- Seeking proximity, especially at times of stress
- Distress on separation
- Pleasure when re-united
- General orientation of behaviour towards the caregiver
Psychologist use the term “infant” when they refer to children less than 2 years and the term “child” to children between 2 years and adolescence.
Infants physically cannot survive for themselves and so must form attachments with someone in order to feed, be cared for and be protected and so it is likely they are born with a tendency to form these attachments to increase their chance of survival.
It is also likely that the attachment bond has longer beneficiaries apart from survival. It may form the fundamental basis for emotional relationships that will be formed in the future. Bowlby called this the “internal working model”, a mental model of the world that allows us to predict, control and manipulate the world around us. There is also evidence that attachments between individuals affects later sexual relationships. Westermarck (1891) described the fact that if children spend a considerable amount of time together with each other they tend NOT to form sexual relations with these individuals. This is known as the “Westermarck effect” and there is evidence to support this. Shepher (1971) found that not one of 3000 Israeli marriage records he studied was between individuals who had been raised together on the same kibbutz, a kind of communal farming community found in Israel.
Stages in the Development of Attachment
Schaffer and Emerson conducted a classic study of the development of attachment in 60 Glaswegian children. They used “separation anxiety” – the distress shown by the infants when separated by their main caregiver and “stranger anxiety” – very young infants show no sign of anxiety when they are left with a stranger but at a certain age this starts which is viewed as the onset of attachment, as a measure of attachment. The following is the conclusions they were able to draw from the study.
- Fifty percent of the babies made their first attachment between the age of 6 – 8 months – 65 percent with the mother and a further 30 percent with the mother and someone else.
- Mothers who were sensitive to their babies’ needs and responded most quickly tended to have the most intensely attached infants.
- By 18 months 86 percent had formed attachments to more than one person and 65 percent had five or more attachments.
- They were able to propose a stage theory of attachment formation i.e. that there are identifiable stages, and what happens at one stage is distinctly different from what is happening at another stage.
Variety of Attachments
Assessing Secure and Insecure Attachment
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What Causes the Different Attachment Types
Ainsworth and Bell suggested that secure attachments are the result of mothers being responsive to their children’s needs. Their study claimed to show a relationship between maternal responsiveness and the three types of attachments.
More recently a study conducted by Isabella et al (1989) has shown the relation between responsiveness and attachment as predicted by Ainsworth. Mothers and infants who tended to be responsive towards each other from 1 month, and at later ages, were more likely at 12 months to have a secure relationship. Those who tended to have a more one-sided relationship tended to have insecure relationships. This was called the caregiving sensitivity hypothesis, with attachment depending on the warm and loving responsiveness of the caregiver.
Another hypothesis put forward by Kagan (1982) is called the temperament hypothesis. He believed that certain innate personality or temperamental characteristics may account for behaviour in children rather than the result of the caregivers responsiveness. It may be that some children are more vulnerable to stress and so each child will react differently according to their innate temperament. Children who behave in an avoidant way are difficult to upset and ambivalent infants are easy to stress. Secure infants are somewhere between these two.
Research has shown that newborns that are less likely to attend to people and objects are more likely to develop insecure attachments at later ages and that newborns who showed signs of behavioural instability e.g. shaking were less likely to become securely attached to their mother.
Cross-Cultural Variations in Secure and Insecure Attachments
In the same way that there are differences in attachment behaviour between individuals there is also differences in from one culture to another. Secure attachment is important in all cultures and the concept of an internal working model being universal has become a widely accepted view. Researchers in many different countries have used the Strange Situation to investigate secure and insecure attachment. There is considerable consistency in the results across cultures that show there is a relationship between mother – infant interaction and secure attachment. This suggests that there is a biological or genetic basis for attachment formation.
