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Attachment
Published in Mary Nolan, Shona Gore, Contemporary Issues in Perinatal Education, 2023
Attachment theory has its own vocabulary derived from a number of seminal studies; this is no more than a coded communication of expertise, although to begin with it may be a bit off-putting. Following the creation by Ainsworth and colleagues (1978) of a laboratory method for differentiating distinct patterns of attachment, called the Strange Situation Procedure, attachment behaviour was initially split into three observable patterns. The Strange Situation is a graded series of separations and reunions between caregiver (usually the mother) and toddler with the occasional presence and departure of a stranger. This standardised paradigm demonstrates within a comparatively short period of time how small children expect and accept comfort as well as their preferred strategy for regulating their own emotions, with or without the help of their caregiver, when under mild stress. The majority of children (about 65%) demonstrate secure attachment, to be contrasted with anxious-avoidant, anxious-resistant (or ambivalent) and, a later conceptualisation, disorganised patterns of attachment. All children need access to someone more competent, and they automatically adapt to the quality of care available. The Strange Situation reveals a child’s particular stratagem, not a quantified score, and each attachment pattern is fit for purpose. These are descriptions not diagnoses or value-judgements.
Postpartum Psychosis, Bipolar Disorders, and Mother-Baby Unit
Published in Rosa Maria Quatraro, Pietro Grussu, Handbook of Perinatal Clinical Psychology, 2020
Florence Gressier, Ingrid Lacaze de Cordova, Elisabeth Glatigny, Nine M.-C. Glangeaud-Freudenthal, Anne-Laure Sutter-Dallay
One of the specificities of mother-baby units is a joint management of each member of the dyad and also of mother-child interaction. Frequently observed interaction disorders question the mother attachment type. This attachment can be more or less explored in detail depending on available tools for the psychologist. The most comprehensive assessment is the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) (Main, 1985), which is a semi-structured interview on the type of relationships an adult had with her/her own parents during childhood. This interview aims to estimate the influence of past relationship on present ones, as well as kind of attachment, especially as a mother to her child. This knowledge of the maternal attachment functioning may help for a better therapeutic care and for the choice of psychotherapeutical treatment. It may be interesting to understand the attachment process also for very young children, using the strange situation interview (Ainsworth et al., 1978) designed to evaluate the process of attachment and exploratory behavior of a child put in an unfamiliar and stressful context. Even though assessments of maternal and child attachment are not systematic, they are specific tools efficient for learning more about the dyadic functioning.
Major Schools of Psychology
Published in Mohamed Ahmed Abd El-Hay, Understanding Psychology for Medicine and Nursing, 2019
During the 1970s, psychologist Mary Ainsworth further expanded upon Bowlby’s work in her famous “Strange Situation” study. The study involved observing children between the ages of 12–18 months responding to a situation in which they were briefly left alone and then reunited with their mother. The child is observed playing for 20 minutes while caregivers and strangers enter and leave the room. Based on these observations, Ainsworth concluded that there are three major styles of attachment: (1) secure attachment; (2) ambivalent-insecure attachment; and (3) avoidant-insecure attachment (Ainsworth, 1964; Ainsworth, Bell, & Stayton, 1971; Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978). Main and Solomon (1986) added a fourth attachment style known as disorganized-insecure attachment. Numerous studies have supported Ainsworth’s conclusions and additional research has revealed that these early attachment styles can help predict behaviors later in life. The following summarizes characteristics of these attachment styles:
Shame and the Developmental Antecedents of Enduring, Self-Critical Mental States: A Discussion and Some Speculations
Published in Psychiatry, 2020
Objectification of a woman’s body is associated with shame experience and is also highly correlated with objectification in eating disorders (Moradi, Dirks, & Matteson, 2005). Thus, for women, there is a built-in priming of culturally driven objectification even without overt additional efforts to shame. Moreover, all of the patterns of insecure attachment in the infant attachment paradigm (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978; Bowlby, 1958; Main, 1995) are shame based. The anxious–ambivalent child has a parent who prefers their own preoccupations to the infant; the avoidant child has a parent who shames the child’s emotional expression to the point where the child will not display emotional interest in the return of the parent in the strange situation; and the disoriented/disorganized child has a parent who overwhelms the child’s ability to correctly ascertain whether the frightened or frightening version of the parent will show up as these parental versions alternate, as if outside the control of the parent. The child always is at risk of getting it wrong. In the strange situation of Ainsworth, above, freezes, collapses, moves toward the technician, squats and rocks, or does other stereotypical behaviors as they fail to meet their parents' needs or understand their parents signals and get it wrong once again (Main & Morgan, 1996). Infant attachment is an emergency procedure provoked by fear in the infant (Slade, 2014) who seeks shelter with a parent and learns to accommodate to the parent’s emotional proclivities. Only secure infants escape a baseline of being shamed by their parent.
Alcoholics Anonymous: A Vehicle for Achieving Capacity for Secure Attachment Relationships and Adaptive Affect Regulation
Published in Journal of Social Work Practice in the Addictions, 2019
A cross-cultural study in Uganda by Mary Ainsworth (1967) focusing on children and their maternal caregivers was the first formal research into attachment security. This study marked the beginning of attachment research in terms of the quality of attachment. In subsequent attachment research using the often- replicated research paradigm of the ‘Strange Situation’ conducted by Ainsworth, Biehar, Waters, and Wall (1978) the categories of Secure (B), Insecure-Avoidant (A), and Insecure-Resistant (C) were formulated. Later a fourth category of Disorganized-Disoriented (D) was added when Main and Solomon (1986) discovered conflicting and or/fearful behavior that had previously been noted as unclassifiable in the Strange Situation observations of some toddlers reuniting with their mothers. This research and that of other attachment theorists and researchers (Beebe & Lachman, 1988, 2002; Bowlby, 1969/1982; Shore, 2003; Slade, 2002; Stern, 1985) gives scientific credibility to the importance of the bond between children and their caregivers.
Attachment Theory’s Universality Hypothesis: Clinical Implications for Culturally Responsive Assessment
Published in Smith College Studies in Social Work, 2018
The second sub-hypothesis within the claim of universality has been called the normativity hypothesis, which broadly states that beyond the assertion that attachment is a system common to all humans, secure attachment is the most widespread form of this behavior (Zreik, Oppenheim, & Sagi, 2017). This claim is somewhat harder to support because it takes the position that the manifestation of secure attachment behavior as understood in a Western context is common across cultures. Evidence drawn from both strange situation research (Van IJzendoorn & Kroonenberg, 1988) as well as research using the q-set (Posada, Carbonell, Alzate, & Plata, 2004; Posada et al., 1995) does indicate that, cross-culturally, secure attachment is the most common form of attachment. Moreover, specific attachment studies from a vast array of countries and cultures indicate that, when tested for attachment type, most children fall into the securely attached category (Van IJzendoorn & Sagi, 2008; Zreik et al., 2017).