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Key Takeaways
Evolutionary Theory of Attachment
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 likefixed action patternsand 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.
A child has an innate (i.e., inborn) need to attach to one main attachment figure (i.e., monotropy).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
This will lead to irreversible long-term consequences in the child’s intellectual, social, and emotional development.
Such individuals act on impulse with little regard for the consequences of their actions. For example, showing no guilt for antisocial behavior.
Aim
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 theirearly life stagesis likely to affect intellectual, social, and emotional development seriously.
Procedure
Findings
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
Conclusion
Evaluation
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.
Short-Term Separation
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.
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.
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 dominantbehavioral theoryof 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
Thisinternal working modelis 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.
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.
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).
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.
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)
Separation(1973)
Loss(1980)
Critical Evaluation
Implications for children’s nursing
Strengths
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 Situationstudy 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.
Aninsecure-avoidantchild 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.
Limitations
Michael Rutter (1981) argued that if a child fails to develop anemotional 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.
Is attachment theory sexist?
References
Ainsworth, M. D. S., Bell, S. M., & Stayton, D. J. (1971) Individual differences in strange- situation behavior of one-year-olds. In H. R. Schaffer (Ed.)The origins of human social relations. London and New York: Academic Press. Pp. 17-58.
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.
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.
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.
Lorenz, K. (1935). Der Kumpan in der Umwelt des Vogels. Der Artgenosse als auslösendes Moment sozialer Verhaltensweisen.Journal für Ornithologie83, 137–215.
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.
Robertson J. (1953).A Two-Year-Old Goes to Hospital: A Scientific Film Record (Film). Concord Film Council, Nacton.
Robertson, J. (1955). Young children in long-term hospitals.Nursing Times,23(9).
Robertson, J. (1958).Going to Hospital with Mother: A Guide to the Documentary Film. Tavistock Child Development Research Unit.
Robertson, J. (1968). The long-stay child in hospital.Maternal Child Care,4(40), 161-6.
Robertson, J., & Robertson, J. (1968). Jane 17 months; in fostercare for 10 days.London: Tavistock Institute of Human Relations. Film.
Robertson, J., & Robertson, J. (1971). Young children in brief separation: A fresh look.The psychoanalytic study of the child,26(1), 264-315.
Rutter, M. (1972).Maternal deprivation reassessed.Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Rutter, M. (1979). Maternal deprivation, 1972-1978: New findings, new concepts, new approaches.Child Development, 283-305.
Rutter, M. (1981). Stress, coping and development: Some issues and some questions.Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 22(4), 323-356.
Schaffer, H. R. & Emerson, P. E. (1964). The development of social attachments in infancy.Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 29 (3), serial number 94.
Schore, A. N. (2000). Attachment and the regulation of the right brain.Attachment & Human Development, 2(1), 23-47.
Vicedo, M. (2020). Attachment Theory from Ethology to the Strange Situation. InOxford Research Encyclopedia of Psychology.
Weisner, T. S., & Gallimore, R. (1977). My brother’s keeper: Child and sibling caretaking.Current Anthropology, 18(2), 169.
Further Reading
Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc
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.
Saul McLeod, PhD
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.
