Attachment theory


Attachment theory posits that infants need to form a close relationship with at least one primary caregiver to ensure their survival and to develop healthy social and emotional functioning. It was first developed by psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby. The theory proposes that secure attachments are formed when caregivers are sensitive and responsive in social interactions, and consistently available, particularly between the ages of six months and two years. As children grow, they are thought to use these attachment figures as a secure base from which to explore the world and to return to for comfort. Interactions with caregivers have been hypothesized to form a specific kind of attachment behavioral system – or, more recently, internal working model – the relative security or insecurity of which influences characteristic patterns of behavior when forming future relationships. Separation anxiety or grief following the loss of an attachment figure was proposed as being a normal and adaptive response for a securely attached infant.
In the 1970s, developmental psychologist Mary Ainsworth expanded on Bowlby's work, codifying the caregiver's side of the attachment process as requiring the adult's availability, appropriate responsiveness, and sensitivity to the infant's signals. She and her team devised a laboratory procedure known as the Strange Situation Procedure, which she used to identify attachment patterns in infant–caregiver pairs: secure, avoidant, anxious attachment, and later, disorganized attachment. In the 1980s, attachment theory was extended to adult relationships and attachment in adults, making it applicable beyond early childhood. Bowlby's theory integrated concepts from evolutionary biology, object relations theory, control systems theory, ethology, and cognitive psychology, and was most fully articulated in his trilogy, Attachment and Loss.
While criticized from its inception by academic psychologists, ethnographers, and psychoanalysts in the 1950s, attachment theory has become a dominant approach to understanding early social development and has generated extensive research. Several researchers—notably Michael Lamb and his colleagues in the mid-1980s—have shown that the diagnoses of attachment security or insecurity constructed using procedures like the Strange Situation are primarily reflections of what was going on in the social environment during the procedure, external to the child and his or her caregiver. Other findings challenge the theory's observational claims, its claims to universal cultural relevance, the role of temperament in shaping attachment behaviour, the unobservability of internal working models, and the limitations of discrete attachment patterns. Attachment advocates rarely address such criticisms; consequently, the theory’s core concepts persist in influencing therapeutic practices, social policy, and childcare policy. Recent findings show that attachment theory is mistaken in assuming that a one-to-one program underpins infant social behaviour. In short, attachment theory overemphasizes maternal influence on shaping children's social lives while overlooking genetic, cross-cultural, and broader social factors.

Attachment

Within attachment theory, attachment refers to an affectional bond or tie between an individual and an attachment figure, usually a caregiver or guardian. Such bonds may be reciprocal between two adults, but between a child and a caregiver, the bonds arise mainly from the child's own actions in pursuit of safety, security, and protection—which is most important in infancy and childhood. Attachment theory is not an exhaustive explanation of human relationships. For example, Ainsworth speculated that attachment was a "synonym of love," though not all of a baby's relationships are love relationships.
In child-to-adult relationships, the child's tie is called the "attachment" and the caregiver's reciprocal equivalent is referred to as the "caregiving bond". Just as the child's tie is generated through the operation of a hypothesized "attachment behavioral system" in the child, so the caregiving bond is held to be produced by the caregiver's "caregiving behavioral system." The theory proposes that children instinctively attach to carers, with survival as the biological aim of attachment and security as its psychological aim.
The relationship between a child and their attachment figure is especially important in threatening situations, particularly when no other caregivers are present, as is often the case in nuclear families with a traditional division of labour. The presence of at least one supportive attachment figure is especially important in a child's developmental years. In addition to support, attunement is crucial in a caregiver-child relationship. If the primary caregiver and the child are poorly attuned, the child may grow to feel misunderstood and anxious.
Attachment theory holds that infants may form attachments to any consistent, available caregiver who is sensitive and responsive in social interactions with them. The quality of social engagement is more influential than the amount of time spent. In a nuclear family with traditional female-male roles, the biological mother is the usual primary attachment figure, but the role can be assumed by anyone who consistently behaves in a "mothering" way over time. Within attachment theory, mothering equates to a set of behaviours that involves engaging in lively social interaction with the infant and responding readily to signals and approaches. Nothing in the theory suggests that fathers are not equally likely to become principal attachment figures if they provide most of the child care and related social interaction. A secure attachment to a father who is a "secondary attachment figure" may counter the possible negative effects of an unsatisfactory attachment to a mother who is the primary attachment figure.
"Alarm" is the term used for activation of the ABS caused by fear of danger. "Anxiety" is the anticipation or fear of being cut off from the attachment figure. And if an attachment figure is unavailable or unresponsive, separation distress may occur. In infants, extended physical separation can lead to anxiety and anger, followed by sadness and despair. The theory holds that, after the ABS has fully formed, extended physical separation is no longer a threat to the child's bond with the attachment figure. Threats to security in older children and adults arise from prolonged absence, breakdowns in communication, emotional unavailability or signs of rejection or abandonment.

Tenets

Modern attachment theory is based on three principles:
  1. Human beings have an intrinsic need for one-to-one bonding.
  2. The regulation of emotion and fear contributes to vitality.
  3. Attachment fosters adaptiveness and growth.

    Primate beginnings

While Bowlby argued that attachment behaviour was a product of human evolution, citing evidence that infant primates also form attachments, he did not distinguish between species that breed cooperatively—passing newborns readily from adult to adult, as in marmosets and tamarins—and those that rear their young jealously in one-to-one relationships, such as gorillas and chimpanzees. He proposed that one-to-one attachment behaviours, along with their associated emotions, were adaptive in the young of all primates that socialised in the possessive one-to-one manner of gorillas and chimpanzees—a group he mistakenly believed included human hunter-gatherers and, by extension, our Stone Age ancestors.
The long-term evolution of any social species necessarily involves selection for social behaviours—in both infants and adults—that increase the likelihood of individual or group survival. Distinctively, Bowlby's theory did not address the extent to which primate infant survival depended on the caregiving behaviour of older companions. His theory primarily attributed infant survival to innate capacities in newborns themselves. As a result, it initially sidelined protective advantages of adult vigilance and caregiving, emphasizing instead toddlers' own efforts to remain close to familiar figures when distressed. This emphasis led him to argue that the crucial factor in infant safety and survival—both in contemporary contexts and during prehuman adaptation—was the acquisition and development of an innate attachment system, which now underpins the panhuman social psychology of infancy.

Hunter-gatherers

While citing no ethnographic evidence, Bowlby pictured the evolutionary environment of early pre-human adaptation as one in which, like gorillas and chimpanzees, the infant was always in close proximity to their mother, being "carried by his mother on her back", a picture which he assumed also to represent current hunter-gatherer societies. In sidelining the efficacy of protective caregiving initiatives from the infant's older companions, that is the caregiving behavioural system, he was led to propose that there would be a survival necessity for infants to evolve the capacity to sense possibly dangerous conditions such as isolation from companions or rapid approach by strangers. Hence, according to Bowlby, evolution must have ensured that young children's proximity-seeking to a mother-figure in the face of threat has become the "set-goal" of what he called the attachment instinct or attachment behavioural system.

Monotropy

Reflecting his own experience and his observations of English families, Bowlby believed the one-to-oneness of the child's first strong relationship was a human universal, using the term "monotropy" to describe it. Attachments form most obviously if the infant lives in social conditions which mean he or she has only one caregiver, with, perhaps, some occasional care from a small number of other people. Around the world, from the start of life onwards, most children have many more than one important figure in their lives with whom they may smile, cry, cling, and play, or to whom they may "direct attachment behaviour". As within hunter-gatherer tribes, babies born into extended families are often raised cooperatively—a possibility Bowlby apparently did not consider. So, researchers and theorists have abandoned the concept of monotropy insofar as it may be taken to mean the relationship with the special figure differs qualitatively from that of other figures. Instead, current attachment theorists postulate very young children develop hierarchies of relationship.