophisticated ones, largely non-functional until becoming integrated into a functional whole. In short, although Bowlby did discuss the role of the infant’s signaling repertoire during ‘proto-attachment’, his interest in such mechanisms was restricted and the discussion succinct when compared to the further developed issues of attachment and loss— the true scope of his work. As an illustration, such mechanisms are listed in a single section (“Behavioral equipment of the human neonate”) within a single chapter (chapter 14) among three whole volumes of writing.

These three implications and their stress on the onset stages of attachment (or, ‘proto’ attachment) circle back to the human imprinting debate. As discussed, whilst crucial, an infant’s smile remains merely an index amid a much larger set of bodily movements and sounds which stand as attempts to form social interaction. Contemporary understanding of such ‘bodily movements’ has made significant progress since Bowlby’s time. An infant’s early communicative interaction largely takes the form of (but is not reduced to) what has since then been conceptualized as ‘protoconversation’ ( Bråten, 1988 ; Levinson, 2006 ). The latter, just as much as later adult conversation, consists of the multimodal integration of ‘interaction engine’: the face-to-face, turn-organised coordination of mutual gaze, body and facial gesture, and vocalization that characterizes human face-to-face communication. Rudimentary elements of protoconversation can be witnessed from birth (largely through imitation), with fully observable deployment by between 6 and 12-weeks of life ( Trevarthen, 1993 ).

As previously mentioned, the study of early signaling was not nearly as developed during Bowlby’s lifetime as it is now, with significant progress since then in various strands of research concerning early social cognition. A first major element to consider in early signaling and interaction is gaze. Notwithstanding the fact that its study has made tremendous progress, especially if compared to the state of the art during Bowlby’s lifetime when eye tracking technology was not available, its link to attachment in general, or its onset in particular, are not widespread and far from completely understood. For instance, although the link between gaze and attachment has been explicitly studied, it has been so in the context of young adults in their twenties ( Cecchini et al., 2015 ; Prinsen et al., 2019 ). Similarly, even when research has delved into the link between attachment and gaze in children whose age actually corresponds to Bowlby’s four onset phases ( Koulomzin et al., 2002 ), explicit discussion concerning such phases is absent. By this token, an opportunity for advancing the description and mapping of the ‘proto-attachment’ phases, as well their link to early social cognition, is lost.

Closely related to gaze is the issue of joint attention, a phenomenon that emerges as early as 6 months of age ( Charman and Charman, 2003 ) thus also well before the attainment of ‘proper’ attachment. Exploration of the link between such a phenomenon and attachment could also benefit from this paper’s arguments as research assessing the link between joint attention and attachment styles has so far not involved children young enough to correspond to ‘proto-attachment’ phases. More concretely, the earliest study we could find in terms of age involved 12-to 20-month-old children ( Mohammadzade Naghashan et al., 2021 ). In a similar vein, literature addressing joint attention in atypically-developing populations such as toddlers with autism warn that most research on the subject involved participants over 3 years-old ( Naber et al., 2007 ). Such a trend, Naber and collaborators add, overlooks the need to study early precursors of disrupted social behaviors that are essential to understanding how to mitigate or change such deficits in social cognition at later developmental stages. This in turn provides a further example of the lack of attention that ‘proto-attachment’ has received, the potential for correcting such inattention, as well as the corresponding potential clinical benefits.

Shifting from the visual to the aural domain, the link between vocal/acoustic signals and the early stages of attachment is a subject that could bear further strengthening. Modifications to the maternal human pelvis necessary to accommodate bipedalism caused a selective shift toward premature and helpless neonates ( Falk, 1998 ) whose ability to cling actively to their mothers (as is the case in other primates) was accordingly lost. As a result, distal mother-infant gestural communications increased ( Tomasello and Camaioni, 1997 ) and prosodic affective vocalisations became ubiquitous to compensate for the reduction in sustained mother-infant physical contact. Such a shift thus stimulated the development of infant cry on the one hand ( Soltis, 2004 ), and on parental vocal response to it on the other hand, as ‘disembodied extensions of mothers’ cradling arms’ ( Falk, 2004b , p. 462). Such paternal vocal response, has been conventionally subdivided into infant-directed speech— also referred to as ‘motherese’ ( Fernald, 1985 ), ‘babytalk’ ( Singh et al., 2002 ) or ‘songese’ ( Longhi, 2009 ) and infant-directed singing ( Trehub et al., 1993 ). Although several researchers have indirectly related infant-directed speech and infant-directed singing to attachment (see Trehub et al., 1997 ; Swain et al., 2004 ; Shannon, 2006 ; Smith and Trainor, 2008 ), such mentions do not lead to discussion at this level of detail, nor relate motherese to the early stages of attachment (i.e., ‘proto-attachment’) in a specific manner. In this sense, there is scope to render such links more explicit and systematic.

Taken together, examples discussed in these three last paragraphs— gaze, joint attention and parental prosody, respectively —provide proof of concept for the idea that the onset stages of attachment and their underlying, concrete mechanisms entail a microcosm that was less graspable in Bowlby’s time, has become more accessible for contemporary science and methods, and thus should receive scientific attention. Whilst such attention seems to be currently being paid through the scope of social cognition rather than that of attachment theory, both approaches are equally important and legitimate, as well as mutually beneficial. By bringing attention back to such early, ‘proto-attachment’ phases and their underlying mechanisms, the field of attachment theory would not miss a body of interactional phenomena that was originally labeled as ‘imprinting’ and that largely inspired the hatching of attachment theory itself.

A final point of discussion concerns the place ‘proto-attachment’ and human-imprinting-related phenomena occupy in the contemporary body of literature on attachment theory. The present article was largely motivated by the impression that, to our knowledge, in-depth critiques of the theoretical foundations of attachment theory (in general) or of its exact connection to imprinting (in particular) are not many. It could be that, perhaps because of the broad scope of applicability of attachment theory, Bowlby’s initial efforts for studying the establishment of attachment (i.e., his interest in human imprinting and the early ‘proto-attachment’ phases) have not been widely adopted. In this sense, it is interesting to wonder to what extent Bowlby’s theoretical foundations of attachment remain essentially unchallenged by those who adhere to it. Of course, such a suggestion remains a mere hypothesis, yet one that could be tested through a literature review. In the same vein and more concretely, for instance, it could be hypothesized that, should a systematic review on the subject be undertaken, only a handful of exceptions in the literature on attachment would make any mention of human imprinting at all.

In sum, it can be stated that Bowlbyan attachment takes place only after transitioning from an initial imprinting-like, supra-individual, ‘proto-attachment’ phase, through a series of preferences that further develop. Although attachment and imprinting may to a significant extent refer the same list of phenomena, their scopes of application imply different emphases. On the one hand, imprinting theory stresses a series of mechanisms that enable the very first social interactions of an infant as well as later ones that are eventually crucial. Bowlbyan attachment, on the other hand, stresses the psychological bond inherent in such social dynamics. In other words, imprinting is involved in the attachment of a child to their mother, but those researchers that work on attachment are also interested in the development of an affective relationship. Such a difference in scopes becomes natural when considering the contexts of ethology vs. psychology/psychoanalysis these two constructs came from.

Supra-individual learning of objects and the ‘proto-attachment’ behavior that is directed toward them does not occupy a central role in Bowlby’s definition of both imprinting and ‘proper’ attachment, thus diminishing the chances of researchers taking an interest in and exploring them. Stemming from Bowlby’s proposal, raising the question of the extent to which research in the field of human attachment has reproduced this omission.

Together, these distinctions and subtleties stress the importance of bearing in mind Bowlby’s landmarks in the transition through the early stages of attachment, or ‘proto-attachment’, as well as their use in the study of early social cognition.

Author contributions

J-PR conceived the article’s main argument, undertook most of the research and literature review, and wrote most of the article. IC provided substantial feedback during the conception of the article, and substantially contributed to the article’s writing. LB-B and ND contributed to the writing of the article’s introduction and discussion. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

This research was supported by the ANID Millennium Science Initiative Program (ICS2019_024).

Acknowledgments

J-PR would like to thank dearly the late Sir Patrick Bateson for his kind help during the early stages of the manuscript.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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Keywords: attachment theory, imprinting (psychology), human imprinting, psychology, ethology, psychoanalysis, social cognition

Citation: Robledo J-P, Cross I, Boada-Bayona L and Demogeot N (2022) Back to basics: A re-evaluation of the relevance of imprinting in the genesis of Bowlby’s attachment theory. Front. Psychol . 13:1033746. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1033746

Received: 31 August 2022; Accepted: 21 November 2022; Published: 20 December 2022.

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*Correspondence: Juan-Pablo Robledo, [email protected]

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Contributions of Attachment Theory and Research: A Framework for Future Research, Translation, and Policy

Jude cassidy.

University of Maryland

Jason D. Jones

Phillip r. shaver.

University of California, Davis

Attachment theory has been generating creative and impactful research for almost half a century. In this article we focus on the documented antecedents and consequences of individual differences in infant attachment patterns, suggesting topics for further theoretical clarification, research, clinical interventions, and policy applications. We pay particular attention to the concept of cognitive “working models” and to neural and physiological mechanisms through which early attachment experiences contribute to later functioning. We consider adult caregiving behavior that predicts infant attachment patterns, and the still-mysterious “transmission gap” between parental AAI classifications and infant Strange Situation classifications. We also review connections between attachment and (a) child psychopathology, (b) neurobiology, (c) health and immune function, (d) empathy, compassion, and altruism, (e) school readiness, and (f) culture. We conclude with clinical-translational and public policy applications of attachment research that could reduce the occurrence and maintenance of insecure attachment during infancy and beyond. Our goal is to inspire researchers to continue advancing the field by finding new ways to tackle long-standing questions and by generating and testing novel hypotheses.

One gets a glimpse of the germ of attachment theory in John Bowlby's 1944 article, “Forty-Four Juvenile Thieves: Their Character and Home-Life,” published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis . Using a combination of case studies and statistical methods (novel at the time for psychoanalysts) to examine the precursors of delinquency, Bowlby arrived at his initial empirical insight: The precursors of emotional disorders and delinquency could be found in early attachment-related experiences, specifically separations from, or inconsistent or harsh treatment by, mothers (and often fathers or other men who were involved with the mothers). Over the subsequent decades, as readers of this journal know, he built a complex and highly generative theory of attachment.

Unlike other psychoanalytic writers of his generation, Bowlby formed a working relationship with a very talented empirically oriented researcher, Mary Ainsworth. Her careful observations, first in Uganda ( Ainsworth, 1967 ) and later in Baltimore, led to a detailed specification of aspects of maternal behavior that preceded individual differences in infant attachment. Her creation of the Strange Situation ( Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978 ) provided a gold standard for identifying and classifying individual differences in infant attachment security (and insecurity) and ushered in decades of research examining the precursors and outcomes of individual differences in infant attachment. (A PsycInfo literature search using the keyword “attachment” yields more than 15,000 titles).

By the beginning of the 21 st century, the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine's Committee on Integrating the Science of Early Childhood Development based its policy and practice conclusions and recommendations on four themes, one of which was that “early environments matter and nurturing relationships are essential ( Shonkoff & Phillips, 2000 , p. 4) … Children grow and thrive in the context of close and dependable relationships that provide love and nurturance, security, responsive interaction, and encouragement for exploration. Without at least one such relationship, development is disrupted, and the consequences can be severe and long-lasting” (p. 7). This clear and strong statement could be made in large part because of the research inspired by Bowlby's theory and Ainsworth's creative research methods.

Years after Ainsworth's Strange Situation was proposed, Mary Main and colleagues (e.g., George, Kaplan, & Main, 1984 ; Main, Kaplan, & Cassidy, 1985 ) provided a way to study the intergenerational transmission of attachment patterns. They and other researchers found that a parent's “state of mind with respect to attachment” predicted his or her infant's pattern of attachment. Moreover, since the 1980's there has been an explosion of research examining attachment processes beyond the parent-child dyad (e.g., in adult romantic relationships), which has supported Bowlby's (1979) belief that attachment is a process that characterizes humans “from the cradle to the grave” (p. 129). In the present article, space limitations lead us to focus principally on attachment processes early in life and consider the adult attachment literature largely in relation to parental predictors of infant attachment.

A Simple Model of Infant-Mother Attachment

During the 70 years since Bowlby's initial consideration of the developmental precursors of adolescent delinquency and psychopathology, researchers have provided a complex picture of the parental and experiential precursors of infant attachment, the links between early attachment-related experiences and later child functioning, the mechanisms involved in explaining these links, and moderators of these linking mechanisms. Much has been learned at each of several analytic levels, including behavior, cognition, emotion, physiology, and genetics. Figure 1 summarizes this literature in a simple model. We have selected several of the components in Figure 1 for further discussion. For each component, following a brief background and review of the current state of knowledge, we offer suggestions for future research, based largely on identification of gaps in theory or methodological innovations that make new lines of discovery possible. We begin by considering one of the central concepts of attachment theory, the internal working model, followed by a consideration of physiological mechanisms that also help to explain the influence of early attachments. Next, we consider the caregiving behavior that predicts infant attachment and the perplexing issue of the transmission gap between parental Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) classifications and infant Strange Situation classifications. We then examine connections between attachment and (a) child psychopathology, (b) neurobiology, (c) health and immune function, (d) empathy, compassion, and altruism, (e) school readiness, and (f) culture. Finally, we discuss the translational application of attachment research to reducing the risk of developing or maintaining insecure attachments and the policy implications of attachment research.

Note . A complete depiction of attachment processes would require several pages. For instance, here we note the parent's own attachment representations as a contributor to parental attachment-related behavior. There are many other important contributors to parental behavior, including culture, SES, parental age, parental personality, child temperament, and presence or absence of a partner, to name a few. Each of the constructs and arrows in Figure 1 could be surrounded by numerous others.

Internal Working Models

One of the key concepts in attachment theory is the “attachment behavioral system,” which refers to an organized system of behaviors that has a predictable outcome (i.e., proximity) and serves an identifiable biological function (i.e., protection). According to Bowlby (1969/1982 ), such a system is organized by experience-based “internal working models” (IWMs) of self and environment, including especially the caregiving environment.

It is by postulating the existence of these cognitive components and their utilization by the attachment system that the theory is enabled to provide explanations of how a child's experiences with attachment figures come to influence in particular ways the pattern of attachment he develops. (pp. 373-374)

Much of the research on these models is based on the notion that, beginning in the first year of life, mentally healthy individuals develop a “secure base script” that provides a causal-temporal prototype of the ways in which attachment-related events typically unfold (e.g., “When I am hurt, I go to my mother and receive comfort”). According to Bretherton (1991 ; Bretherton & Munholland, 2008 ), secure base scripts are the “building blocks” of IWMs. Theoretically, secure children's and adults' scripts should allow them to create attachment-related “stories” in which one person successfully uses another as a secure base from which to explore and as a safe haven in times of need or distress. Insecure individuals should exhibit gaps in, or distortion or even absence of, such a script. H. Waters and colleagues ( H. Waters & Rodrigues-Doolabh, 2001 ; H. Waters & Waters, 2006 ) tested this hypothesis by having children complete story stems that began with a character's attachment behavioral system presumably being activated (e.g., a child rock-climbing with parents hurts his knee). Secure attachment at 2 years of age was positively correlated with the creation of stories involving knowledge of and access to the secure base script at ages 3 and 4. (A similar methodology has been used in studies of young adults; see Mikulincer, Shaver, Sapir-Lavid, & Avihou-Kanza, 2009 .)

New Directions in the Examination of IWM Formation during Infancy

Despite Bowlby's hypothesis that infants develop IWMs during the first year of life (see also Main et al., 1985 ), almost no empirical work has focused on attachment representations during infancy (instead, most research on IWMs has involved children, adolescents, and adults). We believe, as do others ( Johnson et al., 2010 ; Sherman & Cassidy, 2013 ; Thompson, 2008 ), that IWMs can be studied in infancy. Such work is made possible by recent efforts to bridge social-emotional and cognitive developmental research (e.g., Calkins & Bell, 2010 ; Olson & Dweck, 2008 ), along with methodological advances and accumulating research on an array of previously unexplored infant mental capacities.

Attachment researchers have assumed that infants recall the emotional nature of their attachment-related social experiences with specific individuals (e.g., experiences of comfort with vs. rejection by mother), and that they use these memories to create IWMs that guide their attachment behavior in subsequent interactions with these individuals. This claim has been supported with correlational research findings; for example observations indicating that infants' daily interactions with attachment figures are linked to their IWMs reflected in behavior in the Strange Situation ( Ainsworth et al., 1978 ). These findings can now be supplemented with results from experimental studies.

There is a compelling body of experimental work showing that infants extract complex social-emotional information from the social interactions they observe. For example, they notice helpful and hindering behaviors of one “person” (usually represented by a puppet or a geometric figure) toward another, they personally prefer individuals who have helped others, they form expectations about how two characters should behave toward each other in subsequent interactions, and they behave positively or negatively toward individuals based on what they have observed (e.g., Hamlin & Wynn, 2011 ; Hamlin, Wynn, Bloom, & Mahajan, 2011 ). This work could and should be extended to include attachment relationships, revealing in detail how infants form “models” of particular adults and then modify their emotional reactions and social behaviors toward those adults accordingly ( Johnson et al., 2010 ). At present, there is no experimental research showing that infants form expectations about the later social behavior of another person toward them based on the infants' own past interactions with that person – a capacity that is assumed to underlie infants' development of working models of their caregivers.

As explained in detail in another paper ( Sherman & Cassidy, 2013 ), we urge infancy researchers to consider the specific cognitive and emotional capacities required to form IWMs and then to examine these capacities experimentally. Methods used by researchers who study infant cognition, but rarely used by attachment researchers (e.g., eye-tracking, habituation paradigms), will prove useful. For example, habituation paradigms could allow attachment researchers to study infant IWMs of likely mother and infant responses to infant distress (see Johnson et al., 2010 ). Another research area relevant to attachment researchers' conception of IWMs concerns infants' understanding of statistical probabilities. When considering individual differences in how mothering contributes to attachment quality, Bowlby (1969/1982) adopted Winnicott's (1953) conception of “good enough” mothering; that is, mothering which assures a child that probabilistically, and often enough, the mother will prove responsive to the child's signals. Implicit in such a perspective is the assumption that an infant can make probabilistic inferences. Only recently has there been a surge in interest in the methods available to evaluate this assumption of attachment theory (e.g., Krogh, Vlach, & Johnson, 2013 ; Pelucchi, Hay, & Saffran, 2009 ; Romberg & Saffran, 2013 ; Xu & Kushnir, 2013 ).

One useful conceptual perspective, called rational constructivism, is based on the idea that infants use probabilistic reasoning when integrating existing knowledge with new data to test hypotheses about the world. Xu and Kushnir (2013) reviewed evidence that by 18 months of age, infants use probabilistic reasoning to evaluate alternative hypotheses ( Gerken, 2006 ; Gweon, Tenenbaum, & Schulz, 2010 ), revise hypotheses in light of new data ( Gerken, 2010 ), make predictions ( Denison & Xu, 2010 ), and guide their actions ( Denison & Xu, 2010 ). Moreover, infants are capable of integrating prior knowledge and multiple contextual factors into their statistical computations ( Denison & Xu, 2010 ; Teglas, Girotto, Gonzales, & Bonatti, 2007 ; Xu & Denison, 2009 ). Xu and Kushnir (2013) have further proposed that these capacities appear to be domain-general, being evident in a variety of areas: language, physical reasoning, psychological reasoning, object understanding, and understanding of individual preferences. Notably absent from this list is the domain of social relationships, including attachment relationships.

Several questions about probabilistic inferences can be raised: Do infants make such inferences about the likely behavior of particular attachment figures, and could this ability account for qualitatively different attachments to different individuals (e.g., mother as distinct from father)? Do infants use probabilistic reasoning when drawing inferences related to the outcomes of their own attachment behaviors? (This is related to if-then contingencies: “If I cry, what is the probability that χ will occur?”) How complex can this infant reasoning become, and across what developmental trajectory? “If I do χ, the likelihood of outcome y is 80%, but if I do w , the likelihood of y is only 30%.” Do infants consider context? “If I do χ, the likelihood of y is 90% in context q , but only 20% in context r .” How do infants calculate variability in these probabilities across attachment figures?

In sum, it seems likely that infants use statistical inference to understand their social worlds. This ability would seem to be evolutionarily adaptive in relation to attachment figures, because infants could incorporate probabilistic inferences into their IWMs and use them to guide their attachment behavior. Important advances in our understanding of attachment behavior might occur with respect to how and when this incorporation happens, and also with respect to the role of statistical inference in infants' openness to change in response to changing environmental input (e.g., in response to interventions designed to change parental behavior).

Child-Parent Attachment, Response to Threat, and Physiological Mechanisms of Influence

Bowlby's emphasis on cognitive IWMs as the mechanism through which early experiences influence later functioning is understandable given the emerging cognitive emphasis in psychology when he was writing. But scientists are becoming increasingly aware that the effects of attachment-related experiences are carried in the body and brain in ways not easily reducible to cognition. As a way to touch briefly on the physiological processes involved in attachment, we focus here on a central issue in attachment theory: infants' responses to threat as these are shaped by attachment relationships. One of the core propositions of attachment theory is that proximity to an attachment figure reduces fear in the presence of a possible or actual threat. As explained in the previous section, Bowlby thought the mechanism that explained this link is children's experience-based cognitive representation of the availability of an attachment figure. Specifically, it is because securely attached infants are more likely than insecurely attached infants to have mental representations of caregiver availability and responsiveness that they are able to interpret a threat as manageable and respond to it with less fear and anxiety. Yet in species that do not possess human representational capacities, the link between attachment and response to threat clearly exists, suggesting that in humans there is likely to be more to attachment orientations than cognitive IWMs. (For the initial and more extensive discussion of ideas presented in this section, see Cassidy, Ehrlich, and Sherman [2013] .)

Another Level of “Representation” or Internal Structure: Physiology

Since the time of Bowlby's original writings, one important advance that has extended our understanding of the link between attachment and response to threat has roots in Myron Hofer's laboratory in the 1970s. Hofer, a developmental psychobiologist, noticed defensive vocal protest responses to maternal separation in infant rat pups and asked what non-representational process could account for them. He and his colleagues conducted a series of tightly controlled experiments to identify what physiological subsystems, which he called hidden regulators, are disrupted when mothers are removed from their pups (for reviews, see Hofer, 2006 ; Polan & Hofer, 2008 ). The pups exhibit changes in multiple physiological and behavioral systems, such as those controlling heart rate, body temperature, food intake, and exploration. Hofer concluded that mother-infant interactions have embedded within them a number of vital physiological regulatory functions that are disrupted by separation from mother and do not require cognitive mediators. These regulators can be disentangled by experimentally manipulating parts of a “mother”: the food she provides, her warmth, her licking and grooming, etc. Later, Meaney and colleagues (e.g., Liu et al., 1997 ; reviewed in Meaney, 2001 ) found that rat pups that received high levels of maternal licking and grooming and arched-back nursing positions had milder responses to threat and increased exploratory behavior – effects that lasted into adulthood (and in fact, into subsequent generations as a function of maternal affection in each successive generation). This research group further found that individual differences in maternal behavior were mediated by differences in offsprings' gene expression ( Weaver et al., 2004 ), a finding that has opened up a new research domain for researchers studying both animals and humans ( Sharp, Pickles, Meaney, Marshall, Tibu, & Hill, 2012 ; Suomi, 2011 ).

Early Attachment-Related Experiences and Human Infant Biological Response to Stress

In humans, a fully developed stress response system, the HPA axis, is present at birth ( Adam, Klimes-Dougan, & Gunnar, 2007 ). A growing body of research indicates that differences in the quality of early care contribute to variations in the initial calibration and continued regulation of this system. This regulation in turn plays an important role in shaping behavioral responses to threat ( Jessop & Turner-Cobb, 2008 ).

Researchers have examined connections between caregiving experiences and infant stress physiology by comparing infants' cortisol levels before and after a stressful task (e.g., the Strange Situation). For example, Nachmias, Gunnar, Mangelsdorf, Parritz, and Buss (1996) found that inhibited toddlers who were insecurely attached to their caregivers exhibited elevated cortisol levels following exposure to novel stimuli. There is also experimental evidence that mothers' touch buffers infants' cortisol stress response (in this case, during the still-face laboratory procedure in which mothers are asked to cease interacting emotionally with their infants; Feldman, Singer, & Zagoory, 2010 ). Children living in violent families endure particularly stressful caregiving environments, which are extremely dysregulating for them ( Taylor, Repetti, & Seeman, 1997 ). A number of studies have documented the disrupted stress response of maltreated children (e.g., De Bellis et al., 1999 ; Hart, Gunnar, & Cicchetti, 1995 ). Even living in a family in which the violence does not involve them directly has negative consequences for children, and studies suggest that the quality of caregiving in these harsh environments plays an important role in modifying the stress response (e.g., Hibel, Granger, Blair, Cox, & The FLP Investigators, 2011 ).

Attachment as a Regulator of Infant Stress Reactivity: Further Questions

Just as infants are thought to have evolved a capacity to use experience-based information about the availability of a protective caregiver to calibrate their attachment behavioral system ( Main, 1990 ), and given the close intertwining of the attachment and fear systems, it is likely that infants also evolved a capacity to use information about the availability of an attachment figure to calibrate their threat response system at both the behavioral and physiological levels ( Cassidy, 2009 ). And this capacity is probably not solely “cognitive,” which raises important questions for research: How are representational and physiological processes linked and how do they influence each other and affect child functioning? Does the nature of their interaction vary across particular aspects of child functioning and across developmental periods? How can we understand these interactions in relation to both normative development and individual differences?

In humans, representations and physiological (e.g., stress) reactions are thought to affect each other in ways unlikely to occur in other species. Sapolsky (2004) noted that, in humans, representational processes – the anticipation of threat when none currently exists – can launch a stress response. Relatedly, Bowlby (1973) , focusing on the link between attachment and fear, specified representational “forecasts of availability or unavailability” of an attachment figure as “a major variable that determines whether a person is or is not alarmed by any potentially alarming situation” (p. 204). Thus, the representations that others will be unavailable or rejecting when needed – that is, representations that characterize insecure attachment – could contribute to chronic activation of physiological stress response systems, as could the associated representations of others as having hostile intentions ( Dykas & Cassidy, 2011 ). Conversely, in times of both anticipated and actual threat, the capacity to represent a responsive attachment figure can diminish physiological responses associated with threatening or painful experiences (see Eisenberger et al., 2011 ; Coan, Schaefer, & Davidson, 2006 ). Moreover, consideration of linkages between representational and non-representational processes must include the possibility that causality flows in both directions: Physiological stress responses can presumably prompt a person to engage in higher-level cognitive processes to understand, justify, or eliminate the stressor.

When and how do young children use attachment-related representations as regulators of stress? Neither normative trajectories nor individual differences in the use of representations to influence stress reactivity have been examined extensively. Evidence that stress dysregulation can lead to the conscious engagement of representational processes comes from children as young as 4 who are able to describe strategies for alleviating distress (e.g., changing thoughts, reappraising the situation, mental distraction; Sayfan & Lagattuta, 2009 ). Less studied but of great interest are possible “automatic emotion regulation” processes ( Mauss, Bunge, & Gross, 2007 ) that do not involve conscious or deliberate self-regulation. Recent studies of adults show that there are such processes, that there are individual differences in them that might relate to attachment orientations, that they are associated with particular brain regions that are not the same as those associated with conscious, deliberate emotion regulation, and that they can be influenced experimentally with priming procedures.

Many researchable questions remain: Given the extent to which many forms of psychopathology reflect problems of self-regulation in the face of stress (e.g., Kring & Sloan, 2010 ), can “hidden regulators” stemming from infant-mother interactions tell us about the precursors of psychopathology? What about hidden regulators embedded within a relationship with a therapist (who, according to Bowlby [1988] , serves as an attachment figure in the context of long-term psychotherapy)? When change occurs following long-term therapy, does this change emerge through cognitive representations, changes at the physiological level, or both? See Cassidy et al., (2013) for additional suggestions for future research.

Maternal Caregiving and Infant Attachment: Intergenerational Transmission of Attachment and the “Transmission Gap”

In 1985, Main and colleagues published the first evidence of the intergenerational transmission of attachment: a link between a mother's attachment representations (coded from responses to the AAI; George et al., 1984 ) and her infant's attachment to her ( Figure 1 , Path c). Based on findings from Ainsworth's initial study of the precursors of individual differences in infant attachment ( Ainsworth et al., 1978 ), researchers expected this link to be explained by maternal sensitivity: That is, they believed that a mother's state of mind with respect to attachment guides her sensitive behavior toward her infant ( Figure 1 , Path a), which in turn influences infant attachment quality ( Figure 1 , Path b). However, at the end of a decade of research, van IJzendoorn (1995) published a meta-analysis indicating that the strong and well-replicated link between maternal and infant attachment was not fully mediated by maternal sensitivity (see also Madigan et al., 2006 ). van IJzendoorn labeled what he had found as the “ transmission gap .” Moreover, meta-analytic findings revealed that the link between maternal sensitivity and infant attachment, although nearly universally present across scores of studies, was typically considerably weaker than that reported in Ainsworth's original study ( De Wolff & van IJzendoorn, 1997 ).

The transmission gap has been one of the most perplexing issues facing attachment researchers during the past 15-20 years. Immediate attempts to understand it focused largely on measurement of maternal behavior. Many studies have been aimed at understanding why the strength of the association between maternal sensitivity and infant attachment, while not negligible, is lower than the particularly strong effect found in Ainsworth's original study, and lower than attachment researchers expected. These studies have provided important insights, but no consensus has emerged about how to understand maternal behavior as a predictor of infant attachment. Continued efforts in this area are essential, and they will inform both researchers' understanding of the workings of the attachment behavioral system and clinicians' attempts to reduce the risk of infant insecure attachments.

Further consideration of Bowlby's concept of the secure base may help researchers better understand maternal contributors to infant attachment. First, we should note that any consideration of caregiving influences necessitates consideration of differential child susceptibility to rearing influence. According to the differential susceptibility hypothesis ( Belsky, 2005 ; see also Boyce & Ellis, 2005 , on the theory of biological sensitivity to context, and Ellis, Boyce, Belsky, Bakermans-Kranenberg, & van IJzendoorn, 2011 , for an integration of the differential susceptibility hypothesis and the theory of biological sensitivity to context), children vary genetically in the extent to which they are influenced by environmental factors, and for some children the influence of caregiving behavior on attachment may be minimal. Moreover, we underscore that the thinking presented in the present paper relates to the initial development of infant attachment during the first year of life; contributors to security are likely to differ at different developmental periods.

A focus on secure base provision

For Bowlby (1988) , the secure base concept was the heart of attachment theory: “No concept within the attachment framework is more central to developmental psychiatry than that of the secure base” (pp. 163–164). When parents provide a secure base, their children's confidence in the parents' availability and sensitive responsiveness when needed allows the children to explore the environment freely. The secure base phenomenon contains two intertwined components: a secure base from which a child can explore and a haven of safety to which the child can return in times of distress. In fact, as noted earlier, the central cognitive components of secure attachment are thought to reside in a secure base script (i.e., a script according to which, following a distressing event, the child seeks and receives care from an available attachment figure, experiences comfort, and returns to exploration).

If the goal of research is to understand what components of a parent's behavior allow a child to use the parent as a secure base, researchers should focus as precisely as possible on the parent's secure base provision rather than on his or her parental behavior more broadly. Through experience-based understanding of parental intentions and behavior, an infant gathers information to answer a central secure base question: What is my attachment figure likely to do when activation of my attachment system leads me to seek contact? If experiences lead the infant to believe that the parent will be responsive (most of the time) to behaviors related to activation of his/her attachment system, then the infant will use the parent as a secure base, and behavioral manifestations of the secure base script will appear (i.e., the secure base script will be evident in the Strange Situation attachment assessment, and the infant will be classified as secure). In 2000, E. Waters and Cummings, when proposing an agenda for the field in the millennium of the 2000s, urged that the secure-base concept be kept “at center stage in attachment theory and research” (p. 164). We share this opinion, and believe that additional consideration of the secure base notion will provide a useful framework within which to consider parental behavior as a predictor of infant attachment.

Bowlby (1988) emphasized that an infant's sense of having a secure base resides in the infant's confidence that parental sensitive responsiveness will be provided when needed (e.g., specifying “especially should he [the infant] become tired or frightened” [p. 132]). As such, it may be useful for attachment researchers to frame their question as: Which contexts provide the infant with information about the parent's likely behavior when needed – not in all contexts, but specifically in response to activation of the infant's attachment system ? Bowlby (1969/1982) described the relevant contexts as “fall[ing] into two classes: those which indicate the presence of potential danger or stress (internal or external), and those concerning the whereabouts and accessibility of the attachment figure” (p. 373).

Especially during the early years of life, both of these circumstances are likely to be associated with infant distress. This association has led some writers to wonder whether maternal response to infant distress is particularly predictive of infant attachment quality (e.g., Thompson, 1997 ), and there is compelling evidence that this is the case (e.g., Del Carmen, Pedersen, Huffman, & Bryan, 1993 ; Leerkes, 2011 ; Leerkes, Parade, & Gudmundson, 2011 ; McElwain & Booth-LaForce, 2006 ). When infants experience comfort from parental sensitive responses to their distress, they develop mental representations that contribute to security (“When I am distressed, I seek care, and I am comforted”). These representations are then thought to guide secure attachment behavior, and the physiological regulation that comes from regaining calmness in contact with the parent is thought to calibrate the child's stress reactivity systems and feed back into further secure mental representations (e.g., Cassidy et al., 2013 ; Suomi, 2008 ). The greater predictive power of the maternal response to distress, compared to maternal response to non-distress, may emerge from the considerable intertwining of infant distress and the infant's attachment system during the first year of life.

Future studies attempting to predict infant attachment might benefit from a framework that considers two components of parental behavior: (a) parental behavior related specifically to the secure base function of the infant's attachment system as Bowlby described it (see above), and (b) parental response to infant distress. Table 1 presents a 2 (attachment-related or not) × 2 (infant distressed or not) matrix that gives rise to a number of research questions. One key question is the following: Is parental behavior in response to an infant's attachment behavioral system most predictive of infant attachment, regardless of whether or not the infant is distressed (i.e., parental behavior in both cells 1 and 2)? Another set of questions relates to distress: Is parental response to any form of infant distress the most central predictor of infant attachment (i.e., parental behavior in both cells 1 and 3)? Does the termination of the physiological and emotional dysregulation of distress – no matter what the cause – that occurs through parental care solidify a tendency to use the parent as a secure base? Or do the cognitive models that derive from experiences of distress in different contexts (e.g., distress during play versus distress when seeking comfort) contribute differentially to secure base use? Most previous research has not drawn distinctions concerning the context of infant distress; future work that considers this distinction is needed.

Note . The following examples describe 5- to 12-month old infants participating in studies with their mothers in Cassidy's lab. Cell 1 . The context is attachment-related, and the infant is distressed: After having been left alone in an unfamiliar laboratory playroom, a crying 12-month-old crossed the room to her returning mother and reached to be picked up. Cell 2 . The context is attachment-related, and the infant is not distressed: An 8-month-old infant had been playing contentedly for 20 minutes near her mother at home. The mother had been sitting on the floor holding a toddler whose hair she was braiding. When the mother finished and the toddler moved away, the infant crawled to the mother, clambered up on her lap, and snuggled in for a hug; after exchanging tender pats with her mother, the infant returned to play on the floor. The lack of accessibility to the mother may have led to the infant's seeking contact in a manner that did not involve other activities (e.g., play or feeding). Cell 3 . The context is not attachment-related, and the infant is distressed: A 12-month-old infant became distressed when a toy was removed. Cell 4 . The context is not attachment-related, and the infant is not distressed: An infant, with her mother nearby, played happily with toys.

Additional questions raised by Table 1 include: Is it the combination of maternal behavior when the infant's attachment system is central, along with any behavioral response to infant distress, that best predicts infant attachment (i.e., maternal behavior in cells 1, 2, and 3)? Finally, is it the case (as some have suggested; e.g., Pedersen & Moran, 1999) that maternal behavior in all four cells is predictive of infant attachment? Attempts to increase understanding of the precursors of infant attachment will require the development of detailed coding systems.

Finally, it will be crucial for future research conducted within a secure base framework to identify the specific maternal behaviors in response to activation of the infant's attachment system that predict infant security (for one approach, see Cassidy et al., 2005 , and Woodhouse & Cassidy, 2009 , who note that providing physical contact until the infant is fully calmed may be a more powerful predictor of later security than the general sensitivity of the parent's response). Basic research examining the extent to which infant distress occurs in relation to the attachment behavioral system will provide an important foundation for further work.

Additional mediational pathways: Genetics, cognitions, and emotions

Following the discovery of the transmission gap, several studies examined the possibility of a genetic mediating mechanism. However, neither behavior-genetic nor molecular-genetic research so far indicates a genetic component to individual differences in secure vs. insecure attachment, although mixed findings have emerged concerning a genetic vulnerability for infant disorganized attachment ( Bakermans-Kranenburg & van IJzendoorn, 2004 , 2007 ; Bokhorst et al. 2003 ; Fearon et al., 2006 ; Roisman & Fraley, 2008 ). (For evidence that variability in infants' serotonin-transporter-linked polymorphic region 5-HTTLPR predicts not whether infants are secure or insecure, but their subtype of security or subtype of insecurity, see Raby et al., 2012 ). Future research should examine other genes and gene X environment interactions (see Suomi, 2011 , for examples from primate research).

Despite a conceptual model of intergenerational transmission in which maternal behavior is central, examination of additional linking mechanisms purported to underlie maternal behavior, such as maternal cognitions and emotions, will continue to be important. Perhaps such factors may be more reliably measured than maternal behavior, and if they are, mediating relations may emerge to shed light on mechanisms of transmission (e.g., Bernier & Dozier, 2003 ). Moreover, from a clinical standpoint, factors thought to underlie maternal behavior may be more amenable targets of intervention than her behavior itself. For example, continued examination of maternal cognition through the study of constructs such as reflective functioning and maternal insightfulness may shed light on the link between mother and child attachment ( Oppenheim & Koren-Karie, 2009 ; Slade, Sadler, & Mayes, 2005 ). These constructs refer to the extent to which a mother can see the world from her infant's point of view while also considering her own mental state. There is evidence that these and other components of maternal cognition (e.g., perceptions of the baby, attributions about infant behavior and emotions, maternal mindmindedness) are linked to maternal and/or child attachment, and additional research is needed to clarify the extent to which these components mediate the link between the two (e.g., Leerkes & Siepak, 2006 ; Zeanah, Benoit, Hirshberg, Barton, & Regan, 1994 ).

Another aspect of maternal functioning that should prove fruitful for researchers examining the transmission gap is maternal emotion regulation. As Cassidy (2006) has proposed, much maternal insensitivity can be recast as a failure of maternal emotion regulation. That is, when mothers themselves become dysregulated in the face of child behavior or child emotions that they find distressing (particularly child distress), their maternal behavior is more likely to be driven by their own dysregulation rather than the needs of the child (see also Slade, in press ). Evidence that maternal emotion-regulation capacities contribute to problematic parenting and insecure attachment has been reported ( Leerkes et al., 2011 ; Lorber & O'Leary, 2005 ), as have data indicating that maternal state of mind with respect to attachment (i.e., maternal secure base script knowledge) is uniquely related to maternal physiological regulation in response to infant cries (but not in response to infant laughter; Groh & Roisman, 2009 ). Unfortunately, although there is a sound conceptual and empirical basis for maternal emotion regulation as a mediator of the link between maternal and child attachment, there has been no empirical examination of this possibility.

In sum, the direction of future work depends on researchers' goals. If the goal is to understand the maternal behavior that mediates the link between maternal state of mind and child attachment, then the focus, obviously, must be on maternal behavior. If, however, the goal is to understand what factors may guide maternal behavior, and as such may themselves be successful targets of intervention, then examination of factors such as maternal cognitions and emotions should prove useful as well.

Caregiving as a Function of Adult Attachment Style

Although most researchers using self-report measures of adult attachment have not focused on links with parenting, there is a substantial and growing body of literature (more than 50 published studies) that addresses this link (see Jones, Cassidy, & Shaver, 2013 , for a review). Whereas researchers using the AAI have focused mainly on links between adults' AAI classifications and their observed parenting behaviors , attachment style researchers have focused mainly on links between adult attachment style and self-reported parenting cognitions and emotions (reviewed by Mikulincer & Shaver, 2007 ). But the few studies in which self-report attachment measures were used to predict parenting behavior have found support for predicted associations (e.g., Edelstein et al., 2004 ; Mills-Koonce et al., 2011 ; Rholes, Simpson, & Blakely, 1995 , Study 1; Selcuk et al., 2010 ). This is especially the case for maternal self-reported attachment-related avoidance (note that each of these studies was conducted with mothers only [Edelstein et al. included 4 fathers], so caution is warranted in generalizing these findings to fathers).

It would be useful to have more studies of adult attachment styles and observed parenting behavior. It would also be important to conduct longitudinal and intergenerational research using self-report measures. Prospective research is needed examining the extent to which adult attachment styles predict both parenting behaviors and infant attachment (see Mayseless, Sharabany, & Sagi, 1997 , and Volling, Notaro, & Larsen, 1998 , for mixed evidence concerning parents' adult attachment style as a predictor of infant attachment). Of related interest to researchers examining attachment styles and parenting will be longitudinal research examining the developmental precursors of adult attachment as measured with self-report measures (see Fraley, Roisman, Booth-LaForce, Tresch Owen, & Holland, 2013 , and Zayas, Mischel, Shoda, & Aber, 2011 , for evidence that self-reported attachment style in adolescence and early adulthood is predictable from participants' mothers' behavior during the participants' infancy and early childhood).

In general, we need more merging of social and developmental research traditions. It would be useful to include both the AAI and self-report attachment style measures in studies of parenting behaviors and cognitions. It would also be useful to know how the two kinds of measures relate similarly and differently to parenting variables. Scharf and Mayseless (2011) included both kinds of measures and found that both of them prospectively predicted parenting cognitions (e.g., perceived ability to take care of children), and in some cases, the self-report measure yielded significant predictions when the AAI did not (e.g., desire to have children). From the viewpoint of making predictions for practical or applied purposes, it is beneficial that both interview and self-report measures predict important outcomes but sometimes do so in non-redundant ways, thus increasing the amount of explained variance.

Mothers and Fathers

It is unclear whether it is best to think of a single kind of parental caregiving system in humans or of separate maternal and paternal caregiving systems. Harlow proposed separate maternal and paternal systems in primates (e.g., Harlow, Harlow, & Hansen, 1963 ). Within a modern evolutionary perspective, the existence of separate maternal and paternal caregiving systems is readily understood. Because mothers and fathers may differ substantially in the extent to which the survival of any one child enhances their overall fitness, their parenting behavior may differ. In addition, the inclusion of fathers in future attachment research is crucial. We contend that the field's continued focus on mothers is more likely to reflect the difficulty of recruiting fathers as research participants than a lack of interest in fathers. Bowlby, after all, was careful to use the term “attachment figure” rather than “mother,” because of his belief that although biological mothers typically serve as principal attachment figures, other figures such as fathers, adoptive mothers, grandparents, and child-care providers can also serve as attachment figures. Presumably, it is the nature of the interaction rather than the category of the individual that is important to the child. Also, addition of fathers will permit examination of attachment within a family systems perspective ( Byng-Hall, 1999 ; Johnson, 2008 ). Future research should examine (a) whether the precursors of infant-father attachment are similar to or different from the precursors of infant-mother attachment; (b) whether the Strange Situation best captures the quality of infant-father attachments (some have suggested that it does not; Grossmann Grossman, Kindler, & Zimmermann, 2008 ); (c) the influence of infants' relationships with fathers and father figures on their subsequent security and mental health; (d) possible differences in the working models children have of mothers and fathers; and (e) possible influences of parents' relationship with each other on the child's sense of having, or not having, a secure base ( Bretherton, 2010 ; Davies & Cummings, 1994 ).

Attachment and Psychopathology

As mentioned at the outset of this article, Bowlby was a clinician interested in the influence of early experiences with caregivers on children's later mental health and delinquency ( Bowlby, 1944 , 1951 ). Yet following a line of thinking that later came to characterize the developmental psychopathology approach (e.g., Cicchetti, 1984 ), Bowlby developed attachment theory as a framework for investigating and understanding both normal and abnormal development ( Sroufe, Carlson, Levy, & Egeland, 1999 ). Given space limitations and the focus of this journal, we will concentrate on relations between attachment and child psychopathology ( Figure 1 , Path d; see Cassidy & Shaver, 2008 , and Sroufe, Egeland, Carlson, & Collins, 2005a , for reviews of attachment and psychosocial functioning more broadly). The vast majority of existing studies have, however, not focused on clinically diagnosed psychopathology, but have been concerned with relations between attachment and continuous measures of internalizing and externalizing symptoms (e.g., assessed with the Child Behavior Checklist [CBCL]; Achenbach, 1991 ).

Bowlby's Theory of Attachment and Psychopathology

Bowlby used Waddington's (1957) developmental pathways model to explain how early attachment relates to later developmental outcomes, including psychopathology. According to this model, developmental outcomes are a product of the interaction of early childhood experiences and current context (at any later age). Early attachment is not expected to be perfectly predictive of later outcomes. Moreover, attachment insecurity per se is not psychopathology nor does it guarantee pathological outcomes. Instead, insecurity in infancy and early childhood is thought to be a risk factor for later psychopathology if subsequent development occurs in the context of other risk factors (e.g., poverty, parental psychopathology, abuse). Security is a protective factor that may buffer against emotional problems when later risks are present (see Sroufe et al., 1999 , for a review).

Attachment and Internalizing/Externalizing Behavior Problems: State of the Field

Over the past few decades, there have been many studies of early attachment and child mental health. The findings are complicated and difficult to summarize, as explained by Fearon, Bakermans-Kranenburg, van IJzendoorn, Lapsley, and Roisman (2010 , p. 437): “With the sheer volume, range, and diversity of studies…it has become virtually impossible to provide a clear narrative account of the status of the evidence concerning this critical issue in developmental science” (italics added). Studies contributing to this body of work have used diverse samples and different methods and measures, and have yielded inconsistent and, at times, contradictory results. Fortunately, two recent meta-analyses ( Fearon et al., 2010 ; Groh, Roisman, van IJzendoorn, Bakermans-Kranenburg, & Fearon, 2012 ) provide quantitative estimates of the degree of association between child attachment and internalizing/externalizing symptoms.

The meta-analyses revealed that insecurity (avoidant, ambivalent, and disorganized combined) was related to higher rates of internalizing and externalizing symptoms (though the link appears to be stronger for externalizing symptoms). When the subtypes of insecurity were examined individually, avoidance and disorganization were each significantly related to higher rates of externalizing problems, but only avoidance was significantly related to internalizing problems. Ambivalence was not significantly related to internalizing or externalizing. Contrary to expectations, neither meta-analysis yielded much support for an interaction of child attachment and contextual risk in predicting behavior problems. For example, neither meta-analysis found support for the predicted child attachment by SES interaction. However, given that high versus low SES is a rather imprecise measure of the numerous psychosocial risk factors that could contribute (individually and additively) to behavior problems, along with evidence from large sample studies supporting an attachment by risk interaction (e.g., Fearon & Belsky, 2011 ), these results should be interpreted cautiously. In sum, the answer to the question “Is early attachment status related to later mental health difficulties?” is a resounding yes, but the precise nature of the connections remains unclear.

Attachment and Psychopathology: Gaps in the Research and Future Directions

More research is needed on mechanisms, or mediators, that help to explain how insecurity, or a particular form of insecure attachment, leads in some cases to psychopathology. These mechanisms should be considered at different levels of analysis: neurological, hormonal, cognitive, behavioral, and social-interactional. Mediators may include difficulties in emotion regulation and deficits in social skills, for example. Given the documented links between early attachment and emotion regulation and physiological stress responses ( Cassidy, 1994 ; Spangler & Grossmann, 1993 ), as well as the role of emotion dysregulation and HPA axis irregularities in psychopathology ( Gunnar & Vazquez, 2006 ; Kring & Sloan, 2010 ), emotion regulation seems to be a promising target for mechanism research. More research is also needed on potential moderators and risk factors, such as age, gender, personality, traumas and losses, SES, exposure to family and neighborhood violence. Researchers should consider the cumulative effects of multiple risk factors as well as interactions among risk factors ( Belsky & Fearon, 2002 ; Fearon & Belsky, 2011 ; Kazdin & Kagan, 1994 ).

Given that most research on the mental health sequelae of early attachment has focused on internalizing and externalizing symptoms in non-clinical samples, future research should focus more on clinically significant problems and consider specific clinical disorders. The CBCL is not a measure of psychopathology, although it does indicate risk for eventual psychopathology ( Koot & Verhulst, 1992 ; Verhulst, Koot, & Van der Ende, 1994 ). Future research should address why the link between attachment and problematic behaviors is stronger for externalizing than for internalizing problems, and whether this difference holds for diagnosable pathology (e.g., conduct disorder or major depression). This may be partially a measurement issue. The CBCL is often completed, with reference to a child, by a parent, a teacher, or both. It may be easier to see and remember externalizing behaviors than it is to notice whether a child is experiencing anxiety, sadness, or internal conflicts. Another important diagnostic issue is comorbidity. It is very common for clinicians to assign a person to multiple diagnostic categories. Perhaps attachment theory and related measures could help to identify common processes underlying comorbid conditions and suggest where their roots lie ( Mineka, Watson, & Clark, 1998 ). One likely possibility is emotion regulation and dysregulation influenced by early experiences with parents.

Moreover, additional research is needed on the precise nature of the early childhood predictive factors and issues of causation. Is the issue really attachment status at age 1, for example, or is it continual insecure attachment across years of development? Also, we need to know whether attachment status per se is the issue or whether, for example, poor parenting predicts both attachment classification and psychopathology. Answering these questions will require studies using repeated assessments of attachment, parenting, context, and psychopathology. Further, there is increasing recognition of the importance of genetics and gene-by-environment interactions in understanding the development of psychopathology (e.g., Moffitt, 2005 ). Given preliminary evidence for genetic influences on disorganized attachment ( Lakatos et al., 2000 ) as well as evidence for a gene-by-early-maternal-sensitivity interaction in predicting mental health outcomes ( Bakermans-Kranenburg & van IJzendoorn, 2006 ), this area of inquiry is a very promising avenue for further research. There is also growing evidence concerning environmental effects on gene expression (i.e., epigenetics; Meaney, 2010 ). Especially interesting is the possibility that secure attachment may protect a child from the expression of risky genotypes (see Kochanska, Philibert, & Barry, 2009 , for preliminary evidence).

The Neuroscience of Attachment

Recent methodological advances (e.g., fMRI) have enabled researchers to investigate the neural correlates of attachment in humans. Initial theoretical formulations and empirical findings from the nascent subfield of “attachment neuroscience” ( Coan, 2008 ) have begun to provide answers to important questions about the neurobiology of attachment. Recent advances in this area include: (a) identifying key brain structures, neural circuits, neurotransmitter systems, and neuropeptides involved in attachment system functioning (see Coan, 2008 , 2010 , and Vrtička & Vuilleumier, 2012 , for reviews); (b) providing preliminary evidence that individual differences in attachment can be seen at the neural level in the form of differential brain responses to social and emotional stimuli ( Vrtička & Vuilleumier, 2012 ); (c) demonstrating the ability of attachment figures to regulate their spouses' neural threat response (i.e., hidden regulators; Coan et al., 2006 ); and (d) advancing our understanding of the neurobiology of parenting (see Parsons, Young, Murray, Stein, & Kringelbach, 2010 , for a review).

These early findings suggest important directions for attachment research. First, the vast majority of research on the neurobiology of attachment has been conducted with adults (yet see Dawson et al., 2001 ; White et al., 2012 ). However, researchers have the tools to examine the neural bases of attachment in younger participants. It is feasible to have children as young as 4 or 5 years old perform tasks in a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner ( Byars et al., 2002 ; Yerys et al., 2009 ), and less invasive measures such as EEG are commonly used with infants and even newborns. Additional investigations with younger participants could move the field of attachment neuroscience forward in important ways. For example, researchers could find ethically acceptable ways to extend the work of Coan and colleagues (2006) to parents and children: Just as holding the hand of a spouse attenuates the neural threat response in members of adult couples, holding the hand of a caregiver may have a similar effect on children. Researchers should also extend the sparse literature on how individual differences in attachment in children relate to differential neural responses to social and emotional stimuli.

Second, there is a need for longitudinal investigations that address several important unanswered questions: (a) What does child-parent attachment formation look like at the neural level in terms of the circuits involved and changes in neurobiology over time? (b) What is the role of developmental timing (i.e., sensitive and critical periods in brain development) in the formation of neural circuits associated with attachment? (c) Is the neural circuitry associated with attachment the same for children, adolescents, and adults? Some researchers have suggested that the neural circuitry associated with attachment may be different at different ages ( Coan, 2008 ).

Third, future research should examine the ability of experience to change neural activity in brain regions related to attachment, and should explore potential clinical implications of these findings. For example, Johnson et al. (2013) compared the ability of spousal hand-holding to buffer neural responses to threat before and after couples underwent Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT). They found that EFT increased the ability of hand-holding to attenuate threat responses; similar examination of both parent and child neural activity in response to attachment-related interventions would be informative.

Fourth, it is important for future research to identify which, if any, brain regions are specific to attachment and which are shared with other related social constructs such as caregiving or affiliation more broadly. There is initial evidence that caregiving and attachment involve both unique and overlapping brain regions ( Bartels & Zeki, 2004 ).

Finally, given the inherent interpersonal nature of attachment, future research should attempt to study attachment-related neural processes in situations that approximate as closely as possible “real” social interactions ( Vrtička & Vuilleumier, 2012 ). To date, all studies of the neuroscience of attachment have focused on the neural activity of only one partner in a relationship. By capitalizing on further methodological advances in neuroimaging (e.g., hyperscanning; Montague et al., 2002 ) researchers may be able to examine simultaneously the neural activity of a parent and child while they are interacting.

Attachment, Inflammation, and Health

Evidence is accumulating that attachment insecurity in adulthood is concurrently associated with negative health behaviors (e.g., poor diet, tobacco use; Ahrens, Ciechanowski, & Katon, 2012 ; Huntsinger & Luecken, 2004 ; Scharfe & Eldredge, 2001 ) and problematic health conditions (e.g., chronic pain, hypertension, stroke, heart attack; McWilliams & Bailey, 2010 ). Despite these intriguing cross-sectional findings in adult samples, much less is known about how early attachment relates to long-term health outcomes. One longitudinal study ( Puig, Englund, Collins, & Simpson, 2012 ) reported that individuals classified as insecurely attached to mother at 18 months were more likely to report physical illnesses 30 years later. Two other studies found that early insecure attachment was associated with higher rates of obesity at age 4.5 ( Anderson & Whitaker, 2011 ) and 15 ( Anderson, Gooze, Lemeshow, & Whitaker, 2012 ). Additional longitudinal investigations of the links between early attachment and health outcomes are needed to replicate these findings in different samples using a wider variety of health measures (e.g., medical records, biomarkers, onset and course of specific health problems).

Another goal for future research is to advance our understanding of the processes or mechanisms by which early attachment is related to later health outcomes. Recent proposals that early psychosocial experiences become “biologically embedded” at the molecular level and influence later immune system functioning (e.g., inflammation) provide a promising model with which to pursue this kind of research (see Miller, Chen, & Parker, 2011 , for a review of the conceptual model and its empirical support). In brief, the model proposes that early adverse experiences result in immune system cells with a “proinflammatory phenotype” and neuroendocrine dysregulation leading to chronic inflammation. Inflammation, in turn, is involved in a variety of aging-related illnesses including cardiovascular disease, autoimmune diseases, and certain types of cancer ( Chung et al., 2009 ).

As mentioned earlier, there is mounting evidence that early experiences with caregivers (including their influence on attachment) contribute to the calibration and ongoing regulation of the HPA axis (e.g., cortisol reactivity, diurnal cortisol rhythms), a system that is central to the body's stress response ( Adam et al., 2007 ; Gunnar & Quevedo, 2007 ; Luijk et al., 2010 ; Spangler & Grossmann, 1993 ). The HPA axis also plays an integral role in inflammatory responses and immune system functioning. In addition, there is evidence that early maternal warmth (retrospectively reported) can buffer the deleterious effects of early adversity on pro-inflammatory signaling in adulthood ( Chen, Miller, Kobor, & Cole, 2011 ; see also Pietromonaco, DeBuse, & Powers, 2013 , for a review of the links between adult attachment and HPA axis functioning). Finally, studies show that attachment in adulthood is concurrently related to biomarkers of immunity: attachment-related avoidance is related to heightened levels of the proinflammatory cytokine interleukin-6 (IL-6) in response to an interpersonal stressor ( Gouin et al., 2009 ) and to lower levels of natural killer cell (NK) cytotoxicity (NK cells are involved in immune defense; Picardi et al., 2007 ); attachment-related anxiety is related to elevated cortisol production and lower numbers of T cells ( Jaremka et al., 2013 ).

These initial findings provide an empirical basis for researchers to pursue further the connections between attachment and health. Future research should prospectively examine the relation between early attachment security and biomarkers of inflammation in adulthood. Further, researchers should attempt to elucidate the relations among attachment, HPA axis functioning, inflammation, and the immune system to better understand the biological processes underlying the link between early experience and later health outcomes.

Attachment and Empathy, Compassion, and Altruism

Shortly after the development of the Strange Situation, which allowed researchers to validly assess infants' attachment orientations, there was strong interest in the potential links between attachment security and prosocial motives and behaviors (e.g., empathy, compassion). From a theoretical standpoint, there are reasons to expect that secure children – whose own needs have been responded to in a sensitive and responsive way – will develop the capacity to respond to the needs of others empathically. Several early investigations confirmed the association between child attachment security and empathic responding ( Kestenbaum, Farber, & Sroufe, 1989 ; Sroufe, 1983 ; Teti & Ablard, 1989 ). Over the past 24 years, however, the link between child attachment status and prosocial processes (e.g., empathy, helping, altruism) has received surprisingly little research attention (though see Panfile & Laible, 2012 ; Radke-Yarrow, Zahn-Waxler, Richardson, Susman, & Martinez, 1994 ; van der Mark, van IJzendoorn, & Bakermans-Kranenburg, 2002 ). In contrast, social/personality psychologists have generated substantial and compelling empirical support for a connection between adult attachment and prosocial motives and behaviors.

Mikulincer, Shaver, and colleagues ( Mikulincer & Shaver, 2001 ; Mikulincer, Shaver, Gillath, & Nitzberg, 2005 ; Mikulincer, Shaver, Sahdra, & Bar-On, in press ) have demonstrated that both dispositional and experimentally augmented attachment security (accomplished through various forms of “security priming”) are associated with several prosocial constructs, including reduced outgroup prejudice, increased compassion for a suffering stranger and willingness to suffer in her place, and the ability and willingness of one partner in a couple to listen sensitively and respond helpfully to the other partner's description of a personal problem. In addition, surveys completed in three different countries (United States, Israel, the Netherlands) revealed that more secure adults (measured by self-reports) were more likely to volunteer in their communities (e.g., by donating blood or helping the elderly). Avoidant respondents were much less likely to volunteer, and although anxious respondents volunteered, their reasons for doing so (e.g., to receive thanks, to feel included) were less generous than those of their more secure peers ( Gillath et al., 2005 ).

Further study of how early attachment relates to various forms of prosocial behavior is needed. Developmental attachment researchers would benefit from using the experimental techniques that Mikulincer, Shaver, and colleagues used. Are young children who were classified as secure in the Strange Situation (especially in comparison to children classified as avoidant) more willing to help a suffering individual or more willing to interact with a child from a different ethnic group? Can experimental security “boosts” increase tolerance, empathy, compassion, and altruism in children? There is already robust experimental evidence that infants as young as 14 to 18 months readily engage in altruistic behavior (e.g., retrieving an out-of-reach object for a stranger; see Warneken & Tomasello, 2009 , for a review). To the best of our knowledge, however, no study has examined whether variations in infant attachment predict individual differences in this kind of instrumental helping behavior (although the potential for attachment-related differences has been proposed by Dweck; see Tomasello, Dweck, Silk, Skyrms, & Spelke, 2009 ). Warneken and Tomasello (2009) have proposed that these early helping behaviors reflect a biological predisposition for altruism in infants that begins to be influenced by social and cultural experiences only “a year or two after [the infants] have started behaving altruistically” (p. 400). However, given the innumerable social experiences that infants encounter in the first year of life and the pioneering work by Johnson and colleagues ( Johnson, Dweck, & Chen, 2007 ; Johnson et al., 2010 ) showing that 12- to 16-month-old infants with different attachment patterns have different expectations about others' helpfulness, it may be possible to observe attachment-related individual differences in early helping behaviors earlier than Warneken and Tomasello suggest.

Attachment and School Readiness

In recent years researchers, educators, and policy makers have been increasingly interested in understanding factors that predict children's school readiness and in developing and testing programs that may better prepare children (particularly at-risk children) for school entry. In his 2013 State of the Union Address at the beginning of his second term, President Obama proposed implementing universal, high-quality preschool for all American children with the idea that these early preparatory experiences will enhance school readiness and future academic performance. The focus of much of the initial research on school readiness has been on children's basic cognitive skills such as early literacy and numeracy abilities (e.g., Duncan et al., 2007 ). More recently, researchers have recognized the importance of other competencies such as emotion regulation and social skills (e.g., High and the Committee on Early Childhood, Adoption, and Dependent Care and Council on School Health, 2008 ). Further, High et al. listed “strong nurturing relationships” as one of the universal needs of children that must be met to promote school readiness and positive educational outcomes (p. e1009).

The conclusions reached by High et al. suggest that child attachment security is an important factor to consider when studying school readiness and developing programs designed to improve school readiness (for initial empirical evidence, see Belsky & Fearon, 2002 , and Stacks & Oshio, 2009 ). Decades of research have provided substantial evidence that early attachment security is associated with better emotion regulation capacities and greater social competence (e.g., Cassidy, 1994 ; Sroufe et al., 2005a ; Thompson, 2008 ). In addition, research has demonstrated that secure attachment is associated with better academic performance ( Granot & Mayseless, 2001 ) as well as enhanced cognitive skills and executive functions ( Bernier, Carlson, Deschênes, & Matte-Gagné, 2012 ; Jacobsen, Edelstein, & Hofmann, 1994 ). Thus, as research on school readiness continues to advance, greater consideration of the direct and indirect influences of early attachment security on school readiness is warranted. For example, researchers should test mediational models in which attachment security predicts greater emotion regulation or social competence, which in turn predicts greater school readiness. In addition, both parenting and school readiness interventions could consider whether increasing parental secure base provision fosters a child's school readiness. Moreover, consideration of the extent to which preschool teachers perform secure base and safe haven functions for their young students, and whether these components of the student-teacher relationship relate to young children's classroom functioning will be important (see Commodari, 2013 ).

Attachment and Culture

Bowlby (1969/1982 ) viewed the attachment behavioral system as a product of human evolutionary history, making it cross-culturally universal. Ainsworth's (1967 ; Ainsworth et al., 1978 ) early studies in Uganda and the US provided empirical support for similar attachment processes in very different cultures. Although some researchers have disputed the cross-cultural validity of core tenets of attachment theory (e.g., Rothbaum, Weisz, Pott, Miyake, & Morelli, 2000 ), decades of research strongly suggest that the basic phenomenon and the major kinds of individual differences are universal (see van IJzendoorn & Sagi-Schwartz, 2008 , for a review). Three hypotheses rooted in attachment theory have been examined and supported in cross-cultural research: that secure attachment is the most prevalent pattern in all cultures and is viewed as the most desirable pattern; that maternal sensitivity influences infant attachment patterns; and that secure infant attachment predicts later social and cognitive competence.

Yet much more research is needed. As psychological knowledge, research, and applications become increasingly global, it will become more feasible to map the detailed effects of cross-cultural and contextual differences in parenting, co-parenting, community care, environmental harshness and instability, and conflicts and war on attachment patterns and attachment-related mental health problems. It will be increasingly important to define “culture” and “context” more specifically. Within any large and diverse society, and in every large urban area (in a world increasingly urbanized), there are many cultures and subcultures. Moreover, within any modern society there are large differences in ethnicity, religion, diet, education, income, economic security, and threats to health and the availability of medical care. It is therefore important not to think of differences only between nation states but also within different groups and contexts within each nation.

Translating Attachment Research to Clinical Practice Interventions with Infants and Young Children at Risk for Insecure Attachment

Just as the study of individual differences in attachment began with the study of infants, so the systematic study of how to create attachment-related change focused initially on attempts to alter the developmental trajectory of infants who are at risk of developing or maintaining insecure attachments. Given the substantial and converging longitudinal research underscoring the risks associated with insecure attachment (e.g., poorer mental and physical health and lower social competence), the need to intervene to reduce the risk of insecure attachment is clear. In the past 20 years, researchers and clinicians have developed numerous therapeutic programs to prevent or reduce insecure attachment ( Bakermans-Kranenburg, van IJzendoorn, & Juffer, 2003 ; Egeland, Weinfield, Bosquet, & Cheng, 2000 ; see Berlin, Zeanah, & Lieberman, 2008 , for a review). Despite the fact that a handful of attachment interventions have shown initial success (e.g., Bernard et al., 2012 ; Cassidy et al., 2011 ; Cicchetti, Rogosch, & Toth, 2006 ; Hoffman, Marvin, Cooper, & Powell, 2006 ; Klein Velderman, Bakermans-Kranenburg, Juffer, & van IJzendoorn, 2006 ; Lieberman, Weston, & Pawl, 1991 ; Lyons-Ruth & Easterbrooks, 2006 ; Sadler et al., 2013 ; Toth, Rogosch, Manly, & Cicchetti, 2006 ; van den Boom, 1994 , 1995 ), we have as yet a collection of individual initiatives with little replication. More research is needed to identify the critical targets of attachment interventions and to understand the process of change.

Targets of early intervention

What should an intervention target? Until recently, this question was framed largely as: Should interventions target parental behavior, parental representations, or both? Greater specificity is required. When an intervention targets parental behavior, what specific components of behavior should be targeted? We discussed potential aspects of parental behavior earlier. When an intervention targets parental representations, what specific components should be targeted? Should interventions target representations of the parent her- or himself, of the infant, of the relationship; of the baby as an entity with a mind (e.g., mentalizing approaches; Slade et al., 2005 ); or maternal attributions about the infant's behavior ( Bugental et al., 2002 )?

Several studies (described earlier) suggest additional intervention targets. For example, the evidence that maternal emotion regulation capacities influence parenting ( Dix, 1991 ; Leerkes, Crockenberg, & Burrous, 2004 ; Lorber & Slep, 2005 ; Smith & O'Leary, 1995 ) suggests that targeting maternal emotion regulation capacities might be useful in bringing about change (e.g., the Circle of Security intervention; Hoffman et al., 2006 ). Another target of intervention is suggested by research with non-human primates and other mammals that demonstrates the soothing and regulatory functions that physical contact with an attachment figure can provide ( Hofer, 1994 , 2006 ; Meaney, 2001 ; Suomi, 2008 ; see Feldman, Singer, & Zagoory, 2010 , for such evidence in humans; see also Field, 2011 ). Interventions focused on infant-mother contact may prove useful (see Anisfeld, Casper, Nozyce, & Cunningham, 1990 , for a randomized trial in which mothers assigned to carry their infants in soft baby carriers were more likely to have infants who were securely attached at age 1). Of course, consideration of intervention targets necessarily requires considering moderators of intervention effectiveness. Targeting certain components may be more effective for some mothers than others.

The desire to intervene to reduce the risk of insecure attachment rests on the assumption that doing so in turn reduces the risk of poor child functioning, including a reduction in behavior problems and psychopathology. Remarkably, although there are a number of studies, described above, that show a link between insecure attachment and behavior problems and psychopathology, much less research has focused on whether intervening to reduce the risk of insecure attachment actually leads to a reduction in later problems (yet see Dozier et al., 2006 ; Moss et al., 2011 ; Klein Velderman et al., 2006 ; van den Boom, 1995 ; Van Zeijl et al., 2006 ). Future intervention research should test the change model according to which improving parenting reduces the risk of insecure attachment, which in turn reduces child behavior problems and psychopathology. Given that behavior problems associated with early insecure attachment may not emerge until later in development, and the evidence that the link between insecure attachment and behavior problems grows stronger over time ( Fearon & Belsky, 2011 ), longitudinal studies with long-term outcome assessments will be an important component of future intervention research.

Intervention development and issues of implementation

No attachment intervention has yet achieved widespread implementation. When following the typical efficacy-to-effectiveness clinical model, researchers initially design an intervention with a highly specified protocol, and only once it has proven to be efficacious in a tightly controlled setting do they begin to consider the adaptations needed for effectiveness in real-world settings. With attachment-based infant interventions, the problem has been that initial interventions are typically very expensive, and real-world social agencies attempting to meet the needs of at-risk infants cannot afford them. This is an unfortunate situation, especially because, over the past decade, there has been a call for researchers to attend to issues of implementation during the early stages of intervention planning. For instance, an argument that “the focus on feasibility in the prevention research cycle should not be restricted to the effectiveness stage” has been put forward by Ialongo and colleagues (2006) .

Several components of early attachment-based interventions make implementation at a broad public health level impractical. Many such interventions involve videotaping individual parent-infant interactions and providing individualized parental feedback (e.g., Dozier et al., 2006 ; Klein Velderman et al., 2006 ). This requires considerable resources: extensive training and supervision of staff; expertise and time to create individual diagnostic and treatment plans; and time, space, equipment, skills, and parental assent for individual videotaping. From an attachment perspective, the problem is how to provide an individualized approach that does not require expensive highly skilled staff. This problem has not been easy to solve (e.g., Berlin, Ziv, Amaya-Jackson, & Greenberg, 2005 ). Continued attempts to develop interventions that are widely and affordably implementable are important.

We urgently need evaluations of comprehensive theory- and research-based intervention protocols that can be widely implemented among families whose infants and children are at elevated risk for developing or maintaining insecure attachments . Addressing this need is in keeping with the NIMH (2008) strategic plan's objective of moving interventions to “common practice” more quickly and of examining interventions in “the care setting in which they are delivered” (p. 35). Continued testing of attachment-based interventions should occur further down the efficacy-to-effectiveness stream – with affordable protocols that can be provided through existing service delivery mechanisms. Expensive interventions are not implementable on a broad scale within the current American health care and educational structures.

Intervention development and testing are enormously expensive, yet replication of existing interventions is crucial. We propose that the dedication of resources to development of new interventions occur only when theory, clinical perspectives, or research indicate that existing interventions lack an important component that could reasonably contribute to change.

Interventions during Adolescence

Adolescence is a period of increased risk-taking behavior and mental health disorders ( Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2012 ; Roberts, Attkisson, & Rosenblatt, 1998 ), and attempts to reduce these problematic symptoms and behaviors are important. The dramatic biological and cognitive changes that occur during adolescence have led some researchers to consider this period as a second sensitive period (e.g., Andersen & Teicher, 2008 ; Guttmannova et al., 2011 ), and as such, adolescents may be particularly open to environmental interventions that can lead to improved functioning.

Interventions designed to help adolescents are typically targeted at the reduction of specific problems (e.g., depression or delinquency), and there are many effective interventions for helping troubled adolescents (e.g., Dishion & Kavanagh, 2003 ; Stein, Zitner, & Jensen, 2006 ). Yet given evidence that the link between attachment security and healthy functioning continues to exist in adolescence ( Dykas, Ziv, & Cassidy, 2008 ; Kobak & Sceery, 1988 ; see Allen, 2008 , for a review), increasing adolescent attachment security may also be an effective means of reducing adolescent problems. In other words, does an intervention focused on the adolescent-parent attachment relationship increase the likelihood of reduced problematic adolescent behavior? There has been remarkably little research on this important question. Moreover, the associations among intervention, attachment, and psychopathology may be more complex in adolescence than they are in infancy and early childhood. Another important way to examine the connections among these factors is to design studies to determine whether reducing adolescent psychopathology contributes to secure adolescent attachment.

In an intervention designed to enhance adolescent-parent attachment security – with the idea being that increased security will reduce the prevalence of adolescent problems – questions about intervention approaches arise. For instance, should an intervention include the parent, the adolescent, or both? Bretherton (1992) described Bowlby as the first family therapist because of his proposition that change in a child's attachment to a parent is possible only when there is change within the interaction between the child and the parent (see also Byng-Hall, 1999 ). There has been almost no examination of this proposition in adolescence. One randomized controlled trial ( Diamond et al., 2010 ) showed that Attachment-Based Family Therapy (ABFT) was more efficacious than Enhanced Usual Care in reducing adolescents' depressive symptoms and suicidal ideation.

Policy Implications

Throughout this article we have suggested topics for future research. At least as important are the needs for application of the findings already obtained and increased collaborations among researchers, policy makers, educators, and child service workers. Here we list a few important areas for such efforts.

Attachment research has clearly established the importance of early experiences with parents for child development. Yet far too many parents enter parenthood with insufficient knowledge about child development and the importance of the early parent-child relationship, and without the knowledge and skills needed to parent in a sensitive, responsive manner. Unfortunately, there is almost no future-parent education at any grade level in public schools. In American schools, there seems to be a greater focus on education about sex than about successful parenting. (And most sex education classes do not deal with other aspects of couple relationships, even though there is a considerable body of attachment-related research relevant to establishing and maintaining healthy couple relationships – a foundation for healthy parent-child relationships.) Even at the college level, there are few courses aimed at preparing young adults for healthy marriages and parenting. Researchers and educators should work together to develop future-parent curricula that could be implemented as part of high school and university education. There are several empirically supported parent training programs based on attachment research (described earlier; see Berlin et al., 2008 , for a review), but these have yet to be made a part of general education.

In the context of dramatic social and economic changes, many parents are struggling to strike a balance between work and family responsibilities and to find quality care for their children while the parents are at work or school. There is a need for more flexible work arrangements that recognize child care as a prime societal concern. This includes re-examination of parental leave policies that require parents to return to work too soon after childbirth, either because of company policy or because of financial necessity. In addition, greater attention to the training and screening of childcare workers and prospective foster parents is warranted. In a review of attachment theory and its implications for society, Sweeney (2007) suggested, among several policy implications, “legislative initiatives reflecting higher standards for credentialing and licensing childcare workers, requiring education in child development and attachment theory, and at least a two-year associate's degree course as well as salary increases and increased stature for childcare positions” (p. 342). The massive NICHD childcare study showed that high quality daycare is compatible with secure attachment of young children to their parents, and also that when home conditions make secure attachment unlikely, high quality daycare can increase children's chances of achieving attachment-related security ( NICHD Early Child Care Research Network, 1997 ).

Policies directed at helping families in which one or both parents serve in the military could also be informed by attachment theory and research. Military service often entails frequent moves within the United States and separation of at least one parent from the family during periods of service overseas. In thousands of cases, the separation ends with a soldier's death, and his or her family is left to cope with the tragedy. Attention to helping spouses and children cope effectively with attachment-related stresses that have the potential to damage their lives for years to come has increased in recent years (e.g., Maholmes, 2012 ; see also Riggs & Riggs, 2011 , for consideration of military families within an attachment theory framework), but there continues to be a need for research-informed interventions that consider the particular challenges faced by military families (for discussion, see Miller, Miller, & Bjorklund, 2010 ; Paris et al., 2010 ).

We end with a brief mention of policy implications related to parental incarceration. Elsewhere ( Cassidy, Poehlmann, & Shaver, 2010 ) we have provided reviews and studies related to this issue. Often, incarcerated parents are unable to see their children, and pressures are placed on the rest of extended families, and in many cases on the foster care system. For each adult placed in prison, there are likely to be, on average, more than one or two people outside of prison who suffer from the incarceration. Policy makers could consider the separations and losses that accompany parental incarceration within an attachment framework. Research is needed to assess the value of greater contact between incarcerated individuals and their children, and of parenting interventions that can take place as part of rehabilitation.

Brief Conclusions

Our goal in this article has been to provide a current “state of the art” description of what is known in many important areas of attachment research, discuss gaps in current knowledge, and suggest important avenues for future research and for creating and evaluating practical interventions. Although we have, by design, focused on issues within attachment research specifically, an important enterprise for the future is to consider how attachment is differentiated from, and integrated with, other features of development. As our colleague Alan Sroufe responded when asked his views on the future of attachment research (personal communication, 2012; see also Sroufe, Egeland, Carlson, & Collins, 2005b ), “There is a lot more to personal development than attachment, and there is a lot more even to parenting than attachment. The task is to describe how all of this fits and works together.” That task arises with respect to every phase of development – infancy, childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. And the range of issues and factors to be considered is somewhat different at every stage or phase of development.

Certain large goals of any worthy society – the mental and physical health of its members, the optimal development of each individual's interests and capacities, and a safe environment free of violence and hatred – are likely to be achieved only to the extent that infants and children receive the benefits of what Bowlby and Ainsworth called a safe haven and a secure base, which as far as we can see imaginatively into the future are likely to depend on responsive attachment figures. Partly through the efforts of Bowlby, Ainsworth, and their intellectual offspring, it has been possible to improve hospital procedures, reduce child abuse, contribute to better parenting, increase understanding of the development of psychopathology, and to provide a much better understanding of our social nature as mammals, primates, and human beings. With the goal of a mentally and physically healthy human race in mind, we can simultaneously be proud of the accomplishments of attachment researchers and look forward to participating in addressing the many intellectual, clinical, and educational challenges remaining.

Acknowledgments

Author Note: The writing of this article was supported by awards to Jude Cassidy from NIDA (R21 DA025550), to Jason Jones from NIDA (F31 DA033848), and to Phillip Shaver from the Fetzer Institute. The authors are grateful to Susan S. Woodhouse for engaging in extensive conversations about maternal response to distress, and to Kenneth N. Levy for helpful suggestions about links between attachment and psychopathology.

Invited contribution to the 25 th anniversary edition of Development and Psychopathology .

Contributor Information

Jude Cassidy, University of Maryland.

Jason D. Jones, University of Maryland.

Phillip R. Shaver, University of California, Davis.

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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign | Psychology

Introduction to R

An informal workshop on the use of r for simulations and statistical modeling in psychological science 3, adult attachment theory and research.

A Brief Overview

Research on adult attachment is guided by the assumption that the same motivational system that gives rise to the close emotional bond between parents and their children is responsible for the bond that develops between adults in emotionally intimate relationships. The objective of this essay is to provide a brief overview of the history of adult attachment research, the key theoretical ideas, and a sampling of some of the research findings. This essay has been written for people who are interested in learning more about research on adult attachment.

Background: Bowlby's Theory of Attachment

The theory of attachment was originally developed by John Bowlby (1907 - 1990), a British psychoanalyst who was attempting to understand the intense distress experienced by infants who had been separated from their parents. Bowlby observed that separated infants would go to extraordinary lengths (e.g., crying, clinging, frantically searching) to prevent separation from their parents or to reestablish proximity to a missing parent. At the time of Bowlby's initial writings, psychoanalytic writers held that these expressions were manifestations of immature defense mechanisms that were operating to repress emotional pain, but Bowlby noted that such expressions are common to a wide variety of mammalian species, and speculated that these behaviors may serve an evolutionary function.

Drawing on ethological theory, Bowlby postulated that these attachment behaviors , such as crying and searching, were adaptive responses to separation from a primary attachment figure --someone who provides support, protection, and care. Because human infants, like other mammalian infants, cannot feed or protect themselves, they are dependent upon the care and protection of "older and wiser" adults. Bowlby argued that, over the course of evolutionary history, infants who were able to maintain proximity to an attachment figure via attachment behaviors would be more likely to survive to a reproductive age. According to Bowlby, a motivational system, what he called the attachment behavioral system , was gradually "designed" by natural selection to regulate proximity to an attachment figure.

The attachment behavior system is an important concept in attachment theory because it provides the conceptual linkage between ethological models of human development and modern theories on emotion regulation and personality. According to Bowlby, the attachment system essentially "asks" the following fundamental question: Is the attachment figure nearby, accessible, and attentive? If the child perceives the answer to this question to be "yes," he or she feels loved, secure, and confident, and, behaviorally, is likely to explore his or her environment, play with others, and be sociable. If, however, the child perceives the answer to this question to be "no," the child experiences anxiety and, behaviorally, is likely to exhibit attachment behaviors ranging from simple visual searching on the low extreme to active following and vocal signaling on the other (see Figure 1). These behaviors continue until either the child is able to reestablish a desirable level of physical or psychological proximity to the attachment figure, or until the child "wears down," as may happen in the context of a prolonged separation or loss. In such cases, Bowlby believed that young children experienced profound despair and depression.

Individual Differences in Infant Attachment Patterns

Although Bowlby believed that the basic dynamics described above captured the normative dynamics of the attachment behavioral system, he recognized that there are individual differences in the way children appraise the accessibility of the attachment figure and how they regulate their attachment behavior in response to threats. However, it wasn't until his colleague, Mary Ainsworth (1913 – 1999), began to systematically study infant-parent separations that a formal understanding of these individual differences was articulated. Ainsworth and her students developed a technique called the strange situation --a laboratory paradigm for studying infant-parent attachment. In the strange situation, 12-month-old infants and their parents are brought to the laboratory and, systematically, separated from and reunited with one another. In the strange situation, most children (i.e., about 60%) behave in the way implied by Bowlby's "normative" theory. They become upset when the parent leaves the room, but, when he or she returns, they actively seek the parent and are easily comforted by him or her. Children who exhibit this pattern of behavior are often called secure . Other children (about 20% or less) are ill-at-ease initially, and, upon separation, become extremely distressed. Importantly, when reunited with their parents, these children have a difficult time being soothed, and often exhibit conflicting behaviors that suggest they want to be comforted, but that they also want to "punish" the parent for leaving. These children are often called anxious-resistant . The third pattern of attachment that Ainsworth and her colleagues documented is called avoidant . Avoidant children (about 20%) don't appear too distressed by the separation, and, upon reunion, actively avoid seeking contact with their parent, sometimes turning their attention to play objects on the laboratory floor.

Ainsworth's work was important for at least three reasons. First, she provided one of the first empirical demonstrations of how attachment behavior is patterned in both safe and frightening contexts. Second, she provided the first empirical taxonomy of individual differences in infant attachment patterns. According to her research, at least three types of children exist: those who are secure in their relationship with their parents, those who are anxious-resistant, and those who are anxious-avoidant. Finally, she demonstrated that these individual differences were correlated with infant-parent interactions in the home during the first year of life. Children who appear secure in the strange situation, for example, tend to have parents who are responsive to their needs. Children who appear insecure in the strange situation (i.e., anxious-resistant or avoidant) often have parents who are insensitive to their needs, or inconsistent or rejecting in the care they provide. In the years that have followed, a number of researchers have demonstrated links between early parental sensitivity and responsiveness and attachment security.

Adult Romantic Relationships

Although Bowlby was primarily focused on understanding the nature of the infant-caregiver relationship, he believed that attachment characterized human experience from "the cradle to the grave." It was not until the mid-1980's, however, that researchers began to take seriously the possibility that attachment processes may play out in adulthood. Hazan and Shaver (1987) were two of the first researchers to explore Bowlby's ideas in the context of romantic relationships. According to Hazan and Shaver, the emotional bond that develops between adult romantic partners is partly a function of the same motivational system--the attachment behavioral system--that gives rise to the emotional bond between infants and their caregivers. Hazan and Shaver noted that the relationship between infants and caregivers and the relationship between adult romantic partners share the following features:

• both feel safe when the other is nearby and responsive
• both engage in close, intimate, bodily contact
• both feel insecure when the other is inaccessible
• both share discoveries with one another
• both play with one another's facial features and exhibit a mutual fascination and preoccupation with one another
• both engage in "baby talk"

On the basis of these parallels, Hazan and Shaver argued that adult romantic relationships, like infant-caregiver relationships, are attachments, and that romantic love is a property of the attachment behavioral system, as well as the motivational systems that give rise to caregiving and sexuality.

Three Implications of Adult Attachment Theory

The idea that romantic relationships may be attachment relationships has had a profound influence on modern research on close relationships. There are at least three critical implications of this idea. First, if adult romantic relationships are attachment relationships, then we should observe the same kinds of individual differences in adult relationships that Ainsworth observed in infant-caregiver relationships . We may expect some adults, for example, to be secure in their relationships--to feel confident that their partners will be there for them when needed, and open to depending on others and having others depend on them. We should expect other adults, in contrast, to be insecure in their relationships. For example, some insecure adults may be anxious-resistant : they worry that others may not love them completely, and be easily frustrated or angered when their attachment needs go unmet. Others may be avoidant : they may appear not to care too much about close relationships, and may prefer not to be too dependent upon other people or to have others be too dependent upon them.

Second, if adult romantic relationships are attachment relationships, then the way adult relationships "work" should be similar to the way infant-caregiver relationships work . In other words, the same kinds of factors that facilitate exploration in children (i.e., having a responsive caregiver) should facilitate exploration among adults (i.e., having a responsive partner). The kinds of things that make an attachment figure "desirable" for infants (i.e., responsiveness, availability) are the kinds of factors adults should find desirable in romantic partners. In short, individual differences in attachment should influence relational and personal functioning in adulthood in the same way they do in childhood.

Third, whether an adult is secure or insecure in his or her adult relationships may be a partial reflection of his or her experiences with his or her primary caregivers . Bowlby believed that the mental representations or working models (i.e., expectations, beliefs, "rules" or "scripts" for behaving and thinking) that a child holds regarding relationships are a function of his or her caregiving experiences. For example, a secure child tends to believe that others will be there for him or her because previous experiences have led him or her to this conclusion. Once a child has developed such expectations, he or she will tend to seek out relational experiences that are consistent with those expectations and perceive others in a way that is colored by those beliefs. According to Bowlby, this kind of process should promote continuity in attachment patterns over the life course, although it is possible that a person's attachment pattern will change if his or her relational experiences are inconsistent with his or her expectations. In short, if we assume that adult relationships are attachment relationships, it is possible that children who are secure as children will grow up to be secure in their romantic relationships. Or, relatedly, that people who are secure as adults in their relationships with their parents will be more likely to forge secure relationships with new partners.

In the sections below I briefly address these three implications in light of early and contemporary research on adult attachment.

Do We Observe the Same Kinds of Attachment Patterns Among Adults that We Observe Among Children?

The earliest research on adult attachment involved studying the association between individual differences in adult attachment and the way people think about their relationships and their memories for what their relationships with their parents are like. Hazan and Shaver (1987) developed a simple questionnaire to measure these individual differences. (These individual differences are often referred to as attachment styles , attachment patterns , attachment orientations , or differences in the organization of the attachment system .) In short, Hazan and Shaver asked research subjects to read the three paragraphs listed below, and indicate which paragraph best characterized the way they think, feel, and behave in close relationships:

A. I am somewhat uncomfortable being close to others; I find it difficult to trust them completely, difficult to allow myself to depend on them. I am nervous when anyone gets too close, and often, others want me to be more intimate than I feel comfortable being. B. I find it relatively easy to get close to others and am comfortable depending on them and having them depend on me. I don't worry about being abandoned or about someone getting too close to me. C. I find that others are reluctant to get as close as I would like. I often worry that my partner doesn't really love me or won't want to stay with me. I want to get very close to my partner, and this sometimes scares people away.

Based on this three-category measure , Hazan and Shaver found that the distribution of categories was similar to that observed in infancy. In other words, about 60% of adults classified themselves as secure (paragraph B), about 20% described themselves as avoidant (paragraph A), and about 20% described themselves as anxious-resistant (paragraph C).

Although this measure served as a useful way to study the association between attachment styles and relationship functioning, it didn't allow a full test of the hypothesis that the same kinds of individual differences observed in infants might be manifest among adults. (In many ways, the Hazan and Shaver measure assumed this to be true.) Subsequent research has explored this hypothesis in a variety of ways. For example, Kelly Brennan and her colleagues collected a number of statements (e.g., "I believe that others will be there for me when I need them") and studied the way these statements "hang together" statistically (Brennan, Clark, & Shaver, 1998). Brennan's findings suggested that there are two fundamental dimensions with respect to adult attachment patterns (see Figure 2). One critical variable has been labeled attachment-related anxiety . People who score high on this variable tend to worry whether their partner is available, responsive, attentive, etc. People who score on the low end of this variable are more secure in the perceived responsiveness of their partners. The other critical variable is called attachment-related avoidance . People on the high end of this dimension prefer not to rely on others or open up to others. People on the low end of this dimension are more comfortable being intimate with others and are more secure depending upon and having others depend upon them. A prototypical secure adult is low on both of these dimensions.

Brennan's findings are critical because recent analyses of the statistical patterning of behavior among infants in the strange situation reveal two functionally similar dimensions: one that captures variability in the anxiety and resistance of the child and another that captures variability in the child's willingness to use the parent as a safe haven for support (see Fraley & Spieker, 2003a, 2003b). Functionally, these dimensions are similar to the two-dimensions uncovered among adults, suggesting that similar patterns of attachment exist at different points in the life span.

In light of Brennan's findings, as well as taxometric research published by Fraley and Waller (1998), most researchers currently conceptualize and measure individual differences in attachment dimensionally rather than categorically. That is, it is assumed that attachment styles are things that vary in degree rather than kind. The most popular measures of adult attachment style are Brennan, Clark, and Shaver's (1998) ECR and Fraley, Waller, and Brennan's (2000) ECR-R--a revised version of the ECR. [ Click here to take an on-line quiz designed to determine your attachment style based on these two dimensions. ] Both of these self-report instruments provide continuous scores on the two dimensions of attachment-related anxiety and avoidance. [ Click here to learn more about self-report measures of individual differences in adult attachment. ]

Do Adult Romantic Relationships "Work" in the Same Way that Infant-Caregiver Relationships Work?

There is now an increasing amount of research that suggests that adult romantic relationships function in ways that are similar to infant-caregiver relationships, with some noteworthy exceptions, of course. Naturalistic research on adults separating from their partners at an airport demonstrated that behaviors indicative of attachment-related protest and caregiving were evident, and that the regulation of these behaviors was associated with attachment style (Fraley & Shaver, 1998). For example, while separating couples generally showed more attachment behavior than nonseparating couples, highly avoidant adults showed much less attachment behavior than less avoidant adults. In the sections below I discuss some of the parallels that have been discovered between the way that infant-caregiver relationships and adult romantic relationships function.

Partner selection Cross-cultural studies suggest that the secure pattern of attachment in infancy is universally considered the most desirable pattern by mothers (see van IJzendoorn & Sagi, 1999). For obvious reasons there is no similar study asking infants if they would prefer a security-inducing attachment figure. Adults seeking long-term relationships identify responsive caregiving qualities, such as attentiveness, warmth, and sensitivity, as most "attractive" in potential dating partners (Zeifman & Hazan, 1997). Despite the attractiveness of secure qualities, however, not all adults are paired with secure partners. Some evidence suggests that people end up in relationships with partners who confirm their existing beliefs about attachment relationships (Frazier et al., 1997).

Secure base and safe haven behavior In infancy, secure infants tend to be the most well adjusted, in the sense that they are relatively resilient, they get along with their peers, and are well liked. Similar kinds of patterns have emerged in research on adult attachment. Overall, secure adults tend to be more satisfied in their relationships than insecure adults. Their relationships are characterized by greater longevity, trust, commitment, and interdependence (e.g., Feeney, Noller, & Callan, 1994), and they are more likely to use romantic partners as a secure base from which to explore the world (e.g., Fraley & Davis, 1997). A large proportion of research on adult attachment has been devoted to uncovering the behavioral and psychological mechanisms that promote security and secure base behavior in adults. There have been two major discoveries thus far. First and in accordance with attachment theory, secure adults are more likely than insecure adults to seek support from their partners when distressed. Furthermore, they are more likely to provide support to their distressed partners (e.g., Simpson et al., 1992). Second, the attributions that insecure individuals make concerning their partner's behavior during and following relational conflicts exacerbate, rather than alleviate, their insecurities (e.g., Simpson et al., 1996).

Avoidant Attachment and Defense Mechanisms According to attachment theory, children differ in the kinds of strategies they use to regulate attachment-related anxiety. Following a separation and reunion, for example, some insecure children approach their parents, but with ambivalence and resistance, whereas others withdraw from their parents, apparently minimizing attachment-related feelings and behavior. One of the big questions in the study of infant attachment is whether children who withdraw from their parents--avoidant children--are truly less distressed or whether their defensive behavior is a cover-up for their true feelings of vulnerability. Research that has measured the attentional capacity of children, heart rate, or stress hormone levels suggests that avoidant children are distressed by the separation despite the fact that they come across in a cool, defensive manner.

Recent research on adult attachment has revealed some interesting complexities concerning the relationships between avoidance and defense. Although some avoidant adults, often called fearfully-avoidant adults, are poorly adjusted despite their defensive nature, others, often called dismissing-avoidant adults, are able to use defensive strategies in an adaptive way. For example, in an experimental task in which adults were instructed to discuss losing their partner, Fraley and Shaver (1997) found that dismissing individuals (i.e., individuals who are high on the dimension of attachment-related avoidance but low on the dimension of attachment-related anxiety) were just as physiologically distressed (as assessed by skin conductance measures) as other individuals. When instructed to suppress their thoughts and feelings, however, dismissing individuals were able to do so effectively. That is, they could deactivate their physiological arousal to some degree and minimize the attention they paid to attachment-related thoughts. Fearfully-avoidant individuals were not as successful in suppressing their emotions.

Are Attachment Patterns Stable from Infancy to Adulthood?

Perhaps the most provocative and controversial implication of adult attachment theory is that a person's attachment style as an adult is shaped by his or her interactions with parental attachment figures. Although the idea that early attachment experiences might have an influence on attachment style in romantic relationships is relatively uncontroversial, hypotheses about the source and degree of overlap between the two kinds of attachment orientations have been controversial.

There are at least two issues involved in considering the question of stability: (a) How much similarity is there between the security people experience with different people in their lives (e.g., mothers, fathers, romantic partners)? and (b) With respect to any one of these relationships, how stable is security over time?

With respect to this first issue, it appears that there is a modest degree of overlap between how secure people feel with their mothers, for example, and how secure they feel with their romantic partners. Fraley, for example, collected self-report measures of one's current attachment style with a significant parental figure and a current romantic partner and found correlations ranging between approximately .20 to .50 (i.e., small to moderate) between the two kinds of attachment relationships. [ Click here to take an on-line quiz designed to assess the similarity between your attachment styles with different people in your life. ]

With respect to the second issue, the stability of one's attachment to one's parents appears to be equal to a correlation of about .25 to .39 (Fraley, 2002). There is only one longitudinal study of which we are aware that assessed the link between security at age 1 in the strange situation and security of the same people 20 years later in their adult romantic relationships. This unpublished study uncovered a correlation of .17 between these two variables (Steele, Waters, Crowell, & Treboux, 1998).

The association between early attachment experiences and adult attachment styles has also been examined in retrospective studies. Hazan and Shaver (1987) found that adults who were secure in their romantic relationships were more likely to recall their childhood relationships with parents as being affectionate, caring, and accepting (see also Feeney & Noller, 1990).

Based on these kinds of studies, it seems likely that attachment styles in the child-parent domain and attachment styles in the romantic relationship domain are only moderately related at best. What are the implications of such findings for adult attachment theory? According to some writers, the most important proposition of the theory is that the attachment system, a system originally adapted for the ecology of infancy, continues to influence behavior, thought, and feeling in adulthood (see Fraley & Shaver, 2000). This proposition may hold regardless of whether individual differences in the way the system is organized remain stable over a decade or more, and stable across different kinds of intimate relationships.

Although the social and cognitive mechanisms invoked by attachment theorists imply that stability in attachment style may be the rule rather than the exception, these basic mechanisms can predict either long-run continuity or discontinuity, depending on the precise ways in which they are conceptualized (Fraley, 2002). Fraley (2002) discussed two models of continuity derived from attachment theory that make different predictions about long-term continuity even though they were derived from the same basic theoretical principles. Each model assumes that individual differences in attachment representations are shaped by variation in experiences with caregivers in early childhood, and that, in turn, these early representations shape the quality of the individual's subsequent attachment experiences. However, one model assumes that existing representations are updated and revised in light of new experiences such that older representations are eventually "overwritten." Mathematical analyses revealed that this model predicts that the long-term stability of individual differences will approach zero. The second model is similar to the first, but makes the additional assumption that representational models developed in the first year of life are preserved (i.e., they are not overwritten) and continue to influence relational behavior throughout the life course. Analyses of this model revealed that long-term stability can approach a non-zero limiting value. The important point here is that the principles of attachment theory can be used to derive developmental models that make strikingly different predictions about the long-term stability of individual differences. In light of this finding, the existence of long-term stability of individual differences should be considered an empirical question rather than an assumption of the theory.

Outstanding Questions and Future Directions for Research on Adult Attachment

There are a number of questions that current and future research on attachment needs to address. For example, it is probably the case that, while some romantic relationships are genuine attachment relationships, others are not. It will be necessary for future researchers to find ways to better determine whether a relationship is actually serving attachment-related functions. Second, although it is clear why attachment behavior may serve an important evolutionary function in infancy, it is not clear whether attachment serves an important evolutionary function among adults. Third, we still don't have a strong understanding of the precise factors that may change a person's attachment style. In the interest of improving people's lives, it will be necessary to learn more about the factors that promote attachment security and relational well-being.

© 2018 R. Chris Fraley

To learn more about attachment theory and research, please check out the book Omri, Gery, and I wrote.

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12 Twenty-First Century Attachment Theory: Challenges and Opportunities

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Attachment theory is the focus of considerable contemporary developmental research. Formulated by Bowlby more than fifty years ago, it has been the subject of ongoing critique, particularly in terms of its relevance in non-Western settings. Attachment theorists have modified the theory in response to empirical findings, advances in allied fields, and further ideas. Yet, as evidenced by this Forum, work still remains. This chapter summarizes changes to some of the central areas of attachment theory as well as remaining points of contention: To whom do infants become attached? How should differences in attachment relationships be characterized? What influences lead to differences in attachment relationships? What are the outcomes of differences in attachment? Its intent is to sharpen the ways that culturally informed research can contribute to a better understanding of the attachment process and its consequences. Discussion concludes with broad reflections on attachment and culture.

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Home — Essay Samples — Psychology — Attachment Theory — Critical Analysis Of The Attachment Theory And Its Role In The Relationship Science

Critical Analysis of The Attachment Theory and Its Role in The Relationship Science

• Categories: Attachment Theory

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Published: Jun 9, 2021

Words: 1936 | Pages: 4 | 10 min read

Table of contents

Introduction, works cited.

• Ainsworth, M. D. (1969). Object relations, dependency, and attachment: A theoretical review of the infant-mother relationship. Child Development, 40(4), 969-1025.
• Ainsworth, M. D., Bell, S. M., & Stayton, D. J. (1974). Infant-mother attachment and social development: Socialization as a product of reciprocal responsiveness to signals. In M. P. Richards (Ed.), The integration of a child into a social world (pp. 99-135). Cambridge University Press.
• Bartholomew, K. (1990). Avoidance of intimacy: An attachment perspective. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 7(2), 147-178.
• Bartholomew, K., & Horowitz, L. M. (1991). Attachment styles among young adults: A test of a four-category model. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 61(2), 226-244.
• Berscheid, E. (1999). The greening of relationship science. American Psychologist, 54(4), 260-266.
• Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and loss: Vol. 1. Attachment. Basic Books.
• Bradbury, T. N. (2002). Research on the nature and determinants of marital satisfaction: A decade in review. Journal of Marriage and Family, 64(4), 964-980.
• Butzer, B., & Campbell, L. (2008). Adult attachment, sexual satisfaction, and relationship satisfaction: A study of married couples. Personal Relationships, 15(1), 141-154.
• Fincham, F. D., & Beach, S. R. (2010). Marriage in the new millennium: A decade in review. Journal of Marriage and Family, 72(3), 630-649.
• Hazan, C., & Shaver, P. (1987). Romantic love conceptualized as an attachment process. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52(3), 511-524.

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Attachment Theory and Emotion Experience in Life Essay

Introduction, the attachment theory and life experiences, works cited.

This paper reports on the attachment theory and how life experience affects one’s emotional attachment to others. Attachment theory advanced by John Bowlby in the early 1950s, seeks to explain how early life relations affects an individual’s emotional bonding in future Hutchison (89).

The theory gives an understanding of the different personalities as relates to emotional relationships. The theory was first focused on the relationship between children and their parents, but was later expanded to look at the whole lifespan. The theory looks at ones attachment as being influenced by both psychological conditions and the social environment.

According to the proponents of the attachment theory, children develop a bond with their caregivers, which grow into an emotional bond. Further research on the theory indicates that life experiences in childhood direct the course of one’s personality as well as the social and emotional development throughout his or her life.

Besides the explanation advanced by the theory regarding the connection between a baby and its mother or a care giver, the theory also seeks to explain the attachment between adults Hutchison (43). Among adults, an emotional attachment is felt more especially during bereavement or separation of spouses. Babies are born without the ability to move or feed themselves.

They depend on care givers to for these needs; they however have pre-programmed set of behavior that comes into action due to the environmental stimuli. Environmental stimuli may trigger a sense of fear or distress in the baby making it cry for help from the mother or the care giver. The protection or comfort offered to the baby makes it develop a stronger emotional bond with the mother and others who are closer to it.

Children grow to relate comfort from distress to the people who are close to them during their early stages of development. The nature of the environment a child grows in, together with the “psychological framework builds up a child’s internal working model” Hutchison (52).

The internal working model comprises of the development of expectations that an individual perceives in social interactions. The theory explains the effect of challenging parenting such as; neglect or abuse. Parents and caregivers should endeavor to develop an environment that makes children feel secure and comfortable.

The type of relationship parents establish with their children at their early stages of development determines the type of emotional attachment a child develops with them. A child who grows up in a loving and sensitive environment develops secure relationships in with others.

Such a child grows to recognize others as being caring, loving and reliable. They also develop high self esteem and learn to deal with negative feelings. Research indicates that people who grow up in secure attachment relationships are able to demonstrate good social aptitude throughout their life.

On the contrary, children brought up in unsecure environment develop an avoidant attachment. An unsecure environment to children is often characterized by fear, anxiety and rejection. This type of environment makes a child make children to downplay their emotional feelings.

There is a group of children who grow up with care givers that are not consistent in responding to their emotional needs. Their care givers are sometimes sensitive, and sometimes insensitive to their feelings. Such children develop “an attachment seeking habit as they try to conquer the insensitivity of their caregivers” Hutchison (34).

This sort of behavior by children is referred to as ambivalent attachment, where the children seek to compensate for the inconsistent responsiveness by the caregiver. Such a child tries to manage other people’s attention through behavior sets such as; seduction, bullying rage and necessity.

Hutchison, Elizabeth . Dimensions of human behavior: The changing life course. 4th Ed . Thousand oaks, CA: Sage publications, 2011. Print

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John Bowlby’s Attachment Theory

Saul Mcleod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul Mcleod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

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Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

Associate Editor for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MSc Psychology of Education

Olivia Guy-Evans is a writer and associate editor for Simply Psychology. She has previously worked in healthcare and educational sectors.

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John Bowlby (1907 – 1990) was a psychoanalyst (like Freud) and believed that mental health and behavioral problems could be attributed to early childhood.

Key Takeaways

• Bowlby’s evolutionary theory of attachment suggests that children come into the world biologically pre-programmed to form attachments with others, because this will help them to survive.
• Bowlby argued that a child forms many attachments, but one of these is qualitatively different. This is what he called primary attachment, monotropy.
• Bowlby suggests that there is a critical period for developing attachment (2.5 years). If an attachment has not developed during this time period, then it may well not happen at all. Bowlby later proposed a sensitive period of up to 5 years.
• Bowlby’s maternal deprivation hypothesis suggests that continual attachment disruption between the infant and primary caregiver could result in long-term cognitive, social, and emotional difficulties for that infant.
• According to Bowlby, an internal working model is a cognitive framework comprising mental representations for understanding the world, self, and others, and is based on the relationship with a primary caregiver.
• It becomes a prototype for all future social relationships and allows individuals to predict, control, and manipulate interactions with others.

Evolutionary Theory of Attachment

Bowlby (1969, 1988) was greatly influenced by ethological theory, but especially by Lorenz’s (1935) study of imprinting .  Lorenz showed that attachment was innate (in young ducklings) and therefore had a survival value.

During the evolution of the human species, it would have been the babies who stayed close to their mothers that would have survived to have children of their own.  Bowlby hypothesized that both infants and mothers had evolved a biological need to stay in contact with each other.

Bowlby (1969) believed that attachment behaviors (such as proximity seeking) are instinctive and will be activated by any conditions that seem to threaten the achievement of proximity, such as separation, insecurity, and fear.

Bowlby also postulated that the fear of strangers represents an important survival mechanism, built-in by nature.

Babies are born with the tendency to display certain innate behaviors (called social releases), which help ensure proximity and contact with the mother or attachment figure (e.g., crying, smiling, crawling, etc.) – these are species-specific behaviors.

These attachment behaviors initially function like fixed action patterns and share the same function. The infant produces innate ‘social releaser’ behaviors such as crying and smiling that stimulate caregiving from adults.

The determinant of attachment is not food but care and responsiveness.

Bowlby’s monotropic theory

A child has an innate (i.e., inborn) need to attach to one main attachment figure (i.e., monotropy).

Bowlby’s monotropic theory of attachment suggests attachment is important for a child’s survival.

Attachment behaviors in both babies and their caregivers have evolved through natural selection. This means infants are biologically programmed with innate behaviors that ensure that attachment occurs.

Although Bowlby did not rule out the possibility of other attachment figures for a child, he did believe that there should be a primary bond which was much more important than any other (usually the mother).

Other attachments may develop in a hierarchy below this. An infant may therefore have a primary monotropy attachment to its mother, and below her, the hierarchy of attachments may include its father, siblings, grandparents, etc.

Bowlby believes that this attachment is qualitatively different from any subsequent attachments.  Bowlby argues that the relationship with the mother is somehow different altogether from other relationships.

The child behaves in ways that elicit contact or proximity to the caregiver.  When a child experiences heightened arousal, he/she signals to their caregiver.

Crying, smiling, and locomotion are examples of these signaling behaviors.  Instinctively, caregivers respond to their children’s behavior, creating a reciprocal pattern of interaction.

Critical Period

A child should receive the continuous care of this single most important attachment figure for approximately the first two years of life.

Bowlby (1951) claimed that mothering is almost useless if delayed until after two and a half to three years and, for most children, if delayed till after 12 months, i.e., there is a critical period.

If the attachment figure is broken or disrupted during the critical two-year period, the child will suffer irreversible long-term consequences of this maternal deprivation.  This risk continues until the age of five.

Bowlby used the term maternal deprivation to refer to the separation or loss of the mother as well as the failure to develop an attachment.

The underlying assumption of Bowlby’s Maternal Deprivation Hypothesis is that continual disruption of the attachment between infant and primary caregiver (i.e., mother) could result in long-term cognitive, social, and emotional difficulties for that infant.

The implications of this are vast – if this is true, should the primary caregiver leave their child in daycare, while they continue to work?

Maternal Deprivation

Bowlby’s maternal deprivation hypothesis suggests that continual attachment disruption between the infant and primary caregiver (i.e., mother) could result in long-term cognitive, social, and emotional difficulties for that infant.

Bowlby (1988) suggested that the nature of monotropy (attachment conceptualized as being a vital and close bond with just one attachment figure) meant that a failure to initiate or a breakdown of the maternal attachment would lead to serious negative consequences, possibly including affectionless psychopathy.

Bowlby’s theory of monotropy led to the formulation of his maternal deprivation hypothesis.

John Bowlby (1944) believed that the infant’s and mother’s relationship during the first five years of life was crucial to socialization.

According to Bowlby, if separation from the primary caregiver occurs during the critical period and there is no adequate substitute emotional care, the child will suffer from deprivation.

This will lead to irreversible long-term consequences in the child’s intellectual, social, and emotional development.

Bowlby initially believed the effects to be permanent and irreversible:

• delinquency,
• reduced intelligence,
• increased aggression,
• depression,
• affectionless psychopathy

Bowlby also argued that the lack of emotional care could lead to affectionless psychopathy,

Affectionless psychopathy is characterized by a lack of concern for others, a lack of guilt, and the inability to form meaningful relationships.

Such individuals act on impulse with little regard for the consequences of their actions.  For example, showing no guilt for antisocial behavior.

The prolonged deprivation of the young child of maternal care may have grave and far-reaching effects on his character and so on the whole of his future life (Bowlby, 1952, p. 46).

Bowlby believed that disrupting this primary relationship could lead to a higher incidence of juvenile delinquency, emotional difficulties, and antisocial behavior. To test his hypothesis, he studied 44 adolescent juvenile delinquents in a child guidance clinic.

Bowlby 44 Thieves

To investigate the long-term effects of maternal deprivation on people to see whether delinquents have suffered deprivation.

According to the Maternal Deprivation Hypothesis, breaking the maternal bond with the child during their early life stages is likely to affect intellectual, social, and emotional development seriously.

Between 1936 and 1939, an opportunity sample of 88 children was selected from the clinic where Bowlby worked. Of these, 44 were juvenile thieves (31 boys and 13 girls) who had been referred to him because of their stealing.

Bowlby selected another group of 44 children (34 boys and 10 girls) to act as ‘controls (individuals referred to the clinic because of emotional problems but not yet committed any crimes).

On arrival at the clinic, each child had their IQ tested by a psychologist who assessed their emotional attitudes toward the tests. The two groups were matched for age and IQ.

The children and their parents were interviewed to record details of the child’s early life (e.g., periods of separation, diagnosing affectionless psychopathy) by a psychiatrist (Bowlby), a psychologist, and a social worker.  The psychiatrist, psychologist, and social worker made separate reports.

Bowlby found that 14 children from the thief group were identified as affectionless psychopaths (they were unable to care about or feel affection for others); 12 had experienced prolonged separation of more than six months from their mothers in their first two years of life.

In contrast, only 5 of the 30 children not classified as affectionless psychopaths had experienced separations.

Out of the 44 children in the control group, only two experienced prolonged separations, and none were affectionless psychopaths.

The results support the maternal deprivation hypothesis as they show that most of the children diagnosed as affectionless psychopaths (12 out of 14) had experienced prolonged separation from their primary caregivers during the critical period, as the hypothesis predicts

Bowlby concluded that maternal deprivation in the child’s early life caused permanent emotional damage.

He diagnosed this as a condition and called it Affectionless Psychopathy. According to Bowlby, this condition involves a lack of emotional development, characterized by a lack of concern for others, a lack of guilt, and an inability to form meaningful and lasting relationships.

Bowlby directly observed parental separation’s harm in evacuating children from bombing during WWII, strengthening his hospital research indicating it profoundly impacts children’s emotional and behavioral development.

Limitations

The supporting evidence that Bowlby (1944) provided was in the form of clinical interviews of, and retrospective data on, those who had and had not been separated from their primary caregiver.

This meant that Bowlby asked the participants to look back and recall separations.  These memories may not be accurate.

A criticism of the 44 thieves study was that it concluded affectionless psychopathy was caused by maternal deprivation.  This is correlational data and only shows a relationship between these two variables. It cannot show a cause-and-effect relationship between separation from the mother and the development of affectionless psychopathy.

Other factors could have been involved, such as the reason for the separation, the role of the father, and the child’s temperament. Thus, as Rutter (1972) pointed out, Bowlby’s conclusions were flawed, mixing up cause and effect with correlation.

Many of the 44 thieves in Bowlby’s study had been moved around a lot during childhood, and had probably never formed an attachment.  This suggested that they were suffering from privation, rather than deprivation, which Rutter (1972) suggested was far more deleterious to the children. This led to a very important study on the long-term effects of privation, carried out by Hodges and Tizard (1989).

The study was vulnerable to researcher bias. Bowlby conducted the psychiatric assessments himself and made the diagnosis of Affectionless Psychopathy. He knew whether the children were in the ‘theft group’ or the control group. Consequently, his findings may have been unconsciously influenced by his own expectations. This potentially undermines their validity.

Bowlby struggled to apply his new maladaptation model to retrospective research on adolescents with conduct problems, as such studies prejudice outcomes by selecting for problems and then looking backward.

Cautious of this, in 1950, Bowlby, Robertson, and new researcher Mary Ainsworth (1956) began a forward-looking “follow-up study” on whether preschoolers who were hospitalized long-term subsequently developed conduct issues.

Assessing 60 such children aged 6-13 and controls, contrary to maternal deprivation hypotheses, they found more emotional apathy, withdrawal, and poor control than criminality.

So, while early prolonged separation impacted some children’s later adjustment, outcomes proved far more varied than Bowlby’s theory initially predicted. The improved prospective methodology highlighted limitations in Bowlby’s previous retrospective approaches.

In the conclusions of the paper Bowlby admitted that his theory regarding the development of conduct problems may be wrong:

It is clear that some of the workers, including the present senior author, in their desire to call attention to dangers which can often be avoided have on occasion overstated their case. In particular, statements implying that children who are brought up in institutions or who suffer other forms of serious privation and deprivation in early life commonly develop psychopathic or affectionless characters (e.g., Bowlby, 1944) are seen to be mistaken. (Bowlby et al., 1956, p. 240)

Short-Term Separation

When WWII ended in 1945, Bowlby had to choose between completing child psychoanalysis training or researching parental separation’s impact on children. He chose the latter, joining colleagues at London’s Tavistock Clinic.

Robertson and Bowlby (1952) believe that short-term separation from an attachment figure leads to distress.

John Bowlby spent two years working alongside a social worker, James Robertson (1952), who observed that children experienced intense distress when separated from their mothers. Even when other caregivers fed such children, this did not diminish the child’s anxiety.

They found three progressive stages of distress:

• Protest : The child cries, screams, and protests angrily when the parent leaves. They will try to cling to their parents to stop them from leaving. Protest could last from a few hours to several days.
• Despair : The child’s protesting gradually stops, and they appear calmer, although still upset. The child refuses others’ attempts for comfort and often seems withdrawn and uninterested in anything. In the despair stage, children become increasingly withdrawn and hopeless.
• Detachment : If separation continues, the child will engage with other people again. All emotions are suppressed, and children live moment-to-moment by repressing feelings for their mother. On the surface, children were seen to be happy and content, but when the mother visited, they frequently ignored her and hardly cried when she left. If this state continues, children become so withdrawn as to seek no mothering at all – a sign of major psychological trauma.

Controversy arose between Bowlby and Robertson regarding the stages of separation, particularly the third stage, which Robertson termed denial, but Bowlby called detachment.

However, both powerfully influenced attitudes and practices around keeping mothers and children together. This led to advocacy for allowing parental presence and major reforms in hospital policies.

A Two-Year-Old Goes to Hospital

Though doctors saw the despair phase as adjustment, Bowlby felt it showed distress’s harm.

To demonstrate this, Robertson filmed two-year-old Laura’s distress when hospitalized for eight days for minor surgery in “ A Two-Year-Old Goes to Hospital ” (1952).

Time series photography showed the stages through which a small child, Laura, passed during her 8-day admission for umbilical hernia repair. The film graphically depicted Laura’s behavior while separated from her mother for a period of time in strange circumstances” (Alsop-Shields & Mohay, 2001).

Laura cries out for her mother from admission onward, pleading in anguish to go home when visited the second day. As the week progresses, her initial constant distress gives way to listlessness and detachment during the parents’ increasingly ambivalent visits.

However, when approached by hospital staff, Laura startles out of her trance to suddenly burst into tears and fruitlessly call for her mother once more.

The raw behaviors captured on film revealed the three-phase separation response of protest, despair, and detachment observed in Bowlby and Robertson’s prior research.

Laura’s suffering starkly contradicts expectations of childrens’ ready hospital adjustment, instead demonstrating their deep distress from both physical separation and the hospital environment itself.

These findings contradicted the dominant behavioral theory of attachment (Dollard and Miller, 1950), which was shown to underestimate the child’s bond with their mother.  The behavioral theory of attachment states that the child becomes attached to the mother because she feeds the infant.

Implications for nursing include the development of family-centered care models keeping parents integral to a child’s hospital care in order to minimize trauma, principles now widely implemented as a result of this pioneering work on attachment.

Internal Working Model

The child’s attachment relationship with their primary caregiver leads to the development of an internal working model (Bowlby, 1969).

This internal working model is a cognitive framework comprising mental representations for understanding the world, self, and others.

The social and emotional responses of the primary caregiver provide the infant with information about the world and other people, and also how they view themselves as individuals.

For example, the extent to which an individual perceives himself/herself as worthy of love and care, and information regarding the availability and reliability of others (Bowlby, 1969).

Bowlby referred to this knowledge as an internal working model (IWM), which begins as a mental and emotional representation of the infant’s first attachment relationship and forms the basis of an individual’s attachment style.

A person’s interaction with others is guided by memories and expectations from their internal model which influence and help evaluate their contact with others (Bretherton & Munholland, 1999).

Working models also comprise cognitions of how to behave and regulate affect when a person’s attachment behavioral system is activated, and notions regarding the availability of attachment figures when called upon.

Bowlby (1969) suggested that the first five years of life were crucial to developing the IWM, although he viewed this as more of a sensitive period rather than a critical one.

Around the age of three, these seem to become part of a child’s personality and thus affect their understanding of the world and future interactions with others (Schore, 2000).

According to Bowlby (1969), the primary caregiver acts as a prototype for future relationships via the internal working model.

There are three main features of the internal working model: (1) a model of others as being trustworthy, (2) a model of the self as valuable, and (3) a model of the self as effective when interacting with others.

It is this mental representation that guides future social and emotional behavior as the child’s internal working model guides their responsiveness to others in general.

The concept of an internal model can be used to show how prior experience is retained over time and to guide perceptions of the social world and future interactions with others.

Early models are typically reinforced via interactions with others over time, and become strengthened and resistant to change, operating mostly at an unconscious level of awareness.

Although working models are generally stable over time they are not impervious to change and as such remain open to modification and revision.  This change could occur due to new experiences with attachment figures or through a reconceptualization of past experiences.

Although Bowlby (1969, 1988) believed attachment to be monotropic, he did acknowledge that rather than being a bond with one person, multiple attachments can occur arranged in the form of a hierarchy.

A person can have many internal models, each tied to different relationships and different memory systems, such as semantic and episodic (Bowlby, 1980).

Collins and Read (1994) suggest a hierarchical model of attachment representations whereby general attachment styles and working models appear on the highest level, while relationship-specific models appear on the lowest level.

General models of attachment are thought to originate from early relationships during childhood, and are carried forward to adulthood where they shape perception and behavior in close relationships.

Attachment & Loss Trilogy

The attachment books trilogy developed key concepts regarding attachment, separation distress, loss responses, and clinical implications over the course of the three volumes.

Attachment (1969/1982)

• Provided evidence for the importance of early parent-child relationships.
• Analyzed the systemic and “goal-corrected” nature of behavior.
• Introduced the concept of an “environment of adaptedness” that organisms inherit a potential to develop systems suited for.
• Discussed how attachment behaviors in infants are components of an attachment system designed to achieve security.
• Explained how attachment behaviors change via feedback from caregivers, becoming oriented toward discriminated figures.
• Posited attachment as a foundational system for survival that interacts with other systems like exploration.

Separation (1973)

• Focused on the negative impacts of separation from attachment figures.
• Outlined phases of separation responses in infants and children.
• Analyzed short- and long-term pathological effects of loss or deprivation.
• Studied how mourning progresses in relation to attachment bonds.
• Linked separation distress and avoidance to later issues of delinquency.

Loss (1980)

• Explored the concept of “loss” in relation to attachment theory.
• Proposed stages of the mourning process.
• Studied outcomes following the loss of an attachment figure.
• Examined detachment and defense processes resulting from loss.
• Applied attachment theory understanding to treatment approaches.

Critical Evaluation

Implications for children’s nursing.

• During Robertson and Bowlby’s research, the British government established a parliamentary committee investigating children’s hospital conditions. This resulted in the 1959 Platt Report, containing 55 recommendations, including allowing parental presence and provisions for their accommodation and children’s education/recreation (Alsop-Shields & Mohay, 2001).
• Robertson also specifically critiqued task-oriented nursing and childcare institutions (Robertson, 1955, 1968, 1970) as emotionally neglectful. He and Bowlby suggested dysfunctional families be kept together but supported (Robertson & Bowlby, 1952) – principles now accepted but decades ahead of their time.
• Robertson and Bowlby’s work has greatly influenced the development of family-centered pediatric nursing models like partnership-in-care and family-centered care in the 1990s. By planning care around the whole family unit rather than just the hospitalized child, and involving parents closely in care, these models aim to reduce emotional trauma for children.

Bifulco et al. (1992) support the maternal deprivation hypothesis. They studied 250 women who had lost mothers, through separation or death, before they were 17.

They found that the loss of their mother through separation or death doubles the risk of depressive and anxiety disorders in adult women. The rate of depression was the highest in women whose mothers had died before the child reached 6 years.

Mary Ainsworth’s (1971, 1978) Strange Situation study provides evidence for the existence of the internal working model. A secure child will develop a positive internal working model because it has received sensitive, emotional care from its primary attachment figure.

An insecure-avoidant child will develop an internal working model in which it sees itself as unworthy because its primary attachment figure has reacted negatively to it during the sensitive period for attachment formation.

Bowlby’s Maternal Deprivation is supported by Harlow’s (1958) research with monkeys .  Harlow showed that monkeys reared in isolation from their mother suffered emotional and social problems in older age.  The monkey’s never formed an attachment (privation) and, as such grew up to be aggressive and had problems interacting with other monkeys.

Konrad Lorenz (1935) supports Bowlby’s maternal deprivation hypothesis as the attachment process of imprinting is an innate process.

Bowlby’s (1944, 1956) ideas had a significant influence on the way researchers thought about attachment, and much of the discussion of his theory has focused on his belief in monotropy.

Although Bowlby may not dispute that young children form multiple attachments, he still contends that the attachment to the mother is unique in that it is the first to appear and remains the strongest.  However, the evidence seems to suggest otherwise on both of these counts.

• Schaffer & Emerson (1964) noted that specific attachments started at about eight months, and very shortly thereafter, the infants became attached to other people. By 18 months, very few (13%) were attached to only one person; some had five or more attachments.
• Rutter (1972) points out that several indicators of attachment (such as protest or distress when an attached person leaves) have been shown for various attachment figures – fathers, siblings, peers, and even inanimate objects.

Critics such as Rutter have also accused Bowlby of not distinguishing between deprivation and privation – the complete lack of an attachment bond, rather than its loss.  Rutter stresses that the quality of the attachment bond is the most important factor, rather than just deprivation in the critical period.

Bowlby used the term maternal deprivation to refer to the separation or loss of the mother as well as the failure to develop an attachment.  Are the effects of maternal deprivation as dire as Bowlby suggested?

Michael Rutter (1972) wrote a book called Maternal Deprivation Re-assessed .  In the book, he suggested that Bowlby may have oversimplified the concept of maternal deprivation.

Bowlby used the term “maternal deprivation” to refer to separation from an attached figure, loss of an attached figure and failure to develop an attachment to any figure.  These each have different effects, argued Rutter.  In particular, Rutter distinguished between privation and deprivation.

Michael Rutter (1981) argued that if a child fails to develop an emotional bond , this is privation, whereas deprivation refers to the loss of or damage to an attachment.

Deprivation might be defined as losing something that a person once had, whereas privation might be defined as never having something in the first place.

From his survey of research on privation, Rutter proposed that it is likely to lead initially to clinging, dependent behavior, attention-seeking, and indiscriminate friendliness, then as the child matures, an inability to keep rules, form lasting relationships, or feel guilt.

He also found evidence of anti-social behavior, affectionless psychopathy, and disorders of language, intellectual development and physical growth.

Rutter argues that these problems are not due solely to the lack of attachment to a mother figure, as Bowlby claimed, but to factors such as the lack of intellectual stimulation and social experiences that attachments normally provide.  In addition, such problems can be overcome later in the child’s development, with the right kind of care.

Bowlby assumed that physical separation on its own could lead to deprivation, but Rutter (1972) argues that it is the disruption of the attachment rather than the physical separation.

This is supported by Radke-Yarrow (1985), who found that 52% of children whose mothers suffered from depression were insecurely attached. This figure raised to 80% when this occurred in a context of poverty (Lyons-Ruth,1988). This shows the influence of social factors. Bowlby did not take into account the quality of the substitute care. Deprivation can be avoided if there is good emotional care after separation.

Is attachment theory sexist?

Feminist critics argue Bowlby’s attachment theory is sexist for overly emphasizing mothers as ideal caregivers while neglecting other influences like fathers (e.g., Vicedo, 2017).

His popular 1950s parenting articles reinforced gender roles by proclaiming mothers uniquely important and always available. Critics also attacked his concept “monotropy” – instincts focused on one caregiver, presumably the mother.

However, Bowlby’s academic writings use phrases like “mothers or foster-mothers,” adoptive mothers, and “mother substitutes,” acknowledging many can serve as primary caregiver.

He never scientifically stated only biological mothers suffice. While “monotropy” poorly implies a singular caregiver, Bowlby meant children form one main attachment, not only to mothers. So academically, Bowlby did not limit caregivers to mothers, though his public emphasis on maternal deprivation and parenting did reinforce gender biases.

There are implications arising from Bowlby’s work.  He reinforced the idea that a mother should be the most central caregiver and that this care should be given continuously. An obvious implication is that mothers should not go out to work.  There have been many attacks on this claim:

• Mothers are the exclusive carers in only a very small percentage of human societies; often there are a number of people involved in the care of children, such as relations and friends (Weisner, & Gallimore, 1977).
• Van Ijzendoorn, & Tavecchio (1987) argue that a stable network of adults can provide adequate care and that this care may even have advantages over a system where a mother has to meet all a child’s needs.
• There is evidence that children develop better with a mother who is happy in her work, than a mother who is frustrated by staying at home (Schaffer, 1990).

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Ainsworth, M. D. S., Blehar, M. C., Waters, E., & Wall, S. (1978).  Patterns of attachment: A psychological study of the strange situation . Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Alsop‐Shields, L., & Mohay, H. (2001). John Bowlby and James Robertson: theorists, scientists and crusaders for improvements in the care of children in hospital.  Journal of advanced nursing ,  35 (1), 50-58.

Bifulco, A., Harris, T., & Brown, G. W. (1992). Mourning or early inadequate care? Reexamining the relationship of maternal loss in childhood with adult depression and anxiety. Development and Psychopathology, 4(03) , 433-449.

Bowlby, J. (1944). Forty-four juvenile thieves: Their characters and home life. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 25(19-52) , 107-127.

Bowlby, J. (1951). Maternal care and mental health . World Health Organization Monograph.

Bowlby, J. (1952). Maternal care and mental health. Journal of Consulting Psychology, 16(3) , 232.

Bowlby, J. (1953). Child care and the growth of love . London: Penguin Books.

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Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment. Attachment and loss: Vol. 1. Loss . New York: Basic Books.

Bowlby, J. (1980). Loss: Sadness & depression. Attachment and loss (vol. 3); (International psycho-analytical library no.109). London: Hogarth Press.

Bowlby, J. (1988). Attachment, communication, and the therapeutic process. A secure base: Parent-child attachment and healthy human development , 137-157.

Bowlby, J., Ainsworth, M., Boston, M., & Rosenbluth, D. (1956). The effects of mother‐child separation: a follow‐up study .  British Journal of Medical Psychology ,  29 (3‐4), 211-247.

Bowlby, J., and Robertson, J. (1952). A two-year-old goes to hospital. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, 46, 425–427.

Bretherton, I., & Munholland, K.A. (1999). Internal working models revisited. In J. Cassidy & P.R. Shaver (Eds.), Handbook of attachment: Theory, research, and clinical applications (pp. 89– 111) . New York: Guilford Press.

Collins, N. L., & Read, S. J. (1994). Cognitive representations of adult attachment: The structure and function of working models. In K. Bartholomew & D. Perlman (Eds.) Advances in personal relationships, Vol. 5: Attachment processes in adulthood  (pp. 53-90). London: Jessica Kingsley.

Harlow, H. F., & Zimmermann, R. R. (1958). The development of affective responsiveness in infant monkeys. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 102 ,501 -509.

Hodges, J., & Tizard, B. (1989). Social and family relationships of ex‐institutional adolescents. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 30(1) , 77-97.

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Lyons-Ruth, K., Zoll, D., Connell, D., & Grunebaum, H. E. (1986). The depressed mother and her one-year-old infant: Environment, interaction, attachment, and infant development. In E. Tronick & T. Field (Eds.), Maternal depression and infant disturbance (pp. 61-82). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Ministry of Health (1959). The Welfare of Children in Hospital, Platt Report . London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office.

Radke-Yarrow, M., Cummings, E. M., Kuczynski, L., & Chapman, M. (1985). Patterns of attachment in two-and three-year-olds in normal families and families with parental depression. Child development , 884-893.

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Further Reading

• The Internal Working Models Concept: What Do We Really Know About the Self in Relation to Others?
• The Effects of Maternal Deprivation
• Davies, R. (2010). Marking the 50th anniversary of the Platt Report: from exclusion, to toleration and parental participation in the care of the hospitalized child .  Journal of Child Health Care ,  14 (1), 6-23.
• Bowlby, J. (1963). Pathological mourning and childhood mourning .  Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association ,  11 (3), 500-541.

Home Essay Examples Psychology Attachment Theory

Attachment Theory: Meaning And Evaluation

• Category Psychology
• Subcategory Behavior
• Topic Attachment Theory

Attachment Theory is a unique theory that many social workers use within their practices. Attachment theory looks at one’s development specifically in the first few years of their lives (Berzoff, Flanagan, Hertz, 2016.) The theory examines the bond between a child and their primary caregiver. Through looking at this bond we can see how attachment styles influence an individual’s behavior in childhood and later in life.

Attachment theory was first developed by John Bowlby a Psychoanalyst and was built upon by Mary Ainsworth and American psychologist (Berzoff, et al, 2016.) The concept of the theory is that during our infancy we form attachments to our primary caregiver. Depending on how that caregiver treats us (ie responds to our needs promptly and with love and kindness) depends on how “secure” our attachment is. Through research, Ainsworth & Bowlby found that Attachment theory provides a baseline to how we form attachments in childhood and later in life. “The basic attachment findings were that attachment, now defined as “proximity-seeking” by the infant toward the mother or other primary caregiver, develops rapidly, across cultures, from six to twelve months after birth.” (Berzoff, et al, pg. 200 2016.)

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Attachment Styles

In Attachment theory, four distinct attachment styles have been observed in infants and toddlers. Three of these styles were discovered by Ainsworth in a study called “Strange Situation”. The study had a mother and their infant in a room playing with toys. An unknown friendly female would enter the room and the mother would leave for a few minutes. The researchers would observe the infants and how they responded when the mother left and then when they were reunited ((Berzoff, et al, 2016.) From this research, Ainsworth developed three attachment styles: secure attachment and insecure attachment: avoidant attachment and ambivalent attachment. A fourth attachment style was added in 1986 by Main & Solomon. This attachment style is known as a disorganized attachment which is an insecure attachment style. Below are the attachment styles discussed greater in-depth.

Secure attachment: This attachment style is the result of the primary caregiver attending to the child’s needs promptly. When left with the stranger as mentioned above the child is distressed when their caregiver leaves but shows joy and seeks comfort when the caregiver returns. After they are reunited the child continues with normal behaviors ( Zeanah, Berlin, & Boris, 2011)

Avoidant Attachment: This attachment style is a result of the primary caregiver not being responsive to the infant’s needs. In extreme cases, the parent may punish or reject the child (Berzoff, et al, 2016.) This child has the minimal response from being separated from its caregiver and when the caregiver returns the child ignores or avoids the caregiver. ( Zeanah, Berlin, & Boris, 2011.)

Ambivalent Attachment: This attachment style is when the infant becomes upset when the caregiver leaves but when the caregiver returns the child can not be consoled and often resistant to the caregiver’s attempts. The infant often becomes ambivalent when they receive inconsistent caregiving and can manifest from a chaotic environment. (Berzoff, et al, 2016.)

Disorganized Attachment: Added after Ainsworth’s study disorganized attachment is the most severe of the insecure styles. The child’s behavior is inconsistent and often fearful. Sometimes the child will avoid the caregiver, be resistant to the caregiver, or even prefer a stranger to the caregiver. This behavior is often a result of a violent inconsistent upbringing ( Zeanah, Berlin, & Boris, 2011)

Evaluation of Theory Through Social Work Code of Ethics

Attachment theory like any other theory has its limits and potential conflicts of interest. When attachment theory first started to be explored many studies were done which violated informed consent which is in the code of ethics. A secret study done by Peter Neubauer in the 1970s separated twins and triplets at birth for research purposes. “Neubauer conceived the experiment to compare the development of separated sets of twins and triplets with fellow psychiatrist Viola Bernard, to explore one of psychology’s most pressing questions — that of nature versus nurture, or whether human behavior is more affected by environment or genetics. Researchers did not obtain the consent of participants or their adoptive families. They also failed to inform families that their child had been separated from a twin during the adoption process or in their later observation of the children, according to Sharon Morello, one of the subjects of the study.” (Mccormack, Pg 1, 2018.) Another area where this case violates the code of ethics is the lack of access to records. The records are sealed till 2065 .” (Mccormack, 2018.) Looking at this study poses the question of how many other studies have been done in the name of research without informed consent? Another study done by Harry Harlow studied baby rhesus monkeys exploring the role that social relationships play in early development. (Thorpe, 2019.) Harlow took the infant monkeys away from their mothers and provided them with a wire mother and a cloth mother. The study showed that the baby monkeys clung to the cloth mother and only associated with the wire mother when it wanted to eat raining the question of if touch and child-caregiver relationships matter. Even though this study was done on animals it fringes on the area of informed consent. Animals can not give their consent. As humans, we tend to anthropomorphize animals but regardless due to lack of informed consent from the subjects, this raises ethical issues.

Evaluation of Theory through Empirical Research

Looking at attachment styles through the lens of research is an ideal way to quantify if attachment styles influence individuals into adulthood. We will look at how attachment styles may affect us later in life. The research that this paper examines is attachment theory in correlation to trauma. The research this paper supports is that if infants experience trauma that they are more likely to show insecure attachment styles.

A study done in Mugla Sitki Kocman University, in Turkey in 2016 explored the connection of childhood trauma on attachment styles (Erozkan, 2016.) Through collecting data from 911 students the findings strongly supported the theory that trauma in childhood affects attachment styles. “Results indicated that there were significant positive relationships between physical abuse, emotional abuse, physical neglect, emotional neglect, and sexual abuse subdimensions of childhood trauma and insecure types of attachment (fearful, preoccupied, and dismissing attachment styles). These results indicated that participants displaying relatively high levels of physical abuse, emotional abuse, physical neglect, emotional neglect, and sexual abuse subdimensions of childhood trauma tended to report insecure types of attachment (fearful, preoccupied, and dismissing attachment styles). (Erozkan, pg 1075 2016.)

A similar study done with Danish 328 Danish students showed that “ Secure attachment was significantly associated with low levels or lifetime and current number of PTSD symptoms, negative affectivity, somatization, and emotional and avoidant coping, and a more favorable attribution of benevolence in the world” (Elklit & O’Connor, pg 2008)

Attachment styles can affect one’s life in a variety of ways from our achievement to our parenting styles. This was confirmed by a 2003 study that hypothesized that individuals with a secure attachment style were more able to achieve and goal-oriented. The study found “Securely attached participants were higher in need for achievement, lower in fear of failure, and adopted more approach (relative to avoidance) personal achievement goals than did insecure participants, both avoidant and anxious/ambivalent. Secure participants adopted more mastery-approach goals than avoidant participants and adopted fewer performance-avoidance goals than anxious/ambivalent participants.( Elliot & Reis pg. 321, 2003) Looking directly at trauma and how it might affect parenting a 2017 study proposed that adults with insecure childhood experiences had the “potential to affect the parent/child relationship, both in terms of attachment style parental reflective functioning.” (Cristobal, Fuenzalida & Santelices,pg 1. 2017.) The study findings were complex but it did indeed show that “adults with insecure early attachment show higher inabilities to recognize the mental states of their children (higher prementalization). On the other hand, secure attachment did not show this effect.” (Cristobal, Fuenzalida & Santelices,pg 1. 2017.) It also showed that interestedly enough attachment styles and attachment patterns are passed on intergenerationally.

Evaluation of Theory through the Lens of Trauma

Looking at these articles we see that Attachment theory and trauma are interconnected. The higher the adverse child experiences the more likely a child is to develop an insecure attachment style that may affect them later in life. What this paper doesn’t touch upon is that even though if in early childhood we create an insecure attachment it is possible to change your attachment style in adulthood.

Examining these case studies, we see that our attachment styles shape how we interact in our lives. It can affect how we view the world, how goal-oriented we are to how we parent our own children. This theory provides great insight into how trauma specifically childhood trauma can affect our lives. Having this knowledge gives us great power to look at our trauma and heal our attachment styles. Many studies are being done that are showing that we can shift our attachment styles. A study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology showed that through intimacy-building exercises individuals with avoidant attachment styles rated their relationships as higher quality(Stanton, Campbell & Pink, 2017) In understanding our attachment styles we can better look at how they may be affecting our lives. 

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What is Attachment Theory? Bowlby’s 4 Stages Explained

No matter what the “it” refers to, Sigmund Freud would have probably said yes to that question.

However, we now know a lot more about psychology, parenting, and human relationships than Freud did.

It’s clear now that not every issue can be traced back to one’s mother. After all, there is another person involved in the raising (or at least the creation) of a child.

In addition, there are many other important people in a child’s life who influence him or her. There are siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles, godparents, close family friends, nannies, daycare workers, teachers, peers, and others who interact with a child on a regular basis.

The question posed above is tongue-in-cheek, but it touches upon an important discussion in psychology—what influences children to turn out the way they do? What affects their ability to form meaningful, satisfying relationships with those around them?

What factors contribute to their experiences of anxiety, avoidance, and fulfillment when it comes to relationships?

Although psychologists can pretty conclusively say that it’s not entirely the mother’s fault or even the fault of both parents, we know that a child’s early experiences with their parents have a profound impact on their relationship skills as adults.

Much of the knowledge we have on this subject today comes from a concept developed in the 1950s called attachment theory . This theory will be the focus of this article: We’ll explore what it is, how it describes and explains behavior, and what its applications are in the real world.

Before you continue, we thought you might like to download our three Positive Relationships Exercises for free . These detailed, science-based exercises will help you or your clients build healthy, life-enriching relationships.

This Article Contains:

What is attachment theory a definition, research and studies, erik erikson, attachment theory in babies, infants, and early childhood development, attachment theory in adults: close relationships, parenting, love, and divorce, attachment theory in grief and trauma, the attachment theory test, using attachment theory in the classroom (worksheet and pdf), attachment theory in social work, criticisms of attachment theory, recommended books, articles, and essays, a take-home message.

The psychological theory of attachment was first described by John Bowlby, a psychoanalyst who researched the effects of separation between infants and their parents (Fraley, 2010).

Bowlby hypothesized that the extreme behaviors infants engage in to avoid separation from a parent or when reconnecting with a physically separated parent—like crying, screaming, and clinging—were evolutionary mechanisms. Bowlby thought these behaviors had possibly been reinforced through natural selection and enhanced the child’s chances of survival.

These attachment behaviors are instinctive responses to the perceived threat of losing the survival advantages that accompany being cared for and attended to by the primary caregiver(s). Since the infants who engaged in these behaviors were more likely to survive, the instincts were naturally selected and reinforced over generations.

These behaviors make up what Bowlby termed an “attachment behavioral system,” the system that guides us in our patterns and habits of forming and maintaining relationships (Fraley, 2010).

Research on Bowlby’s theory of attachment showed that infants placed in an unfamiliar situation and separated from their parents will generally react in one of these ways upon reunion with the parents:

• Secure attachment: These infants showed distress upon separation but sought comfort and were easily comforted when the parents returned;
• Anxious-resistant attachment: A smaller portion of infants experienced greater levels of distress and, upon reuniting with the parents, seemed both to seek comfort and to attempt to “punish” the parents for leaving.
• Avoidant attachment: Infants in the third category showed no stress or minimal stress upon separation from the parents and either ignored the parents upon reuniting or actively avoided the parents (Fraley, 2010).
• In later years, researchers added a fourth attachment style to this list: the disorganized-disoriented attachment style, which refers to children who have no predictable pattern of attachment behaviors (Kennedy & Kennedy, 2004).

It makes intuitive sense that a child’s attachment style is largely a function of the caregiving the child receives in his or her early years. Those who received support and love from their caregivers are likely to be secure, while those who experienced inconsistency or negligence from their caregivers are likely to feel more anxiety surrounding their relationship with their parents.

However, attachment theory takes it one step further, applying what we know about attachment in children to relationships we engage in as adults. These relationships (particularly intimate and/or romantic relationships) are also directly related to our attachment styles as children and the care we received from our primary caregivers (Firestone, 2013).

The development of this theory gives us an interesting look into the study of child development.

Bowlby and Ainsworth: The History and Psychology of Attachment Theory

Bowlby’s interest in child development traces back to his first experiences out of college, in which he volunteered at a school for maladjusted children. According to Bowlby, two children sparked his curiosity and drive that laid the foundations of attachment theory.

There was an isolated and distant teenager who had no stable mother figure in his life and had recently been expelled from his school for stealing, and an anxious 7- or 8-year-old boy who followed Bowlby wherever he went, earning himself a reputation as Bowlby’s “shadow” (Bretherton, 1992).

Through his work with children, Bowlby developed a strong belief in the impact of family experiences on children’s emotional and behavioral wellbeing .

Early on in his career, Bowlby proposed that psychoanalysts working with children should take a holistic perspective, considering children’s living environments, families, and other experiences in addition to any behaviors exhibited by the children themselves.

This idea grew into a strategy of helping children by helping their parents, a generally effective strategy given the importance of the child’s relationships with their parents (or other caregivers).

At roughly the same time Bowlby was creating the foundations for his theory on attachment, Mary Ainsworth was finishing her graduate degree and studying security theory, which proposed that children need to develop a secure dependence on their parents before venturing out into unfamiliar situations.

In 1950, the two crossed paths when Ainsworth took a position in Bowlby’s research unit at the Tavistock Clinic in London. Her initial responsibilities included analyzing records of children’s behavior, which inspired her to conduct her own studies on children in their natural settings.

Through several papers, numerous research studies, and theories that were discarded, altered, or combined, Bowlby and Ainsworth developed and provided evidence for attachment theory.

Theirs was a more rigorous explanation and description of attachment behavior than any others on the topic at the time, including those that had grown out of Freud’s work and those that were developed in direct opposition to Freud’s ideas (Bretherton, 1992).

There were several groundbreaking studies that contributed to the development of attachment theory or provided evidence for its validity, including the study described earlier in which infants were separated from their primary caregivers and their behavior was observed to fall into a “style” of attachment.

Further findings on emotional attachment came from a surprising place: rhesus monkeys.

The Harlow Experiments

His work showed that motherly love was emotional rather than physiological, that the capacity for attachment is heavily dependent upon experiences in early childhood, and that this capacity was unlikely to change much after it was “set” (Herman, 2012).

Harlow discovered these interesting findings by conducting two groundbreaking experiments.

In the first experiment, Harlow separated infant monkeys from their mothers a few hours after birth. Each monkey was instead raised by two inanimate surrogate “mothers.” Both provided the infant monkeys with the milk they needed to survive, but one was made out of wire mesh while the other was wire mesh covered with soft terry cloth.

The monkeys who were given the freedom to choose which mother to associate with almost always chose to take milk from the terry cloth “mother.” This finding showed that infant attachment is not simply a matter of where they get their milk—other factors are at play.

For his second experiment, Harlow modified his original setup. The monkeys were given either the bare wire mesh surrogate mother or the terry cloth mother, both of which provided the milk the monkeys needed to grow.

Both groups of monkeys survived and thrived physically, but they displayed extremely different behavioral tendencies. Those with a terry cloth mother returned to the surrogate when presented with strange, loud objects, while those with a wire mesh mother would throw themselves to the floor, clutch themselves, rock back and forth, or even “scream in terror.”

This provided a clear indication that emotional attachment in infancy, gained through cuddling, affected the monkey’s later responses to stress and emotion regulation (Herman, 2012).

These two experiments laid the foundations for further work on attachment in children and the impacts of attachment experiences in later life.

Erikson’s work was based on Freud’s original personality theories and drew from his idea of the ego. However, Erikson placed more importance on context from culture and society than on Freud’s focus on the conflict between the id and the superego.

In addition, his stages of development are based on how children socialize and how it affects their sense of self rather than on sexual development.

The eight stages of psychosocial development according to Erikson are:

• Infancy—Trust vs. Mistrust : In this stage, infants require a great deal of attention and comfort from their parents, leading them to develop their first sense of trust (or, in some cases, mistrust);
• Early Childhood—Autonomy vs. Shame and Doubt : Toddlers and very young children are beginning to assert their independence and develop their unique personality, making tantrums and defiance common;
• Preschool Years—Initiative vs. Guilt : Children at this stage begin learning about social roles and norms. Their imagination will take off at this point, and the defiance and tantrums of the previous stage will likely continue. The way trusted adults interact with the child will encourage him or her to act independently or to develop a sense of guilt about any inappropriate actions;
• School Age—Industry (Competence) vs. Inferiority : At this stage, the child is building important relationships with peers and is likely beginning to feel the pressure of academic performance. Mental health issues may begin at this stage, including depression, anxiety, ADHD, and other problems.
• Adolescence—Identity vs. Role Confusion : The adolescent is reaching new heights of independence and is beginning to experiment and put together his or her identity. Problems with communication and sudden emotional and physical changes are common at this stage (Wells, Sueskind, & Alcamo, 2017).
• Young Adulthood—Intimacy vs. Isolation : At this stage (ages 18-40, approximately), the individual will begin sharing with others more, including people outside o the family. If the individual is successful in this stage of development, he or she will build satisfying relationships that have a sense of commitment, safety, and care; if not, they may fear commitment and experience isolation, loneliness, and depression (McLeod, 2017).
• Middle Adulthood—Generativity vs. Stagnation : In the penultimate stage (ages 40-65, approximately), the individual is likely established in his or her career, relationship, and family. If the individual is not established and contributing to society, he or she may feel stagnant and unproductive.
• Late Adulthood—Ego Integrity vs. Despair : Finally, late adulthood (ages 65 and above) usually brings reduced productivity, which can either be embraced as a reward for one’s contributions or be met with guilt or dissatisfaction. Successfully navigating this stage will protect the individual from feeling depressed or hopeless, and help the individual cultivate wisdom (McLeod, 2017).

Although it does not map completely onto attachment theory, Erikson’s findings are clearly related to the attachment styles and behaviors Bowlby, Ainsworth, and Harlow identified.

John Bowlby – Attachment Theory – Diana Simon Psihoterapeut

According to Bowlby and Ainsworth, attachments with the primary caregiver develop during the first 18 months or so of the child’s life, starting with instinctual behaviors like crying and clinging (Kennedy & Kennedy, 2004). These behaviors are quickly directed at one or a few caregivers in particular, and by 7 or 8 months old, children usually start protesting against the caregiver(s) leaving and grieve for their absence.

Once children reach the toddler stage, they begin forming an internal working model of their attachment relationships. This internal working model provides the framework for the child’s beliefs about their own self-worth and how much they can depend on others to meet their needs.

In Bowlby and Ainsworth’s view, the attachment styles that children form based on their early interactions with caregivers form a continuum of emotion regulation, with anxious-avoidant attachment at one end and anxious-resistant at the other.

Secure attachment falls at the midpoint of this spectrum, between overly organized strategies for controlling and minimizing emotions and the uncontrolled, disorganized, and ineffectively managed emotions.

The most recently added classification, disorganized-disoriented, may display strategies and behaviors from all across the spectrum, but generally, they are not effective in controlling their emotions and may have outbursts of anger or aggression (Kennedy & Kennedy, 2004).

Research has shown that there are many behaviors in addition to emotion regulation that relates to a child’s attachment style. Among other findings, there is evidence of the following connections:

• Secure Attachment: These children are generally more likely to see others as supportive and helpful and themselves as competent and worthy of respect. They relate positively to others and display resilience, engage in complex play and are more successful in the classroom and in interactions with other children. They are better at taking the perspectives of others and have more trust in others;
• Anxious-Avoidant Attachment : Children with an anxious-avoidant attachment style are generally less effective in managing stressful situations. They are likely to withdraw and resist seeking help, which inhibits them from forming satisfying relationships with others . They show more aggression and antisocial behavior, like lying and bullying, and they tend to distance themselves from others to reduce emotional stress;
• Anxious-Resistant Attachment : These children are on the opposite end of the spectrum from anxious-avoidant children. They likely lack self-confidence and stick close to their primary caregivers. They may display exaggerated emotional reactions and keep their distance from their peers, leading to social isolation.
• Disorganized Attachment : Children with a disorganized attachment style usually fail to develop an organized strategy for coping with separation distress, and tend to display aggression, disruptive behaviors, and social isolation. They are more likely to see others as threats than sources of support, and thus may switch between social withdrawal and defensively aggressive behavior (Kennedy & Kennedy, 2004).

It is easy to see from these descriptions of behaviors and emotion regulation how attachment style in childhood can lead to relationship problems in adulthood.

Attachment styles are primarily discussed in the context of our childhood and upbringing.

In the early stages of development, children develop different attachment patterns to their parents or caregiver. These attachment styles can be predictive of how children grow up. For example, anxious or avoidant attachment styles are often powerful predictors for psychopathology or maladjustment development in the later stages of life (Benoit, 2004).

On the contrary, children with secure attachment styles to their parents are also more likely to have secure attachments to their romantic partners. This being said, attachment styles from childhood play a significant role in all the relationships you will encounter.

From this image, you may notice that the secure attachment style is the only one with a “positive” connotation, whereas the other attachment styles seem to have more unfavorable consequences.

If you recognize yourself as displaying one of the more maladaptive attachment styles, don’t fret because this is 1. very common and 2. not set in stone. For example, if you identify with the fearful-avoidant attachment style, you may see that trust seems to be the biggest issue.

The purpose of this image is not to make you feel ashamed about having a particular attachment style, but the opposite. By accepting and embracing your weaknesses, you allow yourself to grow.

Indeed, it is clear how these attachment styles in childhood lead to attachment types in adulthood. Below is an explanation of the four attachment types in adult relationships.

Examples: The Types, Styles, and Stages (Secure, Avoidant, Ambivalent, and Disorganized)

The adult attachment styles follow the same general pattern described above (Firestone, 2013):

Secure Attachment

These adults are more likely to be satisfied with their relationships, feeling secure and connected to their partners without feeling the need to be together all the time. Their relationships are likely to feature honesty , support, independence, and deep emotional connections.

Dismissive-Avoidant (or Anxious-Avoidant) Attachment

One of the two types of adult avoidant attachments, people with this attachment style generally keep their distance from others. They may feel that they don’t need human connection to survive or thrive, and insist on maintaining their independence and isolation from others.

These individuals are often able to “shut down” emotionally when a potentially hurtful scenario arises, such as a serious argument with their partner or a threat to the continuance of their relationship.

Anxious-Preoccupied (or Anxious-Resistant) Attachment

Those who form less secure bonds with their partners may feel desperate for love or affection and feel that their partner must “complete” them or fix their problems.

While they long for safety and security in their romantic relationships, they may also be acting in ways that push their partner away rather than invite them in. The behavioral manifestations of their fears can include being clingy, demanding, jealous, or easily upset by small issues.

Fearful-Avoidant (or Disorganized) Attachment:

The second type of adult avoidant attachment manifests as ambivalence rather than isolation. People with this attachment style generally try to avoid their feelings because it is easy to get overwhelmed by them. They may suffer from unpredictable or abrupt mood swings and fear getting hurt by a romantic partner.

These individuals are simultaneously drawn to a partner or potential partner and fearful of getting to close. Unsurprisingly, this style makes it difficult to form and maintain meaningful, healthy relationships with others.

Each of these styles should be thought of as a continuum of attachment behaviors, rather than a specific “type” of person. Someone with a generally secure attachment style may on occasion display behaviors more suited to the other types, or someone with a dismissive-avoidant style may form a secure bond with a particular person.

Therefore, these “types” should be considered a way to describe and understand an individual’s behavior rather than an exact description of someone’s personality.

Based on a person’s attachment style, the way he or she approaches intimate relationships, marriage, and parenting can vary widely.

The number of ways in which this theory can be applied or used to explain behavior is compounded and expanded by the fact that relationships require two (or more) people; any attachment behaviors that an individual displays will impact and be influenced by the attachment behaviors of other people.

Given the huge variety of individuals, behaviors, and relationships, it is not surprising that there is so much conflict and confusion.

It is also not surprising, although no less unfortunate, that many relationships end up in divorce or dissolution, an event that may continue an unhealthy cycle of attachment in the children of these unions.

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Speaking of unfortunate situations, attachment theory also has applications in the understanding of the  grief and trauma associated with loss.

Although you may be most familiar with Kübler-Ross’s Five Stages of Grief, they were preceded by Bowlby’s Four Stages. During Bowlby’s work on attachment, he and his colleague Colin Murray Parkes noticed four stages of grief:

• Shock and Numbness: In this initial phase, the bereaved may feel that the loss is not real, or that it is simply impossible to accept. He or she may experience physical distress and will be unable to understand and communicate his or her emotions.
• Yearning and Searching: In this phase, the bereaved is very aware of the void in his or her life and may try to fill that void with something or someone else. He or she still identifies strongly and may be preoccupied with the deceased.
• Despair and Disorganization: The bereaved now accepts that things have changed and cannot go back to the way they were before. He or she may also experience despair, hopelessness, and anger, as well as questioning and an intense focus on making sense of the situation. He or she might withdraw from others in this phase.
• Reorganization and Recovery: In the final phase, the bereaved person’s faith in life may start to come back. He or she will start to rebuild and establish new goals, new patterns, and new habits in life. The bereaved will begin to trust again, and grief will recede to the back of his or her mind instead of staying front and center (Williams & Haley, 2017).

Of course, one’s attachment style will influence how grief is experienced as well. For example, someone who is secure may move through the stages fairly quickly or skip some altogether, while someone who is anxious or avoidant may get stuck on one of the stages.

We all experience grief differently, but viewing these experiences through the lens of attachment theory can bring new perspective and insight into our unique grieving processes and why some of us get “stuck” after a loss.

If you’re interested in learning about your attachment style, there are many tests, scales, and questionnaires out available for you to take.

Feeny, Noller, and Hanrahan developed the Original Attachment Three-Category Measure in 1987 to test respondents’ adult attachment style. It contains only three items and is very simple, but it can still give you a good idea of which category you fall into: avoidant, anxious/ambivalent, or secure. You can complete the measure yourself or read more about it on page 3 of  this PDF .

Bartholomew and Horowitz’s Relationships Questionnaire added to The Three-Category Measure by expanding it to include the dismissive-avoidant category. You can find it on the same PDF as the Three-Category Measure, starting on page 3.

Fraley, Waller, and Brennan’s Experiences in Close Relationships Questionnaire-Revised (ECR-R) is a 32-item questionnaire that gives results measured by two subscales related to attachment: avoidance and anxiety (Fraley, Waller, & Brennan, 2000). Items are rated on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). You can find this questionnaire on the final three pages of the PDF mentioned above.

In addition to these scales, there are several less rigorous attachment style tests that can help you learn about your own style of connecting with others. These aren’t instruments often used in empirical research, but they can be helpful tools for learning more about yourself and your attachment style.

Diane Poole Heller developed an Attachment Styles Test, which contains 45 items rated on a three-point scale from “Rarely/Never” to “Usually/Often.” You can find it here , although after completing it you must enter an email to receive your results.

The Relationship Attachment Style Test is a 50-item test hosted on Psychology Today’s website. It covers the four attachment types noted earlier (Secure, Anxious-Ambivalent, Dismissive-Avoidant, Fearful-Avoidant) as well as Dependent and Codependent attachment styles .

If you are interested in taking this test, you can find it at this link . However, be aware that while you receive a free “snapshot report” at the end, you will need to pay to see your full results.

One of the ways in which the principles and concepts of attachment theory have been effectively applied to teaching is the practice of emotion coaching.

Emotion coaching is about helping children to become aware of their emotions and to manage their own feelings particularly during instances of ‘misbehavior.’ It enables practitioners to create an ethos of positive learning behavior and to have the confidence to de-escalate situations when behavior is challenging” (National College for Teaching and Leadership, 2014).

Emotion coaching is more about supporting children in learning about and regulating their own emotions and behavior than it is about “coaching” in the traditional sense. In emotion coaching, teachers are not required—or even encouraged—to promote proper behavior through rewards or punishments.

Instead, emotion coaching involves:

• Teaching students about the world of “in the moment” emotion;
• Showing students strategies for dealing with emotional ups and downs;
• Empathizing with and accepting negative or unpleasant emotions as normal, but not accepting negative behavior;
• Using moments of challenging behavior as opportunities for teaching;
• Building trusting and respectful relationships with the students (National College for Teaching and Leadership, 2014).

According to attachment theory expert Dr. John Gottman, there are five steps to emotion coaching, and they can be practiced by parents, teachers, or any significant adult in a child’s life:

• Tune in: Notice or become aware of your own and the child’s emotions. Make sure you are calm enough to practice emotion coaching, otherwise, you might want to give both of you a quick breather;
• Connect: Use this situation as an opportunity for you to practice and for the child to learn. State objectively (This is important!) what emotions you think the child is experiencing to help them connect their emotions to their behavior;
• Accept and Listen: Practice empathy. Put yourself in the child’s shoes, think about a situation when you felt a similar emotion, and try to remember what it felt like;
• Reflect: Once everyone is calm, go back over what the child said or did, mentioning only what you saw, heard, or understand of the situation. Reflect on what happened and why it happened;
• End with Problem Solving/Choices/Setting Limits: Whenever possible, try to end the situation by guiding or involving the child in problem-solving (Somerset Children & Young People, n.d.).

To learn more about emotion coaching and improve your skills as a parent or teacher, try the following activity.

What Would an Emotion Coach Do?

This short, two-page activity from the Somerset Emotion Coaching Project can help you enhance your understanding of what emotion coaching is—and what it is not.

There are five scenarios presented along with six potential responses. Your task is to read the scenario and decide which response(s) is/are the appropriate emotion coaching response(s).

The first scenario is: “Angry pupil over not wanting to attend a compulsory revision session.”

Your options include:

• Get cross with the pupil for the bad behavior;
• Tell the pupil they will have to complete an extra session due to the bad behavior;
• Help the pupil to think about what they can do about the problem;
• Tell the pupil not to make a big deal about staying after school;
• Validate the pupil’s expression of anger and frustration;
• Soothe the pupil.

This is an excellent activity to do in groups, as you can discuss each option with others and hear different perspectives from your own. In addition to identifying the emotion coaching response(s), you can also discuss which options are dismissive, avoidant, etc.

You can see the rest of the scenarios and try your hand at this activity by clicking here (an automatic download will start when you click on the link).

Emotion Coaching Scripts

Another great resource from the Somerset Emotion Coaching Project, this activity gives you a chance to practice brainstorming emotion coaching-appropriate responses.

As an added bonus, you can use the scripts you develop to guide you the next time you encounter a situation like those described.

There are six scenarios which you are instructed to create a script for:

• A pupil arrives late to class. She refuses to communicate with you and says “Don’t even start, just leave me alone”;
• A young person refuses to sit by her usual friends at a youth center and says that they have been saying unkind comments about her size;
• A boy regularly fails to complete work independently and will often sit passively and contribute little. He rarely presents with disruptive behavior but simply completes very little work. He appears isolated from his peers;
• A nursery child is crying at drop-off time and is clinging to her parent who has to go to work;
• An aggressive, confrontational parent is annoyed because she’s been asked to come in and talk about her son’s behavior. She approaches you and starts the conversation by saying, “You’re always having a go at us”;
• During recess, a group of young boys was fighting and one of them was hurt (not seriously). You approach them and they all look at you with worried expressions.

For each scenario, the instructions encourage you to:

• Recognize the emotion the child is displaying;
• Validate that emotion;
• Label the emotion the child is feeling;
• Empathize with the child;
• Set limits, if appropriate, and problem-solve.

Completing this worksheet provides you with an excellent opportunity to think, plan, and prepare for effective emotion coaching. You can download this activity for your own use here (an automatic download will start when you click on the link).

If you’re interested in learning more about applying attachment theory to teaching, check out Louis Cozolino’s book Attachment-Based Teaching: Creating a Tribal Classroom . He puts forth a simple but potentially game-changing idea: Relationships are the key to better performance rather than rigidly structured curricula.

In addition, our article Attachment Styles in Therapy: Worksheets & Handouts provides useful worksheets pertaining attachment styles.

Emotion coaching can also be used by social workers, to some extent. However, the application of attachment theory to social work is more significant in the three key messages that it espouses:

• It is vital for social workers to offer children and families a safe haven and secure base. This does not mean families should be forever comfortable and come to depend on the social worker, but families should know a social worker can provide a safe place when they are struggling as well as support for moving forward and outward;
• Social workers must be aware of children’s (and their families’) inner experiences and practice mentalization , or “bringing the inside out.” One of the most important factors in finding healing and improving family relations is to ensure that parents have an idea of what is going on in their children’s heads, including how they feel and think about their parents;
• Among the most effective tools in a social worker’s toolbox is the practice of recording parents as they interact with their child and using the videos to coach the parent. Valuable insights can be found in watching oneself parenting, and the social worker can provide in the moment coaching, offering praise for the parents’ strengths alongside suggestions for improvement (Shemmings, 2015).

Of course, there are many ways to apply attachment theory to working with children, especially those who are in the midst of family crises. However, if these three points are attended to, you’ll have the most important bases covered.

For social workers who work with adults, there are some different strategies and key points to keep in mind, specifically:

• Remember that attachment theory applies throughout the entire range of life, and many behaviors and processes are shaped by early attachment, including staying safe, seeking comfort, regulating proximity to the attachment figure, and seeking predictability;
• Keep in mind that attachment patterns are not based on a few key moments, but on thousands of moments throughout early life, and how an attachment figure responds (or does not respond) sets a template for the child’s attachment style in the future. This template affects how the child recognizes and responds to their own emotions and how they interact with attachment figures;
• This early template becomes deeply embedded in the brain and therefore has a significant impact on our ability to regulate our emotions and connect and relate to others in adulthood. This can lead an adult who was abused in childhood to fail to recognize that they are being abused in their intimate relationship, or even cause them to find comfort and stability in the predictability of their situation;
• Remember that attachment behaviors are adaptive to the context in which they were formed. Habits and behaviors that are adaptive in childhood, in an evolutionary sense at least, may become maladaptive and harmful in adulthood;
• Finally, social workers should never think that they are “treating” a set of behaviors and must recognize that the individual’s strategies were formed for a reason and likely helped him or her survive a difficult situation in childhood. The role of a social worker is to help clients avoid overapplying those strategies and to guide them in adding effective, new strategies to their toolboxes (Hardy, 2016).

As with any popular theory in psychology, there are several criticisms that have been raised against it.

Chief among them are the following criticisms:

• Overemphasis on Nurture: This criticism stems from psychologist J. R. Harris, who believes that parents do not have as much of an influence over their child’s personality or character as most people believe. She notes that much of one’s personality is determined by genetics rather than environment (Harris, 1998; Lee, 2003).
• The stressful situation criticism of attachment theory’s limitations notes that the model was based on a child’s reactions in momentary, stressful situations (being separated from one’s parent), and does not provide any insight into how children and parents interact in non-stressful situations;
• Further, the early model did not take into consideration the fact that children can have different kinds of attachments to different people; the attachment with the mother may not represent the attachments formed with others;
• Finally, the mother was viewed as the automatic primary attachment figure in the early model, when the father, stepparent, sibling, grandparent, aunt, or uncle may be the person that the child connects most strongly with (Field, 1996; Lee, 2003).

Although some of these criticisms have faded over time as the theory is injected with new evidence and updated concepts, it is useful to look at any theory with a critical eye.

17 Exercises for Positive, Fulfilling Relationships

Empower others with the skills to cultivate fulfilling, rewarding relationships and enhance their social wellbeing with these 17 Positive Relationships Exercises [PDF].

Created by experts. 100% Science-based.

A few of the most popular books on attachment theory can be found below:

• Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller ( Amazon );
• Attachment in Psychotherapy by David J. Wallin ( Amazon );
• Handbook of Attachment: Theory, Research, and Clinical Applications (3rd Edition) by Jude Cassidy and Phillip R. Shaver ( Amazon );
• Theories of Attachment: An Introduction to Bowlby, Ainsworth, Gerber, Brazelton, Kennell, & Klaus by Carol Garhart Mooney ( Amazon );
• Insecure in Love: How Anxious Attachment Can Make You Feel Jealous, Needy, and Worried and What You Can Do About It by Leslie Becker-Phelps ( Amazon );
• Wired for Love: How Understanding Your Partner’s Brain and Attachment Style Can Help You Defuse Conflict and Build a Secure Relationship by Dr. Stan Tatkin ( Amazon ).

There are also several great websites that host insightful essays and informative articles about attachment theory and its applications, including:

• www.communitycare.co.uk : The Community Care website calls itself “The heart of your social care career” and offers many interesting pieces on social work, attachment theory, and working with children and families who are struggling.
• “Attachment Theory” by Saul McLeod:  This article provides an excellent, brief introduction to attachment theory, as well as information on the Harlow experiments, the stages of attachment, and Lorenz’s imprinting theory.
• “A Brief Overview of Adult Attachment Theory and Research” by R. Chris Fraley:  This piece from attachment theory expert R. Chris Fraley also gives readers a thorough and academic introduction to familiarize them with the theory.
• “Attachment Styles at Work: Measurement, Collegial Relationships, and Burnout” by Michael P. Leiter, Arla Day, and Lisa Price:  This article , published in the journal Burnout Research in 2015, dives into the applications of attachment theory in the workplace, a subject we didn’t explore in this piece. The authors share some interesting insights about how one’s attachment style affects their relationships and performance in the workplace.

This piece tackled attachment theory, a theory developed by John Bowlby in the 1950s and expanded upon by Mary Ainsworth and countless other researchers in later years. The theory helps explain how our childhood relationships with our caregivers can have a profound impact on our relationships with others as adults.

Although attachment theory may not be able to explain every peculiarity of personality, it lays the foundations for a solid understanding of yourself and those around you when it comes to connecting and interacting with others.

What do you think about attachment theory? Do you think there are attachment styles not covered by the four categories? Are there any other criticisms of attachment theory you think are valid and worthy of discussion? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comment section.

We hope you enjoyed reading this article. Don’t forget to download our three Positive Relationships Exercises for free .

• Benoit, D. (2004). Infant-parent attachment: Definition, types, antecedents, measurement and outcome. Paediatrics & Child Health, 9(8) , 541-545.
• Bretherton, I. (1992). The origins of Attachment Theory: John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth. Developmental Psychology, 28, 759-775.
• Cherry, K. (2018). The story of Bowlby, Ainsworth, and Attachment Theory: The importance of early emotional bonds. Retrieved from https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-attachment-theory-2795337
• Field, T. (1996). Attachment and separation in young children. Annual Review of Psychology, 47 , 541-561.
• Firestone, L. (2013). How your attachment style impacts your relationship.  Retrieved from https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/compassion-matters/201307/how-your-attachment-style-impacts-your-relationship
• Fraley, R. C. (2010). A brief overview of adult attachment theory and research. Retrieved from https://internal.psychology.illinois.edu/~rcfraley/attachment.htm
• Hardy, R. (2016). Tips on applying attachment theory in social work with adults. Retrieved from http://www.communitycare.co.uk/2016/12/06/attachment-theory-social-work-adults/
• Harris, J. R. (1998). The nurture assumption: Why our children turn out the way they do. Free Press.
• Herman, E. (2012). Harry F. Harlow, monkey love experiments. Retrieved from http://pages.uoregon.edu/adoption/studies/HarlowMLE.htm
• Kennedy, J. H., & Kennedy, C. E. (2004). Attachment theory: Implications for school psychology. Psychology in the Schools, 41 , 247-259.
• Lee, E. J. (2003). The attachment system throughout the life course: Review and criticisms of attachment theory . Retrieved from http://www.personalityresearch.org/papers/lee.html
• McLeod, S. (2017). Erik Erikson. Retrieved from https://www.simplypsychology.org/Erik-Erikson.html
• National College for Teaching and Leadership (2014). An introduction to attachment and the implications for learning and behaviour [PDF Slide Presentation] . Retrieved from https://www.bathspa.ac.uk/media/bathspaacuk/education-/research/digital-literacy/education-resource-introduction-to-attatchment.pdf
• Shemmings, D. (2015). How social workers can use attachment theory in direct work. Retrieved from http://www.communitycare.co.uk/2015/09/02/using-attachment-theory-research-help-families-just-assess/
• Somerset Children & Young People Health & Wellbeing. (n.d.). Emotion coaching and self-regulation. Retrieved from http://www.cypsomersethealth.org/?ks=1&page=mhtk_secp_5
• Wells, J., Sueskind, B., & Alcamo, K. (2017). Child and adolescent issues. Retrieved from https://www.goodtherapy.org/learn-about-therapy/issues/child-and-adolescent-issues
• Williams, L., & Haley, E. (2017). Before the five stages were the FOUR stages of grief. Retrieved from https://whatsyourgrief.com/bowlby-four-stages-of-grief/

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What our readers think.

muchas gracias por la información

The linked surveys are problematic, when they refer to intimate or close relationships, particularly for persons who’ve only had one close adult relationship. Or none.

Article is defective (‘to’ instead of ‘too’ aside). Cannot – for the life of me – find the four stages of attachment declared at the outset; only four styles. For what’s it’s worth I experienced paternal absence and maternal rejection – prostitute mother and pimp father – which is to say, no parenting or attachment at all – leading to a hotch-potch of all three non-secure ‘styles’.

how does attachment influences personality development in adulthood.

Good question! We answer this question by linking the different attachment styles to adult behaviors traits in this article: https://positivepsychology.com/attachment-style-worksheets/ (see the subsection ‘Attachment Theory in Psychology: 4 Types & Characteristics’)

Hope this helps!

– Nicole | Community Manager

How do I reference this article

You can reference this article in APA 7th as follows: Ackerman, C. A. (2018, April 27). What is Attachment Theory? Bowlby’s 4 stages explained. PositivePsychology.com. https://positivepsychology.com/attachment-theory/

I think that a big limitation when discussing Attachment Theory, that I haven’t seen addressed, is the effect of trauma on a older child past the early defining stage, or an adult. Bullying, accidents and injury, severe illness, family upheaval, or other significant life events can significantly affect a person’s psychological state, and thus alter a Securely Attached style to one of the other types.

Thank you for an informative article! Do you happen to know of any non-profit organizations that focus on stopping the cycle of maladaptive attachment in families? I’m a student with some ideas for a program that I’d like to pitch to some organizations that serve at risk individuals.

Glad you found the article helpful — that sounds like an interesting idea! Your question’s a little tricky. It’s hard to know how explicitly existing services draw on Bowlby’s principles. However, I suspect that the messages of the framework are likely embedded in various parent support groups and educational opportunities. If you’re interested in the U.S. specifically, maybe check out some of the services listed here and inquire about any curriculums.

Thank you, Nicole!

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