Attachment Theory: Understanding the Formation of Attachments in Children, Apuntes de Desarrollo de Personalidad

¡Descarga Attachment Theory: Understanding the Formation of Attachments in Children y más Apuntes en PDF de Desarrollo de Personalidad solo en Docsity! 1 DESARROLLO SOCIAL Y DE LA PERSONALIDAD LESSON 1 (PART II): Attachment What is attachment? Is the positive emotional bond that develops between a child and a particular, special individual. When children experience attachment to a given person, they feel pleasure when they are with them and feel comforted by their presence at times of distress. Attachment in mammals: ◼ Parental and filial attachment do, however, have obvious beneficial consequences with respect to the immediate survival of the young (Hinde, 1975). ◼ Social structure: The presence of others in the groups in addition to a mother-infant unit is probably an important factor influencing attachment. ◼ Mobility: Equivalent to the stage of development of the young at birth (i.e., altricial, semi-altricial, precocial) In some cases selection then may favor the formation of attachment by the time the young are capable of independent mobility. Criteria of attachment: 1. Preference for one individual (the presumed attachment figure) over another. 2. Seeking and maintenance of proximity to that figure; also used as evidence of a preference. 3. Response to brief separation from the presumed attachment figure. 4. Response to extended periods of separation. 5. Response to reunion with the presumed attachment figure. 6. Use of the attachment figure as a secure base from which to explore the world. 2 DESARROLLO SOCIAL Y DE LA PERSONALIDAD In a classic study, psychologist Harry Harlow gave infant monkeys the choice of cuddling a wire "monkey" that provided food or a soft, terry cloth monkey that was warm but did not provide food. Their preference was clear: Baby monkeys spent most of their time clinging to the cloth monkey, (contact comfort.) Lorenz's findings (ethological theory) suggested that attachment was based on biologically determined factors. It turns out, however, that the ability to provide food and other physiological needs may not be as crucial as Freud (psychoanalytic theory) and other theorists first thought. The Ainsworth strange situation and parents of attachment: Developmental psychologist Mary Ainsworth built on Bowlby's theorizing to develop a widely used experimental technique to measure attachment. It consists of a sequence of staged episodes that illustrate the strength of attachment between a child and (typically) his or her mother. 5 DESARROLLO SOCIAL Y DE LA PERSONALIDAD How can mothers learn how to respond their infants? One way is from their own mothers. Mothers typically respond to their infants based on their own attachment styles. As a result, there is substantial similarity in attachment patterns from one generation to the next. It is important to realize that a mother's (and others') behaviour toward infants is at least in part a reaction to the child's ability to provide effective cues. A mother may not be able to respond effectively to a child whose own behaviour is unrevealing, misleading, or ambiguous. For instance, children who clearly display their anger or fear or unhappiness will be easier to read —and respond to effectively—than children whose behaviour is ambiguous. Consequently, the kind of signals an infant send may in part determine how successful the mother will be in responding. Fathers and attachment: If you looked at the early theorizing and research on attachment, you'd find little mention of the father and his potential contributions to the life of the infant. However, there are several factors that led to the demise of this view, and we need to highlight some of them: • Societal norms change and fathers begam to take a more active role in child-rearing activities. • It became increasingly clear from research findings that some infants formed their primary initial relationships with their fathers and not with their mothers. • Furthermore, the nature of father’s play with their babies is often quite different from that of mothers. Fathers engage in more physical, rough-and-tumble activities with children, while mothers play traditional games such as peek-a-boo and games with more verbal elements. Average levels of social responsiveness and emotional conflict shown by infants who were either securely or insecurely attached to their mothers and fathers: 6 DESARROLLO SOCIAL Y DE LA PERSONALIDAD Who is at risk of becoming an insensitive caregiver? ◼ Depressed parents often ignore babies’ social signals and generally fail to establish satisfying and synchronous relationships with them. ◼ Infants often become angry at these caregivers’ lack of responsiveness and may soon begin to match their depressive symptoms, even when interacting with other nondepressed adults. ◼ Another group of parents who are often insensitive caregivers are those who themselves felt unloved, neglected, or abused as children. ◼ These formerly mistreated caregivers often start out with the best intentions, but they often expect their infants to be perfect and to love them right away. So when their babies are irritable, fussy, or inattentive (as all infants are at times), these emotionally insecure adults are likely to feel as if they are being rejected once again. ◼ Caregivers whose pregnancies were unplanned and their babies unwanted can be particularly insensitive caregivers whose children fare rather poorly in all aspects of development. Who is the responsible of the kind of attachment developed in children? The responsible of the type of attachment develop is the caregiver, for some theorists, the baby’s temperament, for others, and both of them, for most theorists. Does temperament explain attachment security? Jerome Kagan argued that the Strange Situation really measures individual differences in infants’ temperaments rather than the quality of their attachments. This idea grew from his observation that the percentages of 1- year-olds who have established secure, resistant, and avoidant attachments corresponds closely to the percentages of babies who fall into Thomas and Chess’s easy, difficult, and slow-to-warm-up temperamental profiles. 7 DESARROLLO SOCIAL Y DE LA PERSONALIDAD Do mothers explain attachment security? One review of 34 studies revealed that maternal characteristics that often predict insensitive parenting, such as illness, depression, and child maltreatment, were associated with a sharp increase in insecure attachments. Child temperamental problems stemming from prematurity, illness, and other psychological disorders had virtually no impact on attachment quality. Finally, a study of identical and same-sex fraternal twins revealed that 70 percent of the identical twin pairs and 64 percent of the fraternal twins established the same kind of attachments because concordance in attachment classifications was not much higher for the identical twin pairs, it appears that genetic contributions to children’s attachments were modest. The combined influences of caregiving and temperament Grazyna Kochanska (1998) sought to test an integrative theory of infant-caregiver attachments—one specifying that: • quality of caregiving is most important in determining whether an infant’s emerging attachments are secure or insecure, but • infant temperament is the better predictor of the type of insecurity infants display, should their attachments be insecure. Attachment and later development: For example, infants who were securely attached at age 12 to 18 months: o are better problem solvers as 2-year-olds o are more complex and creative in their symbolic play o display more positive and fewer negative emotions, o are more attractive to toddlers as playmates than those who were insecurely attached. Infants whose primary attachments are insecure are at risk of becoming hostile and aggressive preschool and grade-school children whom peers are likely to reject. Cultural variations in attachment classifications Japanese mothers have much more close contact with their infants and strive to anticipate and satisfy all their babies’ needs, rather than react to their needy babies’ cries. Furthermore, intense separation and stranger anxieties, which characterize resistant attachments, are much more common in cultures such as Japan, where caregivers rarely leave their infants with substitute caregivers. Parents in northern Germany deliberately encourage their infants to be independent and tend to discourage clingy close contact, perhaps explaining why more German than American babies show reunion behaviours characteristic of the avoidant attachment pattern. In Israel, where communally reared kibbutz children who sleep in infant houses without their parents being accessible to them at night are found to have more insecure attachment relationships than children who sleep at home with their mothers.