Close Relationships

Functions, Forms and Processes

Patricia Noller, Judith A. Feeney

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134953332
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Close Relationships: Functions, Forms and Processes provides an overview of current theory and research in the area of close relationships, written by internationally renowned scholars whose work is at the cutting edge of research in the field. The volume consists of three sections: introductory issues, types of relationships, and relationship processes. In the first section, there is an exploration of the functions and benefits of close relationships, the diversity of methodologies used to study them, and the changing social context in which close relationships are embedded. A second section examines the various types of close relationships, including family bonds and friendships. The third section focuses on key relationship processes, including attachment, intimacy, sexuality, and conflict.This book is designed to be an essential resource for senior undergraduate and postgraduate students, researchers, and practitioners, and will be suitable as a resource in advanced courses dealing with the social psychology of close relationships.

Section III

Relationship Processes

10

Attachment Across the Lifespan

CINDY HAZAN, MARY CAMPA, and NURIT GUR-YAISH

In his 1958 Presidential Address to the American Psychological Association, Harry Harlow noted that the mission of psychologists is to analyze all facets of human behavior and, in his view, we had thus far failed in our mission by neglecting love and affection. Indeed, compared to other aspects of human behavior, it took the field a long time to begin investigating these topics. Nearly 50 years later, one can only imagine Harlow's delight in knowing that there is now an international network of scholars whose research efforts are devoted entirely to the study of close relationships.

We agree that the issues covered in this volume should be of central importance to psychological scientists. As Berscheid and Peplau (1983) wrote so eloquently in the introductory chapter of the book widely credited with launching this new area of research (Kelley et al., 1983, p. 1):

Relationships with others lie at the very core of human existence. Humans are conceived within relationships, born into relationships, and live their lives within relationships. Each individual's dependence on other people—for the realization of life itself, for survival during one of the longest gestation periods in the animal kingdom, for food and shelter and aid and comfort throughout the life cycle—is a fundamental fact of the human condition.

The primary focus of our chapter is the subset of close relationships known as attachments (see also Simpson & Tran; Parke et al.; Gaines et al.; Gable & Reis; all this volume). They are special in several respects and generally considered to be the closest of all close relationships. The prototypes of attachment are bonds between parents and their offspring and between adult mates or romantic partners.

One of many notable strengths of attachment theory is that it addresses both normative and individual-differences phenomena. However, attachment research on all stages of the lifespan has focused almost exclusively on individual differences. As a consequence, many normative aspects of the theory have yet to be explored empirically and thus relatively little progress has been made on this front. In the present chapter we attempt to correct this imbalance by emphasizing normative attachment issues and findings wherever possible.

The chapter is divided into two major sections. In the first, we offer a definition of attachment that highlights its distinctive features, outlines the phases in its ontogeny, reviews what is known about its possible biological and neurological underpinnings, and discusses the ways in which attachments are transformed and integrated with other social behavioral systems during the course of development. This overview of the normative aspects of attachment theory and research is followed by highlights from the vast body of findings related to individual differences, including stability (and change) across time and relationships, as well as in the structure of attachment hierarchies. In the second section, we address the practical significance and applied value of attachment theory and research. Here we report findings from intervention research targeted toward infant-caregiver pairs, children and their foster/adoptive parents, adolescents, and adult couples.

ATTACHMENT THEORY AND RESEARCH

Attachment theory grew out of an invitation in 1950 from the World Health Organization to the British psychiatrist John Bowlby to report on the mental health of the many London children who had been orphaned by the Second World War. His conclusion, that healthy adjustment required a “continuous and warm relationship” with at least one adult caregiver, had positive effects on policy but suffered from the lack of a specific mechanism to explain the association between “maternal deprivation” and poor developmental outcomes. The search for this mystery mechanism led Bowlby into scientific literatures far removed from his training as a psychoanalyst, including those on ethology, evolutionary biology, control systems theory, and cognitive science. The result was a comprehensive theory of attachment that eventually filled three volumes (Bowlby, 1969/1982, 1973, 1980).

The Attachment Behavior System

A basic assumption of the theory is that, because of their extreme immaturity at birth, human infants can survive only if an adult is available and willing to provide protection and care. Thus, as a result of natural selection, a behavioral system evolved to promote proximity to and the development of the kind of bond with a protector/caregiver needed to ensure survival.

The dynamics of the attachment system are readily observable in the behavior of all normal year-old infants in relation to their primary attachment figure—typically their mother. So, too, are the defining features of attachment relationships. The baby stays close and continuously monitors her whereabouts (proximity maintenance), retreats to her for comfort if needed (safe haven), resists and is distressed by separations from her (separation distress), and explores happily as long as she is present and attentive (secure base). The attachment system is activated by fear or anxiety, typically as a result of perceived threat or separation from attachment figures; otherwise the system is quiescent, which potentiates the activation of other behavior systems such as exploration or affiliation. In theory, the attachment system is active across the lifespan and the same four behavioral features define attachment at all ages. A subset of these behaviors may be observed in other types of close relationships (e.g., seeking proximity to friends or using them as a safe haven and source of comfort), but attachment relationships by definition are characterized by the presence of all four (see Parke et al., this volume).

The Ontogeny of Infant Attachment Bonds

while the attachment system is hypothesized to be innate, attachment bonds take time to form. Bowlby (1969/1982) proposed four phases in the development of infant-caregiver attachments, which Ainsworth (1972) later elaborated upon and labeled as follows. In the preattachment phase (approximately 0 to 2 months of age), infants are inherently interested in and responsive to social interaction and generally accepting of care from almost anyone. In the attachment-in-the-making phase (2–6 months), they begin to discriminate among caregivers by preferentially directing social signals (smiles, cries) and responding differentially to certain individuals (e.g., greeting more enthusiastically, settling more quickly). In the dear-cut attachment phase (beginning around 6 or 7 months), infants start to exhibit separation distress. In the final phase, goal-corrected partnership (around 24 months), children have less urgent needs for physical proximity and are also more capable of negotiating with caregivers regarding separations and availability.

The separation-distress feature of attachment is central because its emergence indicates that an attachment bond has been established, but it is important for historical reasons as well. During the 1940s and 1950s, there were a number of reports that young children appear to be quite disturbed by separations from their primary caregivers, even if the separations are relatively brief, but especially if they are extended (e.g., Burlingham & Freud, 1944; Robertson, 1953). An invariant sequence of reactions, that Bowlby later labeled protest, despair, and detachment, was observed. At first, the children resist the separation by crying inconsolably and actively searching for absent caregivers. Eventually, agitation and anxiety subside and they begin to evince deeper and more pervasive signs of distress, including lethargy, decreased appetite, and sleep disturbances. In time, they appear to recover. It is only when they are reunited with caregivers that otherwise invisible lingering effects of the separation are apparent in the form of either defensive emotional withdrawal or anger mixed with anxious clinging.

Thus along with the discovery that extended “maternal deprivation” has long-term negative effects, there was now evidence that even comparatively brief separations have short-term detrimental effects. In Bowlby's view, the universal sequence of children's reactions reflects the adaptive functioning of the attachment behavior system in the environment in which it originally evolved. The immediate response to separation from attachment figures should be to resist and actively try to regain contact (the protest reaction). If such efforts prove futile then it becomes adaptive to cease crying and searching, and instead conserve resources and avoid attracting predators (the so-called despair reaction). When reunion begins to seem unlikely, the adaptive response is to withdraw emotionally from the lost attachment figure (the detachment reaction) and become open to forming new attachments.

The Psychobiology of Infant Attachment

In recent years there has been growing interest in moving beyond observable attachment behaviors to exploring their psychobiological underpinnings. The primary focus of such work (reviewed in Fox & Card, 1999) has been individual differences. Such normative questions as whether infants' attachment figures have unique effects on their physiology or whether there are physiological markers that distinguish attachment bonds from other close relationships have yet to be empirically investigated. In contrast, animal researchers have made significant strides in identifying the physiological as well as the neurobiological and neuroanatomical substrates of normative infant-caregiver attachment.

Prominent among these researchers is Holer, who in 1987 brought to the attention of developmental psychologists the findings from his research on separation distress in rat pups (Hofer, 1973a, 1973b, 1975, 1976). The work was motivated by the question of what, exactly, the pups missed about their mother during separations from her. To find out, Hofer and his colleagues designed a series of experiments in which they introduced specific features of the absent mother one at a time, and then measured the effect of each on the pups' distress. They devised ways of mimicking the mother's odor, touch, and movements, added furry mats resembling her soft coat, heated the cage to her body temperature, administered her milk via a gastric cannula, and so on. These studies revealed that each of the pups' distress symptoms was tied to a specific maternal feature. For example, in the mother's absence, the pups became listless and inactive, but wanning the cage normalized activity; the pups' heart rate returned to normal when their stomachs were filled with mothers milk; by imitating mother's grooming behavior with rhythmic stroking, sleep disturbances were corrected. The major discovery was that each maternal feature alleviated a single distress svmptom while having no effect on the others.

Hofer (1984, 1987) interpreted the findings as evidence that specific features of the mother regulate the pups' physiological systems. In his view, the reason pups showed the constellation of symptoms that in human young is called despair is not because they had adaptively ceased protesting the separation but rather because, in the mother's absence, all of these “hidden” regulators were also absent. The fact that extended separations cause behavioral and physiological disorganization is widely accepted as evidence that an attachment exists. The flip side, according to Hofer (1984), is that attachment is what keeps these systems organized and regulated. The superficial (behavioral) symptoms of protest and despair in rats are virtually identical to the symptoms observed in human infants and children separated from attachment figures. This research raises the intriguing possibility that the underlying physiology is also similar, and that physiological co-regulation may be an inherent feature of attachment.

Attachment Hierarchies in Infancy and Childhood

In theory, infants and children form multiple attachments but attachment figures differ systematically in their importance. Specifically, attachment relationships are thought to be organized hierarchically such that individuals have one preferred or primary attachment figure on whom they principally rely for meeting attachment needs and then several secondary attachment figures. Our knowledge of infant and child attachment hierarchies has not advanced much since the early work by Ainsworth in Uganda and Schaffer and Emerson in Scotland (discussed in Bowlby, 1969/1982). The majority of infants that they studied had formed at least one secondary attachment by 18 months and several had established five or more. These secondary attachment figures included fathers, grandmothers, siblings, other adults, and older children.

In a recent study, Bennett (2003) investigated attachment formation in infants adopted by lesbian couples. She found that while all became attached to both mothers, within 18 months following adoption the majority had developed a primary attachment to one. Neither time spent with the child nor legal status vis-à-vis the child was related to the development of a primary bond. Rather it was the mother who provided the more sensitive care who became the primary attachment figure.

The Transition to Adulthood

Although his writings focused mainly on infancy and childhood, Bowlby (1979)...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Section I: Introductory Issues
• Section II: Types of Relationships
• Section III: Relationship Processes
• Author Index
• Subject Index