What is meant in psychology by the term attachment?

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  ASSIGNMENT 1Question 1What is meant in psychology by the term ‘attachment’?The psychological explanation for the term ‘attachment’ is where you form an emotional bond to another person or object both physically and mentally. And to feel secure.  John Bowlby (1969) described it as a lasting psychological connectedness between human beings.    He also stated that early experiences In childhood have an important influence on development & behavior on the individual’s life.Attachment behavior is essentially a survival strategy from evolution for protecting infants from predators.Question 2According to Bowlby, what harm is caused to an individual if he or she is deprived of an attachment bond in early childhood?If the process of ‘attachment’ is ‘interrupted’, the individual may develop mental issues such as depression, behavioural issues, find it hard to make relationships, even goes as far as psychiatric disorders, dwarfism, acute distress or possibly death if the attachment bond is interrupted. From the 1940’s – 1970’s it was determined that a child must have a secure mother-child relationship if the infant was not to suffer any long term problems.Bowlby did a case study on 44 Juvenile thieves and to his amazement discovered that a majority of
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them had suffered some sort of separation from their mothers, possibly more than 6 months or more in the first critical 5 years of their lives. This was actually proven to be of a biased nature as Bowlby did find that most of them had suffered some form of separation from their mothers and he presumed that this was the case of their delinquency.  He also found that a small number of the juvenile thieves were unable to make “true” affection bonds.  But these findings could be thrown out as Bowlby never had results from a “controlled group” to compare ...

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