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What Is Attachment Theory?

The Importance of Early Emotional Bonds

Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

• Attachment Theory
• Stages of Attachment

Attachment Styles

Attachment theory focuses on relationships and bonds (particularly long-term) between people, including those between a parent and child and between romantic partners. It is a psychological explanation for the emotional bonds and relationships between people.

This theory suggests that people are born with a need to forge bonds with caregivers as children. These early bonds may continue to have an influence on attachments throughout life.

History of the Attachment Theory

British psychologist John Bowlby was the first attachment theorist. He described attachment as a "lasting psychological connectedness between human beings." Bowlby was interested in understanding the anxiety and distress that children experience when separated from their primary caregivers.

Thinkers like Freud suggested that infants become attached to the source of pleasure. Infants, who are in the oral stage of development, become attached to their mothers because she fulfills their oral needs.

Some of the earliest behavioral theories suggested that attachment was simply a learned behavior. These theories proposed that attachment was merely the result of the feeding relationship between the child and the caregiver. Because the caregiver feeds the child and provides nourishment, the child becomes attached.

Bowlby observed that feedings did not diminish separation anxiety. Instead, he found that attachment was characterized by clear behavioral and motivation patterns. When children are frightened, they seek proximity from their primary caregiver in order to receive both comfort and care.

Understanding Attachment

Attachment is an emotional bond with another person. Bowlby believed that the earliest bonds formed by children with their caregivers have a tremendous impact that continues throughout life. He suggested that attachment also serves to keep the infant close to the mother, thus improving the child's chances of survival.

Bowlby viewed attachment as a product of evolutionary processes. While the behavioral theories of attachment suggested that attachment was a learned process, Bowlby and others proposed that children are born with an innate drive to form attachments with caregivers.

Throughout history, children who maintained proximity to an attachment figure were more likely to receive comfort and protection, and therefore more likely to survive to adulthood. Through the process of natural selection, a motivational system designed to regulate attachment emerged.

The central theme of attachment theory is that primary caregivers who are available and responsive to an infant's needs allow the child to develop a sense of security. The infant learns that the caregiver is dependable, which creates a secure base for the child to then explore the world.

So what determines successful attachment? Behaviorists suggest that it was food that led to forming this attachment behavior, but Bowlby and others demonstrated that nurturance and responsiveness were the primary determinants of attachment.

Ainsworth's "Strange Situation"

In her research in the 1970s, psychologist Mary Ainsworth expanded greatly upon Bowlby's original work. Her groundbreaking "strange situation" study  revealed the profound effects of attachment on behavior. In the study, researchers observed children between the ages of 12 and 18 months as they responded to a situation in which they were briefly left alone and then reunited with their mothers.

Based on the responses the researchers observed, Ainsworth described three major styles of attachment: secure attachment, ambivalent-insecure attachment, and avoidant-insecure attachment. Later, researchers Main and Solomon (1986) added a fourth attachment style called disorganized-insecure attachment based on their own research.

A number of studies since that time have supported Ainsworth's attachment styles and have indicated that attachment styles also have an impact on behaviors later in life.

Maternal Deprivation Studies

Harry Harlow's infamous studies on maternal deprivation and social isolation during the 1950s and 1960s also explored early bonds. In a series of experiments, Harlow demonstrated how such bonds emerge and the powerful impact they have on behavior and functioning.  

In one version of his experiment, newborn rhesus monkeys were separated from their birth mothers and reared by surrogate mothers. The infant monkeys were placed in cages with two wire-monkey mothers. One of the wire monkeys held a bottle from which the infant monkey could obtain nourishment, while the other wire monkey was covered with a soft terry cloth.

While the infant monkeys would go to the wire mother to obtain food, they spent most of their days with the soft cloth mother. When frightened, the baby monkeys would turn to their cloth-covered mother for comfort and security.

Harlow's work also demonstrated that early attachments were the result of receiving comfort and care from a caregiver rather than simply the result of being fed.

The Stages of Attachment

Researchers Rudolph Schaffer and Peggy Emerson analyzed the number of attachment relationships that infants form in a longitudinal study with 60 infants. The infants were observed every four weeks during the first year of life, and then once again at 18 months.

Based on their observations, Schaffer and Emerson outlined four distinct phases of attachment, including:

Pre-Attachment Stage

From birth to 3 months, infants do not show any particular attachment to a specific caregiver. The infant's signals, such as crying and fussing, naturally attract the attention of the caregiver and the baby's positive responses encourage the caregiver to remain close.

Indiscriminate Attachment

Between 6 weeks of age to 7 months, infants begin to show preferences for primary and secondary caregivers. Infants develop trust that the caregiver will respond to their needs. While they still accept care from others, infants start distinguishing between familiar and unfamiliar people, responding more positively to the primary caregiver.

Discriminate Attachment

At this point, from about 7 to 11 months of age, infants show a strong attachment and preference for one specific individual. They will protest when separated from the primary attachment figure (separation anxiety), and begin to display anxiety around strangers (stranger anxiety).

Multiple Attachments

After approximately 9 months of age, children begin to form strong emotional bonds with other caregivers beyond the primary attachment figure. This often includes a second parent, older siblings, and grandparents.

Factors That Influence Attachment

While this process may seem straightforward, there are some factors that can influence how and when attachments develop, including:

• Opportunity for attachment : Children who do not have a primary care figure, such as those raised in orphanages, may fail to develop the sense of trust needed to form an attachment.
• Quality caregiving : When caregivers respond quickly and consistently, children learn that they can depend on the people who are responsible for their care, which is the essential foundation for attachment. This is a vital factor.

There are four patterns of attachment, including:

• Ambivalent attachment : These children become very distressed when a parent leaves. Ambivalent attachment style is considered uncommon, affecting an estimated 7% to 15% of U.S. children. As a result of poor parental availability, these children cannot depend on their primary caregiver to be there when they need them.
• Avoidant attachment :   Children with an avoidant attachment tend to avoid parents or caregivers, showing no preference between a caregiver and a complete stranger. This attachment style might be a result of abusive or neglectful caregivers. Children who are punished for relying on a caregiver will learn to avoid seeking help in the future.
• Disorganized attachment : These children display a confusing mix of behavior, seeming disoriented, dazed, or confused. They may avoid or resist the parent. Lack of a clear attachment pattern is likely linked to inconsistent caregiver behavior. In such cases, parents may serve as both a source of comfort and fear, leading to disorganized behavior.
• Secure attachment : Children who can depend on their caregivers show distress when separated and joy when reunited. Although the child may be upset, they feel assured that the caregiver will return. When frightened, securely attached children are comfortable seeking reassurance from caregivers. This is the most common attachment style.

The Lasting Impact of Early Attachment

Children who are securely attached as infants tend to develop stronger self-esteem and better self-reliance as they grow older. These children also tend to be more independent, perform better in school, have successful social relationships, and experience less depression and anxiety.

Research suggests that failure to form secure attachments early in life can have a negative impact on behavior in later childhood and throughout life.

Children diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), conduct disorder (CD), or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) frequently display attachment problems, possibly due to early abuse, neglect, or trauma. Children adopted after the age of 6 months may have a higher risk of attachment problems.

Attachment Disorders

In some cases, children may also develop attachment disorders. There are two attachment disorders that may occur: reactive attachment disorder (RAD) and disinhibited social engagement disorder (DSED).

• Reactive attachment disorder occurs when children do not form healthy bonds with caregivers. This is often the result of early childhood neglect or abuse and results in problems with emotional management and patterns of withdrawal from caregivers.
• Disinhibited social engagement disorder affects a child's ability to form bonds with others and often results from trauma, abandonment, abuse, or neglect. It is characterized by a lack of inhibition around strangers, often leading to excessively familiar behaviors around people they don't know and a lack of social boundaries.

Adult Attachments

Although attachment styles displayed in adulthood are not necessarily the same as those seen in infancy, early attachments can have a serious impact on later relationships. Adults who were securely attached in childhood tend to have good self-esteem, strong romantic relationships, and the ability to self-disclose to others.

A Word From Verywell

Our understanding of attachment theory is heavily influenced by the early work of researchers such as John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth. Today, researchers recognize that the early relationships children have with their caregivers play a critical role in healthy development. 

Such bonds can also have an influence on romantic relationships in adulthood. Understanding your attachment style may help you look for ways to become more secure in your relationships.

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Ainsworth MD, Bell SM. Attachment, exploration, and separation: Illustrated by the behavior of one-year-olds in a strange situation . Child Dev . 1970;41(1):49-67. doi:10.2307/1127388

Main M, Solomon J. Discovery of a new, insecure-disorganized/disoriented attachment pattern. In: Brazelton TB, Yogman M, eds., Affective Development in Infancy. Ablex.

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By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

What is Attachment Theory? Bowlby’s 4 Stages Explained

No matter what the “it” refers to, Sigmund Freud would have probably said yes to that question.

However, we now know a lot more about psychology, parenting, and human relationships than Freud did.

It’s clear now that not every issue can be traced back to one’s mother. After all, there is another person involved in the raising (or at least the creation) of a child.

In addition, there are many other important people in a child’s life who influence him or her. There are siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles, godparents, close family friends, nannies, daycare workers, teachers, peers, and others who interact with a child on a regular basis.

The question posed above is tongue-in-cheek, but it touches upon an important discussion in psychology—what influences children to turn out the way they do? What affects their ability to form meaningful, satisfying relationships with those around them?

What factors contribute to their experiences of anxiety, avoidance, and fulfillment when it comes to relationships?

Although psychologists can pretty conclusively say that it’s not entirely the mother’s fault or even the fault of both parents, we know that a child’s early experiences with their parents have a profound impact on their relationship skills as adults.

Much of the knowledge we have on this subject today comes from a concept developed in the 1950s called attachment theory . This theory will be the focus of this article: We’ll explore what it is, how it describes and explains behavior, and what its applications are in the real world.

Before you continue, we thought you might like to download our three Positive Relationships Exercises for free . These detailed, science-based exercises will help you or your clients build healthy, life-enriching relationships.

This Article Contains:

What is attachment theory a definition, research and studies, erik erikson, attachment theory in babies, infants, and early childhood development, attachment theory in adults: close relationships, parenting, love, and divorce, attachment theory in grief and trauma, the attachment theory test, using attachment theory in the classroom (worksheet and pdf), attachment theory in social work, criticisms of attachment theory, recommended books, articles, and essays, a take-home message.

The psychological theory of attachment was first described by John Bowlby, a psychoanalyst who researched the effects of separation between infants and their parents (Fraley, 2010).

Bowlby hypothesized that the extreme behaviors infants engage in to avoid separation from a parent or when reconnecting with a physically separated parent—like crying, screaming, and clinging—were evolutionary mechanisms. Bowlby thought these behaviors had possibly been reinforced through natural selection and enhanced the child’s chances of survival.

These attachment behaviors are instinctive responses to the perceived threat of losing the survival advantages that accompany being cared for and attended to by the primary caregiver(s). Since the infants who engaged in these behaviors were more likely to survive, the instincts were naturally selected and reinforced over generations.

These behaviors make up what Bowlby termed an “attachment behavioral system,” the system that guides us in our patterns and habits of forming and maintaining relationships (Fraley, 2010).

Research on Bowlby’s theory of attachment showed that infants placed in an unfamiliar situation and separated from their parents will generally react in one of these ways upon reunion with the parents:

• Secure attachment: These infants showed distress upon separation but sought comfort and were easily comforted when the parents returned;
• Anxious-resistant attachment: A smaller portion of infants experienced greater levels of distress and, upon reuniting with the parents, seemed both to seek comfort and to attempt to “punish” the parents for leaving.
• Avoidant attachment: Infants in the third category showed no stress or minimal stress upon separation from the parents and either ignored the parents upon reuniting or actively avoided the parents (Fraley, 2010).
• In later years, researchers added a fourth attachment style to this list: the disorganized-disoriented attachment style, which refers to children who have no predictable pattern of attachment behaviors (Kennedy & Kennedy, 2004).

It makes intuitive sense that a child’s attachment style is largely a function of the caregiving the child receives in his or her early years. Those who received support and love from their caregivers are likely to be secure, while those who experienced inconsistency or negligence from their caregivers are likely to feel more anxiety surrounding their relationship with their parents.

However, attachment theory takes it one step further, applying what we know about attachment in children to relationships we engage in as adults. These relationships (particularly intimate and/or romantic relationships) are also directly related to our attachment styles as children and the care we received from our primary caregivers (Firestone, 2013).

The development of this theory gives us an interesting look into the study of child development.

Bowlby and Ainsworth: The History and Psychology of Attachment Theory

Bowlby’s interest in child development traces back to his first experiences out of college, in which he volunteered at a school for maladjusted children. According to Bowlby, two children sparked his curiosity and drive that laid the foundations of attachment theory.

There was an isolated and distant teenager who had no stable mother figure in his life and had recently been expelled from his school for stealing, and an anxious 7- or 8-year-old boy who followed Bowlby wherever he went, earning himself a reputation as Bowlby’s “shadow” (Bretherton, 1992).

Through his work with children, Bowlby developed a strong belief in the impact of family experiences on children’s emotional and behavioral wellbeing .

Early on in his career, Bowlby proposed that psychoanalysts working with children should take a holistic perspective, considering children’s living environments, families, and other experiences in addition to any behaviors exhibited by the children themselves.

This idea grew into a strategy of helping children by helping their parents, a generally effective strategy given the importance of the child’s relationships with their parents (or other caregivers).

At roughly the same time Bowlby was creating the foundations for his theory on attachment, Mary Ainsworth was finishing her graduate degree and studying security theory, which proposed that children need to develop a secure dependence on their parents before venturing out into unfamiliar situations.

In 1950, the two crossed paths when Ainsworth took a position in Bowlby’s research unit at the Tavistock Clinic in London. Her initial responsibilities included analyzing records of children’s behavior, which inspired her to conduct her own studies on children in their natural settings.

Through several papers, numerous research studies, and theories that were discarded, altered, or combined, Bowlby and Ainsworth developed and provided evidence for attachment theory.

Theirs was a more rigorous explanation and description of attachment behavior than any others on the topic at the time, including those that had grown out of Freud’s work and those that were developed in direct opposition to Freud’s ideas (Bretherton, 1992).

There were several groundbreaking studies that contributed to the development of attachment theory or provided evidence for its validity, including the study described earlier in which infants were separated from their primary caregivers and their behavior was observed to fall into a “style” of attachment.

Further findings on emotional attachment came from a surprising place: rhesus monkeys.

The Harlow Experiments

His work showed that motherly love was emotional rather than physiological, that the capacity for attachment is heavily dependent upon experiences in early childhood, and that this capacity was unlikely to change much after it was “set” (Herman, 2012).

Harlow discovered these interesting findings by conducting two groundbreaking experiments.

In the first experiment, Harlow separated infant monkeys from their mothers a few hours after birth. Each monkey was instead raised by two inanimate surrogate “mothers.” Both provided the infant monkeys with the milk they needed to survive, but one was made out of wire mesh while the other was wire mesh covered with soft terry cloth.

The monkeys who were given the freedom to choose which mother to associate with almost always chose to take milk from the terry cloth “mother.” This finding showed that infant attachment is not simply a matter of where they get their milk—other factors are at play.

For his second experiment, Harlow modified his original setup. The monkeys were given either the bare wire mesh surrogate mother or the terry cloth mother, both of which provided the milk the monkeys needed to grow.

Both groups of monkeys survived and thrived physically, but they displayed extremely different behavioral tendencies. Those with a terry cloth mother returned to the surrogate when presented with strange, loud objects, while those with a wire mesh mother would throw themselves to the floor, clutch themselves, rock back and forth, or even “scream in terror.”

This provided a clear indication that emotional attachment in infancy, gained through cuddling, affected the monkey’s later responses to stress and emotion regulation (Herman, 2012).

These two experiments laid the foundations for further work on attachment in children and the impacts of attachment experiences in later life.

Erikson’s work was based on Freud’s original personality theories and drew from his idea of the ego. However, Erikson placed more importance on context from culture and society than on Freud’s focus on the conflict between the id and the superego.

In addition, his stages of development are based on how children socialize and how it affects their sense of self rather than on sexual development.

The eight stages of psychosocial development according to Erikson are:

• Infancy—Trust vs. Mistrust : In this stage, infants require a great deal of attention and comfort from their parents, leading them to develop their first sense of trust (or, in some cases, mistrust);
• Early Childhood—Autonomy vs. Shame and Doubt : Toddlers and very young children are beginning to assert their independence and develop their unique personality, making tantrums and defiance common;
• Preschool Years—Initiative vs. Guilt : Children at this stage begin learning about social roles and norms. Their imagination will take off at this point, and the defiance and tantrums of the previous stage will likely continue. The way trusted adults interact with the child will encourage him or her to act independently or to develop a sense of guilt about any inappropriate actions;
• School Age—Industry (Competence) vs. Inferiority : At this stage, the child is building important relationships with peers and is likely beginning to feel the pressure of academic performance. Mental health issues may begin at this stage, including depression, anxiety, ADHD, and other problems.
• Adolescence—Identity vs. Role Confusion : The adolescent is reaching new heights of independence and is beginning to experiment and put together his or her identity. Problems with communication and sudden emotional and physical changes are common at this stage (Wells, Sueskind, & Alcamo, 2017).
• Young Adulthood—Intimacy vs. Isolation : At this stage (ages 18-40, approximately), the individual will begin sharing with others more, including people outside o the family. If the individual is successful in this stage of development, he or she will build satisfying relationships that have a sense of commitment, safety, and care; if not, they may fear commitment and experience isolation, loneliness, and depression (McLeod, 2017).
• Middle Adulthood—Generativity vs. Stagnation : In the penultimate stage (ages 40-65, approximately), the individual is likely established in his or her career, relationship, and family. If the individual is not established and contributing to society, he or she may feel stagnant and unproductive.
• Late Adulthood—Ego Integrity vs. Despair : Finally, late adulthood (ages 65 and above) usually brings reduced productivity, which can either be embraced as a reward for one’s contributions or be met with guilt or dissatisfaction. Successfully navigating this stage will protect the individual from feeling depressed or hopeless, and help the individual cultivate wisdom (McLeod, 2017).

Although it does not map completely onto attachment theory, Erikson’s findings are clearly related to the attachment styles and behaviors Bowlby, Ainsworth, and Harlow identified.

John Bowlby – Attachment Theory – Diana Simon Psihoterapeut

According to Bowlby and Ainsworth, attachments with the primary caregiver develop during the first 18 months or so of the child’s life, starting with instinctual behaviors like crying and clinging (Kennedy & Kennedy, 2004). These behaviors are quickly directed at one or a few caregivers in particular, and by 7 or 8 months old, children usually start protesting against the caregiver(s) leaving and grieve for their absence.

Once children reach the toddler stage, they begin forming an internal working model of their attachment relationships. This internal working model provides the framework for the child’s beliefs about their own self-worth and how much they can depend on others to meet their needs.

In Bowlby and Ainsworth’s view, the attachment styles that children form based on their early interactions with caregivers form a continuum of emotion regulation, with anxious-avoidant attachment at one end and anxious-resistant at the other.

Secure attachment falls at the midpoint of this spectrum, between overly organized strategies for controlling and minimizing emotions and the uncontrolled, disorganized, and ineffectively managed emotions.

The most recently added classification, disorganized-disoriented, may display strategies and behaviors from all across the spectrum, but generally, they are not effective in controlling their emotions and may have outbursts of anger or aggression (Kennedy & Kennedy, 2004).

Research has shown that there are many behaviors in addition to emotion regulation that relates to a child’s attachment style. Among other findings, there is evidence of the following connections:

• Secure Attachment: These children are generally more likely to see others as supportive and helpful and themselves as competent and worthy of respect. They relate positively to others and display resilience, engage in complex play and are more successful in the classroom and in interactions with other children. They are better at taking the perspectives of others and have more trust in others;
• Anxious-Avoidant Attachment : Children with an anxious-avoidant attachment style are generally less effective in managing stressful situations. They are likely to withdraw and resist seeking help, which inhibits them from forming satisfying relationships with others . They show more aggression and antisocial behavior, like lying and bullying, and they tend to distance themselves from others to reduce emotional stress;
• Anxious-Resistant Attachment : These children are on the opposite end of the spectrum from anxious-avoidant children. They likely lack self-confidence and stick close to their primary caregivers. They may display exaggerated emotional reactions and keep their distance from their peers, leading to social isolation.
• Disorganized Attachment : Children with a disorganized attachment style usually fail to develop an organized strategy for coping with separation distress, and tend to display aggression, disruptive behaviors, and social isolation. They are more likely to see others as threats than sources of support, and thus may switch between social withdrawal and defensively aggressive behavior (Kennedy & Kennedy, 2004).

It is easy to see from these descriptions of behaviors and emotion regulation how attachment style in childhood can lead to relationship problems in adulthood.

Attachment styles are primarily discussed in the context of our childhood and upbringing.

In the early stages of development, children develop different attachment patterns to their parents or caregiver. These attachment styles can be predictive of how children grow up. For example, anxious or avoidant attachment styles are often powerful predictors for psychopathology or maladjustment development in the later stages of life (Benoit, 2004).

On the contrary, children with secure attachment styles to their parents are also more likely to have secure attachments to their romantic partners. This being said, attachment styles from childhood play a significant role in all the relationships you will encounter.

From this image, you may notice that the secure attachment style is the only one with a “positive” connotation, whereas the other attachment styles seem to have more unfavorable consequences.

If you recognize yourself as displaying one of the more maladaptive attachment styles, don’t fret because this is 1. very common and 2. not set in stone. For example, if you identify with the fearful-avoidant attachment style, you may see that trust seems to be the biggest issue.

The purpose of this image is not to make you feel ashamed about having a particular attachment style, but the opposite. By accepting and embracing your weaknesses, you allow yourself to grow.

Indeed, it is clear how these attachment styles in childhood lead to attachment types in adulthood. Below is an explanation of the four attachment types in adult relationships.

Examples: The Types, Styles, and Stages (Secure, Avoidant, Ambivalent, and Disorganized)

The adult attachment styles follow the same general pattern described above (Firestone, 2013):

Secure Attachment

These adults are more likely to be satisfied with their relationships, feeling secure and connected to their partners without feeling the need to be together all the time. Their relationships are likely to feature honesty , support, independence, and deep emotional connections.

Dismissive-Avoidant (or Anxious-Avoidant) Attachment

One of the two types of adult avoidant attachments, people with this attachment style generally keep their distance from others. They may feel that they don’t need human connection to survive or thrive, and insist on maintaining their independence and isolation from others.

These individuals are often able to “shut down” emotionally when a potentially hurtful scenario arises, such as a serious argument with their partner or a threat to the continuance of their relationship.

Anxious-Preoccupied (or Anxious-Resistant) Attachment

Those who form less secure bonds with their partners may feel desperate for love or affection and feel that their partner must “complete” them or fix their problems.

While they long for safety and security in their romantic relationships, they may also be acting in ways that push their partner away rather than invite them in. The behavioral manifestations of their fears can include being clingy, demanding, jealous, or easily upset by small issues.

Fearful-Avoidant (or Disorganized) Attachment:

The second type of adult avoidant attachment manifests as ambivalence rather than isolation. People with this attachment style generally try to avoid their feelings because it is easy to get overwhelmed by them. They may suffer from unpredictable or abrupt mood swings and fear getting hurt by a romantic partner.

These individuals are simultaneously drawn to a partner or potential partner and fearful of getting to close. Unsurprisingly, this style makes it difficult to form and maintain meaningful, healthy relationships with others.

Each of these styles should be thought of as a continuum of attachment behaviors, rather than a specific “type” of person. Someone with a generally secure attachment style may on occasion display behaviors more suited to the other types, or someone with a dismissive-avoidant style may form a secure bond with a particular person.

Therefore, these “types” should be considered a way to describe and understand an individual’s behavior rather than an exact description of someone’s personality.

Based on a person’s attachment style, the way he or she approaches intimate relationships, marriage, and parenting can vary widely.

The number of ways in which this theory can be applied or used to explain behavior is compounded and expanded by the fact that relationships require two (or more) people; any attachment behaviors that an individual displays will impact and be influenced by the attachment behaviors of other people.

Given the huge variety of individuals, behaviors, and relationships, it is not surprising that there is so much conflict and confusion.

It is also not surprising, although no less unfortunate, that many relationships end up in divorce or dissolution, an event that may continue an unhealthy cycle of attachment in the children of these unions.

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Speaking of unfortunate situations, attachment theory also has applications in the understanding of the  grief and trauma associated with loss.

Although you may be most familiar with Kübler-Ross’s Five Stages of Grief, they were preceded by Bowlby’s Four Stages. During Bowlby’s work on attachment, he and his colleague Colin Murray Parkes noticed four stages of grief:

• Shock and Numbness: In this initial phase, the bereaved may feel that the loss is not real, or that it is simply impossible to accept. He or she may experience physical distress and will be unable to understand and communicate his or her emotions.
• Yearning and Searching: In this phase, the bereaved is very aware of the void in his or her life and may try to fill that void with something or someone else. He or she still identifies strongly and may be preoccupied with the deceased.
• Despair and Disorganization: The bereaved now accepts that things have changed and cannot go back to the way they were before. He or she may also experience despair, hopelessness, and anger, as well as questioning and an intense focus on making sense of the situation. He or she might withdraw from others in this phase.
• Reorganization and Recovery: In the final phase, the bereaved person’s faith in life may start to come back. He or she will start to rebuild and establish new goals, new patterns, and new habits in life. The bereaved will begin to trust again, and grief will recede to the back of his or her mind instead of staying front and center (Williams & Haley, 2017).

Of course, one’s attachment style will influence how grief is experienced as well. For example, someone who is secure may move through the stages fairly quickly or skip some altogether, while someone who is anxious or avoidant may get stuck on one of the stages.

We all experience grief differently, but viewing these experiences through the lens of attachment theory can bring new perspective and insight into our unique grieving processes and why some of us get “stuck” after a loss.

If you’re interested in learning about your attachment style, there are many tests, scales, and questionnaires out available for you to take.

Feeny, Noller, and Hanrahan developed the Original Attachment Three-Category Measure in 1987 to test respondents’ adult attachment style. It contains only three items and is very simple, but it can still give you a good idea of which category you fall into: avoidant, anxious/ambivalent, or secure. You can complete the measure yourself or read more about it on page 3 of  this PDF .

Bartholomew and Horowitz’s Relationships Questionnaire added to The Three-Category Measure by expanding it to include the dismissive-avoidant category. You can find it on the same PDF as the Three-Category Measure, starting on page 3.

Fraley, Waller, and Brennan’s Experiences in Close Relationships Questionnaire-Revised (ECR-R) is a 32-item questionnaire that gives results measured by two subscales related to attachment: avoidance and anxiety (Fraley, Waller, & Brennan, 2000). Items are rated on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). You can find this questionnaire on the final three pages of the PDF mentioned above.

In addition to these scales, there are several less rigorous attachment style tests that can help you learn about your own style of connecting with others. These aren’t instruments often used in empirical research, but they can be helpful tools for learning more about yourself and your attachment style.

Diane Poole Heller developed an Attachment Styles Test, which contains 45 items rated on a three-point scale from “Rarely/Never” to “Usually/Often.” You can find it here , although after completing it you must enter an email to receive your results.

The Relationship Attachment Style Test is a 50-item test hosted on Psychology Today’s website. It covers the four attachment types noted earlier (Secure, Anxious-Ambivalent, Dismissive-Avoidant, Fearful-Avoidant) as well as Dependent and Codependent attachment styles .

If you are interested in taking this test, you can find it at this link . However, be aware that while you receive a free “snapshot report” at the end, you will need to pay to see your full results.

One of the ways in which the principles and concepts of attachment theory have been effectively applied to teaching is the practice of emotion coaching.

Emotion coaching is about helping children to become aware of their emotions and to manage their own feelings particularly during instances of ‘misbehavior.’ It enables practitioners to create an ethos of positive learning behavior and to have the confidence to de-escalate situations when behavior is challenging” (National College for Teaching and Leadership, 2014).

Emotion coaching is more about supporting children in learning about and regulating their own emotions and behavior than it is about “coaching” in the traditional sense. In emotion coaching, teachers are not required—or even encouraged—to promote proper behavior through rewards or punishments.

Instead, emotion coaching involves:

• Teaching students about the world of “in the moment” emotion;
• Showing students strategies for dealing with emotional ups and downs;
• Empathizing with and accepting negative or unpleasant emotions as normal, but not accepting negative behavior;
• Using moments of challenging behavior as opportunities for teaching;
• Building trusting and respectful relationships with the students (National College for Teaching and Leadership, 2014).

According to attachment theory expert Dr. John Gottman, there are five steps to emotion coaching, and they can be practiced by parents, teachers, or any significant adult in a child’s life:

• Tune in: Notice or become aware of your own and the child’s emotions. Make sure you are calm enough to practice emotion coaching, otherwise, you might want to give both of you a quick breather;
• Connect: Use this situation as an opportunity for you to practice and for the child to learn. State objectively (This is important!) what emotions you think the child is experiencing to help them connect their emotions to their behavior;
• Accept and Listen: Practice empathy. Put yourself in the child’s shoes, think about a situation when you felt a similar emotion, and try to remember what it felt like;
• Reflect: Once everyone is calm, go back over what the child said or did, mentioning only what you saw, heard, or understand of the situation. Reflect on what happened and why it happened;
• End with Problem Solving/Choices/Setting Limits: Whenever possible, try to end the situation by guiding or involving the child in problem-solving (Somerset Children & Young People, n.d.).

To learn more about emotion coaching and improve your skills as a parent or teacher, try the following activity.

What Would an Emotion Coach Do?

This short, two-page activity from the Somerset Emotion Coaching Project can help you enhance your understanding of what emotion coaching is—and what it is not.

There are five scenarios presented along with six potential responses. Your task is to read the scenario and decide which response(s) is/are the appropriate emotion coaching response(s).

The first scenario is: “Angry pupil over not wanting to attend a compulsory revision session.”

Your options include:

• Get cross with the pupil for the bad behavior;
• Tell the pupil they will have to complete an extra session due to the bad behavior;
• Help the pupil to think about what they can do about the problem;
• Tell the pupil not to make a big deal about staying after school;
• Validate the pupil’s expression of anger and frustration;
• Soothe the pupil.

This is an excellent activity to do in groups, as you can discuss each option with others and hear different perspectives from your own. In addition to identifying the emotion coaching response(s), you can also discuss which options are dismissive, avoidant, etc.

You can see the rest of the scenarios and try your hand at this activity by clicking here (an automatic download will start when you click on the link).

Emotion Coaching Scripts

Another great resource from the Somerset Emotion Coaching Project, this activity gives you a chance to practice brainstorming emotion coaching-appropriate responses.

As an added bonus, you can use the scripts you develop to guide you the next time you encounter a situation like those described.

There are six scenarios which you are instructed to create a script for:

• A pupil arrives late to class. She refuses to communicate with you and says “Don’t even start, just leave me alone”;
• A young person refuses to sit by her usual friends at a youth center and says that they have been saying unkind comments about her size;
• A boy regularly fails to complete work independently and will often sit passively and contribute little. He rarely presents with disruptive behavior but simply completes very little work. He appears isolated from his peers;
• A nursery child is crying at drop-off time and is clinging to her parent who has to go to work;
• An aggressive, confrontational parent is annoyed because she’s been asked to come in and talk about her son’s behavior. She approaches you and starts the conversation by saying, “You’re always having a go at us”;
• During recess, a group of young boys was fighting and one of them was hurt (not seriously). You approach them and they all look at you with worried expressions.

For each scenario, the instructions encourage you to:

• Recognize the emotion the child is displaying;
• Validate that emotion;
• Label the emotion the child is feeling;
• Empathize with the child;
• Set limits, if appropriate, and problem-solve.

Completing this worksheet provides you with an excellent opportunity to think, plan, and prepare for effective emotion coaching. You can download this activity for your own use here (an automatic download will start when you click on the link).

If you’re interested in learning more about applying attachment theory to teaching, check out Louis Cozolino’s book Attachment-Based Teaching: Creating a Tribal Classroom . He puts forth a simple but potentially game-changing idea: Relationships are the key to better performance rather than rigidly structured curricula.

In addition, our article Attachment Styles in Therapy: Worksheets & Handouts provides useful worksheets pertaining attachment styles.

Emotion coaching can also be used by social workers, to some extent. However, the application of attachment theory to social work is more significant in the three key messages that it espouses:

• It is vital for social workers to offer children and families a safe haven and secure base. This does not mean families should be forever comfortable and come to depend on the social worker, but families should know a social worker can provide a safe place when they are struggling as well as support for moving forward and outward;
• Social workers must be aware of children’s (and their families’) inner experiences and practice mentalization , or “bringing the inside out.” One of the most important factors in finding healing and improving family relations is to ensure that parents have an idea of what is going on in their children’s heads, including how they feel and think about their parents;
• Among the most effective tools in a social worker’s toolbox is the practice of recording parents as they interact with their child and using the videos to coach the parent. Valuable insights can be found in watching oneself parenting, and the social worker can provide in the moment coaching, offering praise for the parents’ strengths alongside suggestions for improvement (Shemmings, 2015).

Of course, there are many ways to apply attachment theory to working with children, especially those who are in the midst of family crises. However, if these three points are attended to, you’ll have the most important bases covered.

For social workers who work with adults, there are some different strategies and key points to keep in mind, specifically:

• Remember that attachment theory applies throughout the entire range of life, and many behaviors and processes are shaped by early attachment, including staying safe, seeking comfort, regulating proximity to the attachment figure, and seeking predictability;
• Keep in mind that attachment patterns are not based on a few key moments, but on thousands of moments throughout early life, and how an attachment figure responds (or does not respond) sets a template for the child’s attachment style in the future. This template affects how the child recognizes and responds to their own emotions and how they interact with attachment figures;
• This early template becomes deeply embedded in the brain and therefore has a significant impact on our ability to regulate our emotions and connect and relate to others in adulthood. This can lead an adult who was abused in childhood to fail to recognize that they are being abused in their intimate relationship, or even cause them to find comfort and stability in the predictability of their situation;
• Remember that attachment behaviors are adaptive to the context in which they were formed. Habits and behaviors that are adaptive in childhood, in an evolutionary sense at least, may become maladaptive and harmful in adulthood;
• Finally, social workers should never think that they are “treating” a set of behaviors and must recognize that the individual’s strategies were formed for a reason and likely helped him or her survive a difficult situation in childhood. The role of a social worker is to help clients avoid overapplying those strategies and to guide them in adding effective, new strategies to their toolboxes (Hardy, 2016).

As with any popular theory in psychology, there are several criticisms that have been raised against it.

Chief among them are the following criticisms:

• Overemphasis on Nurture: This criticism stems from psychologist J. R. Harris, who believes that parents do not have as much of an influence over their child’s personality or character as most people believe. She notes that much of one’s personality is determined by genetics rather than environment (Harris, 1998; Lee, 2003).
• The stressful situation criticism of attachment theory’s limitations notes that the model was based on a child’s reactions in momentary, stressful situations (being separated from one’s parent), and does not provide any insight into how children and parents interact in non-stressful situations;
• Further, the early model did not take into consideration the fact that children can have different kinds of attachments to different people; the attachment with the mother may not represent the attachments formed with others;
• Finally, the mother was viewed as the automatic primary attachment figure in the early model, when the father, stepparent, sibling, grandparent, aunt, or uncle may be the person that the child connects most strongly with (Field, 1996; Lee, 2003).

Although some of these criticisms have faded over time as the theory is injected with new evidence and updated concepts, it is useful to look at any theory with a critical eye.

17 Exercises for Positive, Fulfilling Relationships

Empower others with the skills to cultivate fulfilling, rewarding relationships and enhance their social wellbeing with these 17 Positive Relationships Exercises [PDF].

Created by experts. 100% Science-based.

A few of the most popular books on attachment theory can be found below:

• Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller ( Amazon );
• Attachment in Psychotherapy by David J. Wallin ( Amazon );
• Handbook of Attachment: Theory, Research, and Clinical Applications (3rd Edition) by Jude Cassidy and Phillip R. Shaver ( Amazon );
• Theories of Attachment: An Introduction to Bowlby, Ainsworth, Gerber, Brazelton, Kennell, & Klaus by Carol Garhart Mooney ( Amazon );
• Insecure in Love: How Anxious Attachment Can Make You Feel Jealous, Needy, and Worried and What You Can Do About It by Leslie Becker-Phelps ( Amazon );
• Wired for Love: How Understanding Your Partner’s Brain and Attachment Style Can Help You Defuse Conflict and Build a Secure Relationship by Dr. Stan Tatkin ( Amazon ).

There are also several great websites that host insightful essays and informative articles about attachment theory and its applications, including:

• www.communitycare.co.uk : The Community Care website calls itself “The heart of your social care career” and offers many interesting pieces on social work, attachment theory, and working with children and families who are struggling.
• “Attachment Theory” by Saul McLeod:  This article provides an excellent, brief introduction to attachment theory, as well as information on the Harlow experiments, the stages of attachment, and Lorenz’s imprinting theory.
• “A Brief Overview of Adult Attachment Theory and Research” by R. Chris Fraley:  This piece from attachment theory expert R. Chris Fraley also gives readers a thorough and academic introduction to familiarize them with the theory.
• “Attachment Styles at Work: Measurement, Collegial Relationships, and Burnout” by Michael P. Leiter, Arla Day, and Lisa Price:  This article , published in the journal Burnout Research in 2015, dives into the applications of attachment theory in the workplace, a subject we didn’t explore in this piece. The authors share some interesting insights about how one’s attachment style affects their relationships and performance in the workplace.

This piece tackled attachment theory, a theory developed by John Bowlby in the 1950s and expanded upon by Mary Ainsworth and countless other researchers in later years. The theory helps explain how our childhood relationships with our caregivers can have a profound impact on our relationships with others as adults.

Although attachment theory may not be able to explain every peculiarity of personality, it lays the foundations for a solid understanding of yourself and those around you when it comes to connecting and interacting with others.

What do you think about attachment theory? Do you think there are attachment styles not covered by the four categories? Are there any other criticisms of attachment theory you think are valid and worthy of discussion? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comment section.

We hope you enjoyed reading this article. Don’t forget to download our three Positive Relationships Exercises for free .

• Benoit, D. (2004). Infant-parent attachment: Definition, types, antecedents, measurement and outcome. Paediatrics & Child Health, 9(8) , 541-545.
• Bretherton, I. (1992). The origins of Attachment Theory: John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth. Developmental Psychology, 28, 759-775.
• Cherry, K. (2018). The story of Bowlby, Ainsworth, and Attachment Theory: The importance of early emotional bonds. Retrieved from https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-attachment-theory-2795337
• Field, T. (1996). Attachment and separation in young children. Annual Review of Psychology, 47 , 541-561.
• Firestone, L. (2013). How your attachment style impacts your relationship.  Retrieved from https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/compassion-matters/201307/how-your-attachment-style-impacts-your-relationship
• Fraley, R. C. (2010). A brief overview of adult attachment theory and research. Retrieved from https://internal.psychology.illinois.edu/~rcfraley/attachment.htm
• Hardy, R. (2016). Tips on applying attachment theory in social work with adults. Retrieved from http://www.communitycare.co.uk/2016/12/06/attachment-theory-social-work-adults/
• Harris, J. R. (1998). The nurture assumption: Why our children turn out the way they do. Free Press.
• Herman, E. (2012). Harry F. Harlow, monkey love experiments. Retrieved from http://pages.uoregon.edu/adoption/studies/HarlowMLE.htm
• Kennedy, J. H., & Kennedy, C. E. (2004). Attachment theory: Implications for school psychology. Psychology in the Schools, 41 , 247-259.
• Lee, E. J. (2003). The attachment system throughout the life course: Review and criticisms of attachment theory . Retrieved from http://www.personalityresearch.org/papers/lee.html
• McLeod, S. (2017). Erik Erikson. Retrieved from https://www.simplypsychology.org/Erik-Erikson.html
• National College for Teaching and Leadership (2014). An introduction to attachment and the implications for learning and behaviour [PDF Slide Presentation] . Retrieved from https://www.bathspa.ac.uk/media/bathspaacuk/education-/research/digital-literacy/education-resource-introduction-to-attatchment.pdf
• Shemmings, D. (2015). How social workers can use attachment theory in direct work. Retrieved from http://www.communitycare.co.uk/2015/09/02/using-attachment-theory-research-help-families-just-assess/
• Somerset Children & Young People Health & Wellbeing. (n.d.). Emotion coaching and self-regulation. Retrieved from http://www.cypsomersethealth.org/?ks=1&page=mhtk_secp_5
• Wells, J., Sueskind, B., & Alcamo, K. (2017). Child and adolescent issues. Retrieved from https://www.goodtherapy.org/learn-about-therapy/issues/child-and-adolescent-issues
• Williams, L., & Haley, E. (2017). Before the five stages were the FOUR stages of grief. Retrieved from https://whatsyourgrief.com/bowlby-four-stages-of-grief/

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muchas gracias por la información

The linked surveys are problematic, when they refer to intimate or close relationships, particularly for persons who’ve only had one close adult relationship. Or none.

Article is defective (‘to’ instead of ‘too’ aside). Cannot – for the life of me – find the four stages of attachment declared at the outset; only four styles. For what’s it’s worth I experienced paternal absence and maternal rejection – prostitute mother and pimp father – which is to say, no parenting or attachment at all – leading to a hotch-potch of all three non-secure ‘styles’.

how does attachment influences personality development in adulthood.

Good question! We answer this question by linking the different attachment styles to adult behaviors traits in this article: https://positivepsychology.com/attachment-style-worksheets/ (see the subsection ‘Attachment Theory in Psychology: 4 Types & Characteristics’)

Hope this helps!

– Nicole | Community Manager

How do I reference this article

You can reference this article in APA 7th as follows: Ackerman, C. A. (2018, April 27). What is Attachment Theory? Bowlby’s 4 stages explained. PositivePsychology.com. https://positivepsychology.com/attachment-theory/

I think that a big limitation when discussing Attachment Theory, that I haven’t seen addressed, is the effect of trauma on a older child past the early defining stage, or an adult. Bullying, accidents and injury, severe illness, family upheaval, or other significant life events can significantly affect a person’s psychological state, and thus alter a Securely Attached style to one of the other types.

Thank you for an informative article! Do you happen to know of any non-profit organizations that focus on stopping the cycle of maladaptive attachment in families? I’m a student with some ideas for a program that I’d like to pitch to some organizations that serve at risk individuals.

Glad you found the article helpful — that sounds like an interesting idea! Your question’s a little tricky. It’s hard to know how explicitly existing services draw on Bowlby’s principles. However, I suspect that the messages of the framework are likely embedded in various parent support groups and educational opportunities. If you’re interested in the U.S. specifically, maybe check out some of the services listed here and inquire about any curriculums.

Thank you, Nicole!

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Attachment Theory and Emotion Experience in Life Essay

Introduction, the attachment theory and life experiences, works cited.

This paper reports on the attachment theory and how life experience affects one’s emotional attachment to others. Attachment theory advanced by John Bowlby in the early 1950s, seeks to explain how early life relations affects an individual’s emotional bonding in future Hutchison (89).

The theory gives an understanding of the different personalities as relates to emotional relationships. The theory was first focused on the relationship between children and their parents, but was later expanded to look at the whole lifespan. The theory looks at ones attachment as being influenced by both psychological conditions and the social environment.

According to the proponents of the attachment theory, children develop a bond with their caregivers, which grow into an emotional bond. Further research on the theory indicates that life experiences in childhood direct the course of one’s personality as well as the social and emotional development throughout his or her life.

Besides the explanation advanced by the theory regarding the connection between a baby and its mother or a care giver, the theory also seeks to explain the attachment between adults Hutchison (43). Among adults, an emotional attachment is felt more especially during bereavement or separation of spouses. Babies are born without the ability to move or feed themselves.

They depend on care givers to for these needs; they however have pre-programmed set of behavior that comes into action due to the environmental stimuli. Environmental stimuli may trigger a sense of fear or distress in the baby making it cry for help from the mother or the care giver. The protection or comfort offered to the baby makes it develop a stronger emotional bond with the mother and others who are closer to it.

Children grow to relate comfort from distress to the people who are close to them during their early stages of development. The nature of the environment a child grows in, together with the “psychological framework builds up a child’s internal working model” Hutchison (52).

The internal working model comprises of the development of expectations that an individual perceives in social interactions. The theory explains the effect of challenging parenting such as; neglect or abuse. Parents and caregivers should endeavor to develop an environment that makes children feel secure and comfortable.

The type of relationship parents establish with their children at their early stages of development determines the type of emotional attachment a child develops with them. A child who grows up in a loving and sensitive environment develops secure relationships in with others.

Such a child grows to recognize others as being caring, loving and reliable. They also develop high self esteem and learn to deal with negative feelings. Research indicates that people who grow up in secure attachment relationships are able to demonstrate good social aptitude throughout their life.

On the contrary, children brought up in unsecure environment develop an avoidant attachment. An unsecure environment to children is often characterized by fear, anxiety and rejection. This type of environment makes a child make children to downplay their emotional feelings.

There is a group of children who grow up with care givers that are not consistent in responding to their emotional needs. Their care givers are sometimes sensitive, and sometimes insensitive to their feelings. Such children develop “an attachment seeking habit as they try to conquer the insensitivity of their caregivers” Hutchison (34).

This sort of behavior by children is referred to as ambivalent attachment, where the children seek to compensate for the inconsistent responsiveness by the caregiver. Such a child tries to manage other people’s attention through behavior sets such as; seduction, bullying rage and necessity.

Hutchison, Elizabeth . Dimensions of human behavior: The changing life course. 4th Ed . Thousand oaks, CA: Sage publications, 2011. Print

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What Is Attachment Theory? Definition and Stages

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Attachment describes the deep, long-term bonds that form between two people. John Bowlby originated attachment theory to explain how these bonds form between an infant and a caregiver, and Mary Ainsworth later expanded on his ideas. Since it was initially introduced, attachment theory has become one of the most well-known and influential theories in the field of psychology.

Key Takeaways: Attachment Theory

• Attachment is a deep, emotional bond that forms between two people.
• According to psychologist John Bowlby, in the context of evolution, children’s attachment behaviors evolved to make sure they could successfully remain under the protection of their caregivers in order to survive.
• Bowlby specified four phases of child-caregiver attachment development: 0-3 months, 3-6 months, 6 months to 3 years, and 3 years through the end of childhood.
• Expanding on Bowlby's ideas, Mary Ainsworth pointed to three attachment patterns: secure attachment, avoidant attachment, and resistant attachment. A fourth attachment style, disorganized attachment, was later added.

Origins of Attachment Theory

While working with maladjusted and delinquent children in the 1930s, psychologist John Bowlby noticed that these children had trouble forming close relationships with others. He looked into the children’s family histories and noticed that many of them had endured disruptions in their home lives at an early age. Bowlby came to the conclusion that the early emotional bond established between a parent and their child is key to healthy development. As a result, challenges to that bond could have consequences that impact a child throughout their lifetime. Bowlby delved into a number of perspectives to develop his ideas, including psychodynamic theory , cognitive and developmental psychology, and ethology (the science of human and animal behavior within the context of evolution). The result of his work was attachment theory.

At the time, it was believed that babies become attached to their caregivers because they fed the baby. This behaviorist perspective , saw attachment as a learned behavior.

Bowlby offered a different perspective. He said that human development should be understood in the context of evolution . Infants survived throughout much of human history by ensuring they stayed in close proximity to adult caregivers. Children’s attachment behaviors evolved to make sure the child could successfully remain under the protection of their caregivers. Consequently, the gestures, sounds, and other signals infants give off to attract the attention of and maintain contact with adults are adaptive.

Phases of Attachment

Bowlby specified four phases during which children develop attachment to their caretakers.

Phase 1: Birth to 3 Months

From the time they’re born, infants show a preference for looking at human faces and listening to human voices. During the first two to three months of life, infants respond to people but they don’t distinguish between them. At around 6 weeks, the sight of human faces will elicit social smiles, in which babies will happily smile and make eye contact. While the baby will smile at any face that appears in their line of sight, Bowlby suggested that social smiling increases the chances that the caretaker will respond with loving attention, promoting attachment. The baby also encourages attachment with caregivers through behaviors like babbling, crying, grasping, and sucking. Each behavior brings the infant in closer contact with the caregiver and further promotes bonding and emotional investment.

Phase 2: From 3 to 6 Months

When infants are about 3 months old, they start to differentiate between people and they begin to reserve their attachment behaviors for the people they prefer. While they’ll smile and babble at the people they recognize, they won’t do more than stare at a stranger. If they cry, their favorite people are better able to comfort them. Babies’ preferences are restricted to two to three individuals and they usually favor one person in particular. Bowlby and other attachment researchers often assumed this individual would be the infant’s mother, but it could be anyone who most successfully responded to and had the most positive interactions with the baby.

Phase 3: From 6 Months to 3 Years

At about 6 months, babies’ preference for a specific individual becomes more intense, and when that individual leaves the room, the infants will have separation anxiety. Once babies learn to crawl, they will also attempt to actively follow their favorite person. When this individual returns after a period of absence, babies will enthusiastically greet them. Starting at about 7 or 8 months old, babies will also start to fear strangers. This can manifest itself as anything from a bit of extra caution in the presence of a stranger to crying at the sight of someone new, especially in an unfamiliar situation. By the time babies are a year old, they have developed a working model of their favored individual, including how well they respond to the child.

Phase 4: From 3 Years Until Childhood Ends

Bowlby didn’t have as much to say about the fourth stage of attachment or the way attachments continued to impact people after childhood. He did observe, however, that at around 3 years old, children start to comprehend that their caretakers have goals and plans of their own. As a result, the child is less concerned when the caretaker leaves for a period of time.

The Strange Situation and Patterns of Infant Attachment

After moving to England in the 1950s, Mary Ainsworth became John Bowlby’s research assistant and long-term collaborator. While Bowlby had observed that children exhibited individual differences in attachment , it was Ainsworth who undertook the research on infant-parent separations that established a better understanding of these individual differences. The method Ainsworth and her colleagues developed for assessing these differences in one-year-old children was called the “Strange Situation.”

The Strange Situation consists of two brief scenarios in a lab in which a caregiver leaves the infant. In the first scenario, the infant is left with a stranger. In the second scenario the infant is briefly left alone and then joined by the stranger. Each separation between caregiver and child lasted about three minutes.

Ainsworth and her colleagues’ observations of the Strange Situation led them to identify three different patterns of attachment. A fourth attachment style was later added based on the findings from further research.

The four attachment patterns are:

• Secure Attachment: Infants who are securely attached use their caregiver as a secure base from which to explore the world. They will venture out to explore away from the caregiver, but if they're frightened or in need of reassurance, they will return. If the caregiver leaves they will get upset just as all babies will. Yet, these children are confident that their caregiver will return. When that happens they will greet the caregiver with joy.
• Avoidant Attachment : Children who exhibit avoidant attachment are insecure in their attachment to the caregiver. Avoidantly attached children will not become overly distressed when their caregiver leaves, and upon their return, the child will deliberately avoid the caregiver.
• Resistant Attachment : Resistant attachment is another form of insecure attachment. These children become extremely upset when the parent leaves. However, when the caregiver returns their behavior will be inconsistent. They may initially seem happy to see the caregiver only to become resistant if the caregiver attempts to pick them up. These children often respond angrily to the caregiver; however, they also display moments of avoidance as well.
• Disorganized Attachment: The final attachment pattern is most often displayed by children who have been subject to abuse, neglect, or other inconsistent parenting practices. Children with a disorganized attachment style seem to be disoriented or confused when their caregiver is present. They seem to view the caregiver as a source of both comfort and fear, leading to disorganized and conflicting behaviors.

Research has demonstrated that early attachment styles have consequences that reverberate for the rest of an individual’s life. For instance, someone with a secure attachment style in childhood will have better self-esteem as they grow up and will be able to form strong, healthy relationships as adults. On the other hand, those with an avoidant attachment style as children may be unable to become emotionally invested in their relationships and have difficulty sharing their thoughts and feelings with others. Similarly those who had a resistant attachment style as one-year-olds have difficulty forming relationships with others as adults, and when they do, often question whether their partners truly love them.

Institutionalization and Separation

The necessity of forming attachments early in life has serious implications for children who grow up in institutions or are separated from their parents when they're young. Bowlby observed that children who grow up in institutions often don’t form an attachment to any adult. While their physical needs are attended to, because their emotional needs aren’t fulfilled, they don’t bond with anyone as infants and then seem incapable of forming loving relationships when they get older. Some research has suggested that therapeutic interventions might help make up for the deficits these children experienced. However, other events have demonstrated that children that haven’t developed attachments as infants continue to suffer from emotional issues. Further research is still required on this topic, however, one way or another, it seems clear that development proceeds best if children are able to bond with a caretaker in their first years of life.

Separation from attachment figures in childhood can also lead to emotional problems. In the 1950s, Bowlby and James Robertson found that when children were separated from their parents during extended hospital stays—a common practice at the time—it led to a great deal of suffering for the child. If children were kept from their parents for too long, they seemed to stop trusting people, and like the institutionalized children, were no longer able to form close relationships. Fortunately, Bowlby’s work resulted in more hospitals allowing parents to stay with their young children.

Implications for Child-Rearing

Bowlby and Ainsworth’s work on attachment suggests that parents should see their babies as fully equipped to signal what they need. So when babies cry, smile, or babble, parents should follow their instincts and respond. Children with parents who promptly respond to their signals with care tend to be securely attached by the time they are a year old. This doesn’t mean that parents should take the initiative to go to the child when the child hasn't signaled. If the parent insists on attending to the child whether the infant is signaling their desire for attention or not, Bowlby said the child can become spoiled. Bowlby and Ainsworth felt, instead, caretakers should simply be available while letting their child pursue their own independent interests and explorations.

• Cherry, Kendra. “Bowlby & Ainsworth: What is Attachment Theory?” Verywell Mind , 21 September 2019. https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-attachment-theory-2795337
• Cherry, Kendra. “The Different Types of Attachment Styles” Verywell Mind , 24 June 2019. https://www.verywellmind.com/attachment-styles-2795344
• Crain, William. Theories of Development: Concepts and Applications. 5th ed., Pearson Prentice Hall. 2005.
• Fraley, R. Chris and Phillip R. Shaver. “Attachment Theory and Its Place in Contemporary Personality Theory and Research.” Handbook of Personality: Theory and Research, 3rd ed., edited by Oliver P. John, Richard W. Robins, and Lawrence A. Pervin, The Guilford Press, 2008, pp. 518-541.
• McAdams, Dan. The Person: An Introduction to the Science of Personality Psychology . 5th ed., Wiley, 2008.
• McLeod, Saul. “Attachment Theory.” Simply Psychology , 5 February 2017. https://www.simplypsychology.org/attachment.html
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John Bowlby’s Attachment Theory

Saul Mcleod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

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.

Learn about our Editorial Process

Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

Associate Editor for Simply Psychology

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.

On This Page:

John Bowlby (1907 – 1990) was a psychoanalyst (like Freud) and believed that mental health and behavioral problems could be attributed to early childhood.

Key Takeaways

• Bowlby’s evolutionary theory of attachment suggests that children come into the world biologically pre-programmed to form attachments with others, because this will help them to survive.
• Bowlby argued that a child forms many attachments, but one of these is qualitatively different. This is what he called primary attachment, monotropy.
• Bowlby suggests that there is a critical period for developing attachment (2.5 years). If an attachment has not developed during this time period, then it may well not happen at all. Bowlby later proposed a sensitive period of up to 5 years.
• Bowlby’s maternal deprivation hypothesis suggests that continual attachment disruption between the infant and primary caregiver could result in long-term cognitive, social, and emotional difficulties for that infant.
• According to Bowlby, an internal working model is a cognitive framework comprising mental representations for understanding the world, self, and others, and is based on the relationship with a primary caregiver.
• It becomes a prototype for all future social relationships and allows individuals to predict, control, and manipulate interactions with others.

Evolutionary Theory of Attachment

Bowlby (1969, 1988) was greatly influenced by ethological theory, but especially by Lorenz’s (1935) study of imprinting .  Lorenz showed that attachment was innate (in young ducklings) and therefore had a survival value.

During the evolution of the human species, it would have been the babies who stayed close to their mothers that would have survived to have children of their own.  Bowlby hypothesized that both infants and mothers had evolved a biological need to stay in contact with each other.

Bowlby (1969) believed that attachment behaviors (such as proximity seeking) are instinctive and will be activated by any conditions that seem to threaten the achievement of proximity, such as separation, insecurity, and fear.

Bowlby also postulated that the fear of strangers represents an important survival mechanism, built-in by nature.

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 like fixed action patterns and 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.

Bowlby’s monotropic theory

A child has an innate (i.e., inborn) need to attach to one main attachment figure (i.e., monotropy).

Bowlby’s monotropic theory of attachment suggests attachment is important for a child’s survival.

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.

Although Bowlby did not rule out the possibility of other attachment figures for a child, he did believe that there should be a primary bond which was much more important than any other (usually the mother).

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.

Bowlby believes that this attachment is qualitatively different from any subsequent attachments.  Bowlby argues that the relationship with the mother is somehow different altogether from other relationships.

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.

Bowlby (1951) claimed that mothering is almost useless if delayed until after two and a half to three years and, for most children, if delayed till after 12 months, i.e., there is a critical period.

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.

Bowlby used the term maternal deprivation to refer to the separation or loss of the mother as well as the failure to develop an attachment.

The underlying assumption of Bowlby’s Maternal Deprivation Hypothesis is that continual disruption of the attachment between infant and primary caregiver (i.e., mother) could result in long-term cognitive, social, and emotional difficulties for that infant.

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

Bowlby’s maternal deprivation hypothesis suggests that continual attachment disruption between the infant and primary caregiver (i.e., mother) could result in long-term cognitive, social, and emotional difficulties for that infant.

Bowlby (1988) suggested that the nature of monotropy (attachment conceptualized as being a vital and close bond with just one attachment figure) meant that a failure to initiate or a breakdown of the maternal attachment would lead to serious negative consequences, possibly including affectionless psychopathy.

Bowlby’s theory of monotropy led to the formulation of his maternal deprivation hypothesis.

John Bowlby (1944) believed that the infant’s and mother’s relationship during the first five years of life was crucial to socialization.

According to Bowlby, if separation from the primary caregiver occurs during the critical period and there is no adequate substitute emotional care, the child will suffer from deprivation.

This will lead to irreversible long-term consequences in the child’s intellectual, social, and emotional development.

Bowlby initially believed the effects to be permanent and irreversible:

• delinquency,
• reduced intelligence,
• increased aggression,
• depression,
• affectionless psychopathy

Bowlby also argued that the lack of emotional care could lead to affectionless psychopathy,

Affectionless psychopathy is characterized by a lack of concern for others, a lack of guilt, and the inability to form meaningful relationships.

Such individuals act on impulse with little regard for the consequences of their actions.  For example, showing no guilt for antisocial behavior.

The prolonged deprivation of the young child of maternal care may have grave and far-reaching effects on his character and so on the whole of his future life (Bowlby, 1952, p. 46).

Bowlby believed that disrupting this primary relationship could lead to a higher incidence of juvenile delinquency, emotional difficulties, and antisocial behavior. To test his hypothesis, he studied 44 adolescent juvenile delinquents in a child guidance clinic.

Bowlby 44 Thieves

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 their early life stages is likely to affect intellectual, social, and emotional development seriously.

Between 1936 and 1939, an opportunity sample of 88 children was selected from the clinic where Bowlby worked. Of these, 44 were juvenile thieves (31 boys and 13 girls) who had been referred to him because of their stealing.

Bowlby selected another group of 44 children (34 boys and 10 girls) to act as ‘controls (individuals referred to the clinic because of emotional problems but not yet committed any crimes).

On arrival at the clinic, each child had their IQ tested by a psychologist who assessed their emotional attitudes toward the tests. The two groups were matched for age and IQ.

The children and their parents were interviewed to record details of the child’s early life (e.g., periods of separation, diagnosing affectionless psychopathy) by a psychiatrist (Bowlby), a psychologist, and a social worker.  The psychiatrist, psychologist, and social worker made separate reports.

Bowlby found that 14 children from the thief group were identified as affectionless psychopaths (they were unable to care about or feel affection for others); 12 had experienced prolonged separation of more than six months from their mothers in their first two years of life.

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

Bowlby concluded that maternal deprivation in the child’s early life caused permanent emotional damage.

He diagnosed this as a condition and called it Affectionless Psychopathy. According to Bowlby, this condition involves a lack of emotional development, characterized by a lack of concern for others, a lack of guilt, and an inability to form meaningful and lasting relationships.

Bowlby directly observed parental separation’s harm in evacuating children from bombing during WWII, strengthening his hospital research indicating it profoundly impacts children’s emotional and behavioral development.

Limitations

The supporting evidence that Bowlby (1944) provided was in the form of clinical interviews of, and retrospective data on, those who had and had not been separated from their primary caregiver.

This meant that Bowlby asked the participants to look back and recall separations.  These memories may not be accurate.

A criticism of the 44 thieves study was that it concluded affectionless psychopathy was caused by maternal deprivation.  This is correlational data and only shows a relationship between these two variables. It cannot show a cause-and-effect relationship between separation from the mother and the development of affectionless psychopathy.

Other factors could have been involved, such as the reason for the separation, the role of the father, and the child’s temperament. Thus, as Rutter (1972) pointed out, Bowlby’s conclusions were flawed, mixing up cause and effect with correlation.

Many of the 44 thieves in Bowlby’s study had been moved around a lot during childhood, and had probably never formed an attachment.  This suggested that they were suffering from privation, rather than deprivation, which Rutter (1972) suggested was far more deleterious to the children. This led to a very important study on the long-term effects of privation, carried out by Hodges and Tizard (1989).

The study was vulnerable to researcher bias. Bowlby conducted the psychiatric assessments himself and made the diagnosis of Affectionless Psychopathy. He knew whether the children were in the ‘theft group’ or the control group. Consequently, his findings may have been unconsciously influenced by his own expectations. This potentially undermines their validity.

Bowlby struggled to apply his new maladaptation model to retrospective research on adolescents with conduct problems, as such studies prejudice outcomes by selecting for problems and then looking backward.

Cautious of this, in 1950, Bowlby, Robertson, and new researcher Mary Ainsworth (1956) began a forward-looking “follow-up study” on whether preschoolers who were hospitalized long-term subsequently developed conduct issues.

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.

So, while early prolonged separation impacted some children’s later adjustment, outcomes proved far more varied than Bowlby’s theory initially predicted. The improved prospective methodology highlighted limitations in Bowlby’s previous retrospective approaches.

In the conclusions of the paper Bowlby admitted that his theory regarding the development of conduct problems may be wrong:

It is clear that some of the workers, including the present senior author, in their desire to call attention to dangers which can often be avoided have on occasion overstated their case. In particular, statements implying that children who are brought up in institutions or who suffer other forms of serious privation and deprivation in early life commonly develop psychopathic or affectionless characters (e.g., Bowlby, 1944) are seen to be mistaken. (Bowlby et al., 1956, p. 240)

Short-Term Separation

When WWII ended in 1945, Bowlby had to choose between completing child psychoanalysis training or researching parental separation’s impact on children. He chose the latter, joining colleagues at London’s Tavistock Clinic.

Robertson and Bowlby (1952) believe that short-term separation from an attachment figure leads to distress.

John Bowlby spent two years working alongside a social worker, James Robertson (1952), who observed that children experienced intense distress when separated from their mothers. Even when other caregivers fed such children, this did not diminish the child’s anxiety.

They found three progressive stages of distress:

• Protest : The child cries, screams, and protests angrily when the parent leaves. They will try to cling to their parents to stop them from leaving. Protest could last from a few hours to several days.
• Despair : The child’s protesting gradually stops, and they appear calmer, although still upset. The child refuses others’ attempts for comfort and often seems withdrawn and uninterested in anything. In the despair stage, children become increasingly withdrawn and hopeless.
• Detachment : If separation continues, the child will engage with other people again. All emotions are suppressed, and children live moment-to-moment by repressing feelings for their mother. On the surface, children were seen to be happy and content, but when the mother visited, they frequently ignored her and hardly cried when she left. If this state continues, children become so withdrawn as to seek no mothering at all – a sign of major psychological trauma.

Controversy arose between Bowlby and Robertson regarding the stages of separation, particularly the third stage, which Robertson termed denial, but Bowlby called detachment.

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.

A Two-Year-Old Goes to Hospital

Though doctors saw the despair phase as adjustment, Bowlby felt it showed distress’s harm.

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.

However, when approached by hospital staff, Laura startles out of her trance to suddenly burst into tears and fruitlessly call for her mother once more.

The raw behaviors captured on film revealed the three-phase separation response of protest, despair, and detachment observed in Bowlby and Robertson’s prior research.

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 dominant behavioral theory of 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

The child’s attachment relationship with their primary caregiver leads to the development of an internal working model (Bowlby, 1969).

This internal working model is 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.

For example, the extent to which an individual perceives himself/herself as worthy of love and care, and information regarding the availability and reliability of others (Bowlby, 1969).

Bowlby referred to this knowledge as an internal working model (IWM), which begins as a mental and emotional representation of the infant’s first attachment relationship and forms the basis of an individual’s attachment style.

A person’s interaction with others is guided by memories and expectations from their internal model which influence and help evaluate their contact with others (Bretherton & Munholland, 1999).

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.

Bowlby (1969) suggested that the first five years of life were crucial to developing the IWM, although he viewed this as more of a sensitive period rather than a critical one.

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).

According to Bowlby (1969), the primary caregiver acts as a prototype for future relationships via the internal working model.

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.

Although Bowlby (1969, 1988) believed attachment to be monotropic, he did acknowledge that rather than being a bond with one person, multiple attachments can occur arranged in the form of a hierarchy.

A person can have many internal models, each tied to different relationships and different memory systems, such as semantic and episodic (Bowlby, 1980).

Collins and Read (1994) suggest a hierarchical model of attachment representations whereby general attachment styles and working models appear on the highest level, while relationship-specific models appear on the lowest level.

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)

• Provided evidence for the importance of early parent-child relationships.
• Analyzed the systemic and “goal-corrected” nature of behavior.
• Introduced the concept of an “environment of adaptedness” that organisms inherit a potential to develop systems suited for.
• Discussed how attachment behaviors in infants are components of an attachment system designed to achieve security.
• Explained how attachment behaviors change via feedback from caregivers, becoming oriented toward discriminated figures.
• Posited attachment as a foundational system for survival that interacts with other systems like exploration.

Separation (1973)

• Focused on the negative impacts of separation from attachment figures.
• Outlined phases of separation responses in infants and children.
• Analyzed short- and long-term pathological effects of loss or deprivation.
• Studied how mourning progresses in relation to attachment bonds.
• Linked separation distress and avoidance to later issues of delinquency.

Loss (1980)

• Explored the concept of “loss” in relation to attachment theory.
• Proposed stages of the mourning process.
• Studied outcomes following the loss of an attachment figure.
• Examined detachment and defense processes resulting from loss.
• Applied attachment theory understanding to treatment approaches.

Critical Evaluation

Implications for children’s nursing.

• During Robertson and Bowlby’s research, the British government established a parliamentary committee investigating children’s hospital conditions. This resulted in the 1959 Platt Report, containing 55 recommendations, including allowing parental presence and provisions for their accommodation and children’s education/recreation (Alsop-Shields & Mohay, 2001).
• Robertson also specifically critiqued task-oriented nursing and childcare institutions (Robertson, 1955, 1968, 1970) as emotionally neglectful. He and Bowlby suggested dysfunctional families be kept together but supported (Robertson & Bowlby, 1952) – principles now accepted but decades ahead of their time.
• Robertson and Bowlby’s work has greatly influenced the development of family-centered pediatric nursing models like partnership-in-care and family-centered care in the 1990s. By planning care around the whole family unit rather than just the hospitalized child, and involving parents closely in care, these models aim to reduce emotional trauma for children.

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 Situation study 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.

An insecure-avoidant child 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.

Bowlby’s Maternal Deprivation is supported by Harlow’s (1958) research with monkeys .  Harlow showed that monkeys reared in isolation from their mother suffered emotional and social problems in older age.  The monkey’s never formed an attachment (privation) and, as such grew up to be aggressive and had problems interacting with other monkeys.

Konrad Lorenz (1935) supports Bowlby’s maternal deprivation hypothesis as the attachment process of imprinting is an innate process.

Bowlby’s (1944, 1956) ideas had a significant influence on the way researchers thought about attachment, and much of the discussion of his theory has focused on his belief in monotropy.

Although Bowlby may not dispute that young children form multiple attachments, he still contends that the attachment to the mother is unique in that it is the first to appear and remains the strongest.  However, the evidence seems to suggest otherwise on both of these counts.

• Schaffer & Emerson (1964) noted that specific attachments started at about eight months, and very shortly thereafter, the infants became attached to other people. By 18 months, very few (13%) were attached to only one person; some had five or more attachments.
• Rutter (1972) points out that several indicators of attachment (such as protest or distress when an attached person leaves) have been shown for various attachment figures – fathers, siblings, peers, and even inanimate objects.

Critics such as Rutter have also accused Bowlby of not distinguishing between deprivation and privation – the complete lack of an attachment bond, rather than its loss.  Rutter stresses that the quality of the attachment bond is the most important factor, rather than just deprivation in the critical period.

Bowlby used the term maternal deprivation to refer to the separation or loss of the mother as well as the failure to develop an attachment.  Are the effects of maternal deprivation as dire as Bowlby suggested?

Michael Rutter (1972) wrote a book called Maternal Deprivation Re-assessed .  In the book, he suggested that Bowlby may have oversimplified the concept of maternal deprivation.

Bowlby used the term “maternal deprivation” to refer to separation from an attached figure, loss of an attached figure and failure to develop an attachment to any figure.  These each have different effects, argued Rutter.  In particular, Rutter distinguished between privation and deprivation.

Michael Rutter (1981) argued that if a child fails to develop an emotional 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.

Rutter argues that these problems are not due solely to the lack of attachment to a mother figure, as Bowlby claimed, but to factors such as the lack of intellectual stimulation and social experiences that attachments normally provide.  In addition, such problems can be overcome later in the child’s development, with the right kind of care.

Bowlby assumed that physical separation on its own could lead to deprivation, but Rutter (1972) argues that it is the disruption of the attachment rather than the physical separation.

This is supported by Radke-Yarrow (1985), who found that 52% of children whose mothers suffered from depression were insecurely attached. This figure raised to 80% when this occurred in a context of poverty (Lyons-Ruth,1988). This shows the influence of social factors. Bowlby did not take into account the quality of the substitute care. Deprivation can be avoided if there is good emotional care after separation.

Is attachment theory sexist?

Feminist critics argue Bowlby’s attachment theory is sexist for overly emphasizing mothers as ideal caregivers while neglecting other influences like fathers (e.g., Vicedo, 2017).

His popular 1950s parenting articles reinforced gender roles by proclaiming mothers uniquely important and always available. Critics also attacked his concept “monotropy” – instincts focused on one caregiver, presumably the mother.

However, Bowlby’s academic writings use phrases like “mothers or foster-mothers,” adoptive mothers, and “mother substitutes,” acknowledging many can serve as primary caregiver.

He never scientifically stated only biological mothers suffice. While “monotropy” poorly implies a singular caregiver, Bowlby meant children form one main attachment, not only to mothers. So academically, Bowlby did not limit caregivers to mothers, though his public emphasis on maternal deprivation and parenting did reinforce gender biases.

There are implications arising from Bowlby’s work.  He reinforced the idea that a mother should be the most central caregiver and that this care should be given continuously. An obvious implication is that mothers should not go out to work.  There have been many attacks on this claim:

• Mothers are the exclusive carers in only a very small percentage of human societies; often there are a number of people involved in the care of children, such as relations and friends (Weisner, & Gallimore, 1977).
• Van Ijzendoorn, & Tavecchio (1987) argue that a stable network of adults can provide adequate care and that this care may even have advantages over a system where a mother has to meet all a child’s needs.
• There is evidence that children develop better with a mother who is happy in her work, than a mother who is frustrated by staying at home (Schaffer, 1990).

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Harlow, H. F., & Zimmermann, R. R. (1958). The development of affective responsiveness in infant monkeys. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 102 ,501 -509.

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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.

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Further Reading

• The Internal Working Models Concept: What Do We Really Know About the Self in Relation to Others?
• The Effects of Maternal Deprivation
• Davies, R. (2010). Marking the 50th anniversary of the Platt Report: from exclusion, to toleration and parental participation in the care of the hospitalized child .  Journal of Child Health Care ,  14 (1), 6-23.
• Bowlby, J. (1963). Pathological mourning and childhood mourning .  Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association ,  11 (3), 500-541.

IResearchNet

Attachment Theory

Attachment theory definition.

An attachment refers to the strong emotional bond that exists between an infant and his or her caretaker. The attachment theory is designed to explain the evolution of that bond, its development, and its implications for human experience and relationships across the life course. Although attachment theory has primarily been a theory of child development, since the 1980s, the theory has had a large impact on social psychological theories of close relationships, emotion regulation, and personality.

Attachment Theory History and Background

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Drawing on evolutionary theory, Bowlby postulated that behaviors such as crying and searching were adaptive responses to separation from a primary attachment figure—someone who provides support, protection, and care. Because human infants, like other mammalian infants, cannot feed or protect themselves, they are dependent upon the care and protection of older and stronger adults. Bowlby argued that, over the course of human evolution, infants who were able to maintain proximity to an attachment figure (i.e., by looking cute or by expressing in attachment behaviors) would be more likely to survive to a reproductive age. According to Bowlby, a motivational-control system, what he called the attachment behavioral system, was gradually crafted by natural selection to help the child regulate physical proximity to an attachment figure.

The attachment behavior system is an important concept in attachment theory because it provides the conceptual link between evolutionary models of human development and modern theories on emotion regulation and personality. According to Bowlby, the attachment system essentially “asks” the following question: Is the attachment figure nearby, accessible, and attentive? If the child perceives the answer to this question to be “yes,” he or she feels loved, secure, and confident, and, behaviorally, is likely to explore his or her environment, play with others, and be sociable. If, however, the child perceives the answer to this question to be “no,” the child experiences anxiety and, behaviorally, is likely to exhibit attachment behaviors ranging from a simple visual search for the parent to active following and vocal signaling. These behaviors continue until either the child is able to reestablish a desirable level of physical or psychological proximity to the attachment figure, or until the child “wears down,” as may happen in the context of a prolonged separation or loss. In such cases, Bowlby believed that the child may develop symptoms of depression.

Individual Differences in Infant Attachment Patterns

Although Bowlby believed that his theory captured the way attachment operates in most children, he recognized that there are individual differences. Some children, for example, may be more likely to view their parents as inaccessible or distant, perhaps because their parents have not been consistently available in the past. However, it was not until Bowlby’s colleague, Mary Ainsworth, began to study infant-parent separations that individual differences in attachment were incorporated formally into attachment theory. Ainsworth and her students developed a technique called the “strange situation”—a laboratory paradigm for studying infant-parent attachment. In the strange situation, 12-month-old infants and their parents are brought to the laboratory and are separated from one another and then reunited. In the strange situation, most children (i.e., about 60%) behave in the way implied by Bowlby’s “normative” understanding of attachment. Specifically, they become upset when the parent leaves the room, but when he or she returns, they actively seek the parent and are easily comforted by him or her. Children who exhibit this pattern of behavior are often called “secure.” Other children (about 20% or less) are ill-at-ease initially and, upon separation, become extremely distressed. Importantly, when reunited with their parents, these children have a difficult time being soothed and often exhibit conflicting behaviors that suggest they want to be comforted but that they also want to “punish” the parent for leaving. These children are often called “anxious-resistant.” The third pattern of attachment that Ainsworth and her colleagues documented is called “avoidant.” Avoidant children (about 20%) don’t appear too distressed by the separation and, upon reunion, actively avoid seeking contact with their parent, sometimes turning their attention to play objects on the laboratory floor.

Ainsworth’s work was important for at least three reasons. First, she provided one of the first empirical demonstrations of how attachment behavior is patterned in both safe and frightening contexts. Second, she provided the first empirical taxonomy of individual differences in infant attachment patterns. According to her research, at least three types of children exist: those who are secure in their relationship with their parents, those who are anxious-resistant, and those who are anxious-avoidant. Finally, she demonstrated that these individual differences were correlated with infant-parent interactions in the home during the first year of life. Children who appear secure in the strange situation, for example, tend to have parents who are responsive to their needs. Children who appear insecure in the strange situation (i.e., anxious-resistant or anxious-avoidant) often have parents who are insensitive to their needs, or inconsistent or rejecting in the care they provide.

Attachment in Adult Romantic Relationships

Although Bowlby was primarily focused on understanding the nature of the infant-caregiver relationship, he believed that attachment played a role in human experience across the life course. It was not until the mid-1980s, however, that psychologists began to take seriously the possibility that attachment may play a role in adulthood. Cindy Hazan and Phil Shaver were two of the first researchers to explore Bowlby’s ideas in the context of romantic relationships. According to Hazan and Shaver, the emotional bond that develops between adult romantic partners is partly a function of the same motivational system— the attachment behavioral system—that gives rise to the emotional bond between infants and their care-givers. Hazan and Shaver noted that infants and care-givers and adult romantic partners share the following features:

• Both feel safe when the other is nearby and responsive.
• Both engage in close, intimate, bodily contact.
• Both feel insecure when the other is inaccessible.
• Both share discoveries with one another.
• Both play with one another’s facial features and exhibit a mutual fascination and preoccupation with one another.
• Both engage in “baby talk” or “motherese” (i.e., a high-pitched, idiosyncratic language that involves “made up” words that only the couple understands).

On the basis of these parallels, Hazan and Shaver argued that adult romantic relationships, like infant-caregiver relationships, are attachments, and that romantic love is a property of the attachment behavioral system, as well as the motivational systems that give rise to caregiving and sexuality.

Three Implications of Adult Attachment Theory

The idea that romantic relationships may be attachment relationships has had a profound influence on modern research on close relationships. There are at least three critical implications of this idea. First, if adult romantic relationships are attachment relationships, then we should observe the same kinds of individual differences in adult relationships that Ainsworth observed in infant-caregiver relationships. Second, if adult romantic relationships are attachment relationships, then the way adult relationships “work” should be similar to the way infant-caregiver relationships work. Third, whether an adult is secure or insecure in his or her adult relationships may be a partial reflection of his or her attachment experiences in early childhood.

Do we Observe the Same Kinds of Attachment Patterns Among Adults That We Observe Among Children?

If adult romantic relationships are attachment relationships, then the same kinds of individual differences that Ainsworth observed in infant-caregiver relationships should be observed in adult relationships. Some adults, for example, may be expected to be secure in their close relationships—feeling confident that their partners will be there for them when needed and being open to depending on others and having others depend on them. Other adults, in contrast, will be expected to be insecure in their relationships. For example, some insecure adults may be anxious-resistant: They worry that others may not love them completely, and they may be easily frustrated or angered when their attachment needs go unmet. Others may be avoidant: They may appear not to care too much about close relationships and may prefer not to be too dependent upon other people or to have others be too dependent upon them.

The earliest research on adult attachment involved studying the association between individual differences in adult attachment and the way people think about their relationships and their memories for what their relationships with their parents are like. In 1987, Hazan and Shaver developed a simple questionnaire to measure these individual differences. (These individual differences are often referred to as “attachment styles,” “attachment patterns,” “attachment orientations,” or “differences in the organization of the attachment system.”) In short, Hazan and Shaver asked research subjects to read three paragraphs and indicate which paragraph best characterized the way they think, feel, and behave in close relationships. Paragraph A described discomfort and nervousness in being close to others, as well as difficulty with trust and intimacy; paragraph B depicted relative ease with closeness to and mutual dependence with others; and paragraph C indicated a perception that others are hesitant to get close as desired and that a partner doesn’t love them or likely won’t want to stay with them.

Hazan and Shaver found that the number of people endorsing each of these descriptions was similar to the number of children classified as secure, anxious, or avoidant in infancy. In other words, about 60% of adults classified themselves as secure (paragraph B), about 20% described themselves as avoidant (paragraph A), and about 20% described themselves as anxious-resistant (paragraph C).

Do Adult Romantic Relationships “work” in the Same way That infant-Caregiver Relationships work?

If adult romantic relationships are attachment relationships, then the way adult relationships “work” should be similar to the way infant-caregiver relationships work. For the most part, research suggests that adult romantic relationships function in ways that are similar to infant-caregiver relationships. Naturalistic research on adults separating from their partners at an airport demonstrated that behaviors indicative of attachment, such as crying and clinging, were evident and that the way people expressed those behaviors was related to their attachment style. For example, while separating couples generally showed more attachment behavior than nonseparating couples, people with avoidant attachment styles showed much less attachment behavior.

There is also research that suggests that the same kinds of features that mothers desire in their babies are also desired by adults seeking a romantic partner. Studies conducted in numerous cultures suggest that the secure pattern of attachment in infancy is universally considered the most desirable pattern by mothers. Adults seeking long-term relationships identify responsive caregiving qualities, such as attentiveness, warmth, and sensitivity, as most attractive in potential dating partners. Despite the attractiveness of secure qualities, however, not all adults are paired with secure partners. Some evidence suggests that people end up in relationships with partners who confirm their existing beliefs about attachment relationships, even if those beliefs are negative.

Are Attachment Patterns Stable From infancy to Adulthood?

An important implication of attachment theory is that whether an adult is secure or insecure in his or her adult relationships may be a partial reflection of his or her attachment experiences in early childhood. Bowlby believed that the mental representations or working models (i.e., expectations, beliefs, “rules,” or “scripts” for behaving and thinking) that a child holds regarding relationships are a function of his or her caregiving experiences. For example, a secure child tends to believe that others will be there for him or her because previous experiences have led him or her to this conclusion. Once a child has developed such expectations, he or she will tend to seek out relational experiences that are consistent with those expectations and perceive others in a way that is colored by those beliefs. According to Bowlby, this kind of process should promote continuity in attachment patterns over the life course, although it is possible that a person’s attachment pattern will change if his or her relational experiences are inconsistent with his or her expectations. In short, if we assume that adult relationships are attachment relationships, it is possible that children who are secure as children will grow up to be secure in their romantic relationships.

Research shows that there is a modest degree of overlap between how secure people feel with their mothers, for example, and how secure they feel with their romantic partners. For example, among people who are securely attached to their mothers, over 65% of them are likely to feel secure with their romantic partners too. There is also evidence suggesting that people who are secure as children are more likely to grow up to become secure adults. Of secure adults, approximately 70% of them were classified as secure when they were 12 months of age in the strange situation. Taken together, these data suggest that there is a moderate degree of stability in attachment styles from infancy to adulthood, but that there is also plenty of room for people’s ongoing experiences to shape their security.

• Hazan, C., & Shaver, P. R. (1994). Attachment as an organizational framework for research on close relationships. Psychological Inquiry, 5, 1-22.

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14 Real-World Applications of Attachment Theory

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Attachment theory has its roots in an ethnocentric complex of ideas, longstanding in the United States, under the rubric of “intensive mothering.” Among these various approaches and programs, attachment theory has had an inordinate and wide-ranging influence on a wide range of professions concerned with children (family therapy, education, the legal system, and public policy, the medical profession, etc.) inside and outside the United States. This chapter looks critically at how attachment theory has been applied in a variety of contexts and discusses its influence on parenting. It examines the tension distortion that often results when research findings are translated into actual applications or programs, ignoring any particularities of cultural context. It describes how attachment theory has been used as the basis for child-rearing manuals and has influenced programs and policies more directly, to form legal decisions that affect families, as well as to develop public policy and programs. Specific attachment applications are reviewed and their validity questioned. Because child-rearing practices vary among cultures, the value systems that motivate these different practices must be recognized and accounted for when applications are developed and implemented. It concludes with a call for researchers to become proactive in rectifying misuses of attachment theory.

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Attachment Theory: What Is It?

Introduction, definitions of main concepts, overview of behavioral system, nature and nurture in attachment theory, adult attachment theory and influence of attachment, reference list.

Attachment, a psychological bond between people, is the central concept of the attachment theory in psychology. Psychologists coined the theory in the 1960s concerning the emotional development of children. One of the significant figures in formulating comprehensive attachment theory was Bowlby, who wrote a trilogy on the topic in 1969, 1972, and 1980. Attachment is both nature and nurture, where the person’s everyday surroundings influence the biological need for attachment – notably, upbringing, schooling, work environment, etc. Attachment is a vital behavior for a person’s mental development and well-being that correlates with a person’s overall health.

Definitions of central concepts and an overview of the behavioral system of attachment are necessary to fully understand how individuals form attachments and why they are beneficial. Ainsworth and Bell (1970, cited in Junewicz and Billick, 2018, p. 512) note that “attachment is affectional tie that one person or animal forms between himself and another specific one.” This tie is developed over time and often depends on productive communication between people. Furthermore, attachments, especially those formed at infant age, are continuous and withstand the distance. Infant attachment with a caregiver, also known as ‘primary,’ is essential for healthy development.

Attachment theory first and foremost explores the primary bond with a caregiver. Researchers believe that this bond influences all other attachments developed later in life. Many adult mental issues and deviations can be connected to childhood (Sroufe, 2016). Early bonding and experiences form a person’s worldview and social adaptability. Bowlby (1982, cited in Junewicz and Billick, 2018, p. 512) writes that “the infant and young child should experience a warm, intimate and continuous relationship” with their caregiver. A crucial factor in their bond is the fruitfulness of interactions, most pronounced by mutual enjoyment and the caregiver’s understanding of the child’s signals.

There are two significant modes of behavior for children in attachment theory. Keller (2016) describes them as intensive face-to-face exchange and spending time alone with oneself, i.e., developing attachments and emerging independence. Researchers further highlight four stages of attachment: (1) asocial or pre-attachment, (2) indiscriminate attachments, (3) discriminate or specific attachment, and (4) multiple attachments (McLeod, 2017). As the name suggests, pre-attachment is the period from birth to six weeks before a child shows any attachment (McLeod, 2017, para. 5). Then a child starts bonding with his caregivers but without particular preferences. This period lasts from six weeks to seven months, while “infants … can be easily comfortable by a regular caregiver” from three months (McLeod, 2017, para. 5). A child develops an attachment to their primary caregiver after seven months. It may lead to a “stranger fear” and “separation anxiety,” but they resolve eventually, and children bond with multiple caregivers by ten months (McLeod, 2017, para. 5). Although these stages are valid for most cases, there are some factors to consider.

Firstly, if a child does not have a primary caregiver, they might fail to develop strong bonds. Secondly, children are likely to develop a primary attachment with caregivers who understand and respond to their signals most efficiently (Cherry, 2019). Moreover, four possible behavioral patterns or styles relate to developed bonds. These attachment styles are (1) secure, (2) anxious or ambivalent, (3) avoidant, and (4) disorganized attachments (Cherry, 2019; Junewicz and Billick, 2018). The first style is the most beneficial as the primary caregiver is attentive to children’s signals and responds appropriately. The second, third, and fourth styles indicate some negligence, abuse, or conflicting behavior from caregivers (Cherry, 2019). These attachment styles can directly impact attachment styles used in adulthood, namely secure or insecure.

As with all critical theories in science, attachment theory is a subject of ongoing research and debate. Recent studies question a genetic factor in developing solid attachments during children’s early years. Junewicz and Billick (2018, p. 517) argue that attachment is “an inherently biological process heavily shaped by environmental and interpersonal factors,” but it does not require genetic relations. Elaborating on the biological basis for attachment, scientists have approached the topic with the help of neurobiology. The research in question shows that infants possess a “unique neural circuity and physiology” that enables quick attachments while also explaining caregivers’ caring impulses by biochemistry (Junewicz and Billick, 2018, pp. 513-514). That proves Bowlby’s initial suggestion that developing attachments is based on an instinct similar to people’s basic instincts.

Experiences and surroundings affect attachment like any other aspect of human life. It is a scientific fact that brain development depends on activities, and beneficial or detrimental experiences induce a change in biochemistry and brain structure (Junewicz and Billick, 2018). That is especially true for children as their brains are in a rapid cerebral growth phase during the early years of life. Stress and trauma can impede a child’s social development and adult’s social competence, leading to various psychological issues such as depression, anxiety, behavioral and emotional disorders, OCD, PTSD.

The attachment styles correspond to nurture external factors, while the urge for attachments, despite possible abuse or neglect, relates to nature. Responsiveness of caregivers and provision of security shape securely attached children (Sroufe, 2016). They wholly depend on their caregivers, feeling safety and joy while around them and being distressed alone (Junewicz and Billick, 2018; Cherry, 2019). Although securely attached children are distressed while alone, they know that their caregiver will eventually return. If a primary bond is not available regularly, children develop ambivalent attachment due to their inability to depend on their caregiver when needed (Cherry, 2019). That causes them fear and anxiety, which can escalate in adulthood. However, statistics show that this style is quite rare. Neglectful or abusive caregivers lead to an avoidant style when children do not have preferences between caregivers and do not rely on them (Cherry, 2019). Such individuals avoid their caregivers, keep to themselves, and often avoid socializing in adulthood. Finally, inconsistent caregiver’s behavior causes disorganized style, often comforting and discomforting consecutively (Cherry, 2019). As a result, children have chaotic behavioral patterns concerning their caregivers.

There are numerous empirical research studies on attachment transfer in children, adolescents, and adults. These studies show how peers influence each other’s attachments and behaviors and how attachment processes differ depending on age. Furthermore, it is evident that individuals are capable of several bonds, but there is an attachment hierarchy with the primary attachment on top. Most children bond with parents, usually mothers, as a primary attachment (Gillath, Karantzas, and Fraley, 2016). Then they transfer “attachment-related functions from parents to peers” as they age, shifting to their love interest or best friend or even back to parents in adulthood (Gillath et al., 2016, p. 39). Primary attachment transfer is understood as a nature-driven nurture-based process, that is, the instinct to bond and mate shaped by social and emotional conditions.

Adult attachment theory derives from base attachment theory and revolves around early years foundation for adult attachment patterns. Sroufe (2016) emphasizes six significant issues in human development from infancy to adulthood that influence individuals’ well-being based on their outcomes, either positive or negative. The first issue is the “formation of an effective attachment,” which defines the degree of success in resolving subsequent issues (Sroufe, 2016, p. 945). Psychologists believe that this formation of an attachment, effective or not, corresponds to adult behavioral patterns.

In 1987, Hazan and Shaver observed adults and created adult counterparts in attachment styles. With additions, these styles are as follows: (1) secure, (2) anxious-ambivalent or preoccupied, and (3) avoidant (fearful or dismissing) (Gillath et al., 2016, p. 14). Similar to infants, secure attachments indicate a healthy mentality and, therefore, relationships. Individuals can get close to others without obstacles, are comfortable with mutual dependence, and do not fear abandonment (Gillath et al., 2016). Anxious-ambivalent individuals demonstrate anxiety, being overdependent and often intrusive as they fear losing their partner, while avoidant individuals feel discomfort and distrust toward attachments with clear boundaries (Gillath et al., 2016). Despite obvious restrictions and the somewhat harmful nature of second and third styles, attachments are necessary as humans are social entities.

Bartholomew and Horowitz created a model of adult behavioral patterns which clearly shows how attachment correlates with mental health. Thus, low avoidance and anxiety inherent to secure attachment correspond to the highest social competency and a stable mentality (Gillath et al., 2016). Such individuals tend to be optimistic and have a healthy lifestyle with reliant ways to relieve stress. Low avoidance but high anxiety of preoccupied attachments leads to increased stress levels and sensitivity. Individuals have constant social fear of being insufficient and are overprotective and even obsessive with their bonds (Gillath et al., 2016). Low anxiety but high avoidance indicates an individual with low social competency who tends to isolate himself. While isolation is often comforting for such a person, it may connect to depressive symptoms and a homebound lifestyle. High anxiety and avoidance correspond to the lowest social competency. Individuals are anxious to make attachments and have high-stress levels, leading to loneliness, depression, and an unhealthy or destructive lifestyle. In conclusion, the biological need for attachment correlates with well-being and its importance, but behavioral patterns dictate positive or negative features of bonding.

Attachment is a biological need to make solid psychological bonds between people. Attachment theory and its adult counterpart explore to what degree attachment is nature or nurture and what behavioral styles exist concerning attachment. People can have multiple attachments, but they always have a primary attachment, and it changes during their life corresponding to their surroundings. The initial stages of attachment in children are pre-attachment, indiscriminate, discriminate, and multiple attachments. These stages are biological, while attachment styles are developed over time depending on caregivers’ behavior and efficiency. Infant styles can be secure or insecure, and they are similar for adult individuals because infant attachments influence those made in adolescence and adulthood. The secure pattern leads to well-being and a healthy lifestyle and relationships. However, insecure styles relate to high-stress levels, psychological issues, and unhealthy and isolative lifestyles.

Cherry, K. (2019) What is attachment theory? Web.

Gillath, O., Karantzas, G.C. and Fraley, R.C. (2016) Adult attachment: a concise introduction to theory and research . Cambridge: Academic Press.

Junewicz, A. and Billick, S.B. (2018) ‘Nature, nurture, and attachment: implications in light of expanding definitions of parenthood,’ Psychiatric Quarterly , 89(3), pp. 511-519. Web.

Keller, H. (2016) ‘Attachment: a pancultural need but a cultural construct’, Current Opinion in Psychology , 8, pp. 59-63. Web.

McLeod, S. (2017) Attachment theory . Web.

Sroufe, L.A. (2016) ‘The place of attachment in development,’ in Cassidy, J. and Shaver, P. R. (eds.) Handbook of Attachment: Theory, Research, and Clinical Applications , New York: Guilford Press, pp. 997-1011. Web.

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Attachment is the emotional bond that forms between infant and caregiver , and it is how the helpless infant gets primary needs met. It then becomes an engine of subsequent social, emotional, and cognitive development. An infant's early social experience stimulates the growth of the brain and can influence the formation of stable relationships with others.

Attachment provides the infant's first coping system; it sets up a mental representation of the caregiver in an infant's mind, which can be summoned as a comforting mental presence in difficult moments. Attachment allows an infant to separate from the caregiver without distress and explore the world around her.

Neuroscientists believe that attachment is such a primal need that there are networks of neurons in the brain dedicated to setting it in motion in the first place and a hormone — oxytocin —that fosters the process.

Attachment styles are not immutable, they can change substantially over time , research suggests, and may differ from relationship to relationship. Enduring a terrible relationship might lead to a less secure attachment orientation; a history of supportive relationships may lead to increased security. Therapy —providing a safe connection and an opportunity to learn relational skills— may also be helpful .

• Early Attachment
• Attachment Styles

Attachment develops through everyday interactions as a caregiver attends to an infant's needs. The bond between infant and caregiver is usually so well established before the end of the first year of life that it is possible to test the nature and quality of the bond at that time.

As a result of their work with many child-caregiver pairs, researchers have described several basic patterns of attachment. In their studies, researchers briefly separate young children from their caregiver and observe their behavior before and after they are reunited with the caregiver.

• Children with a secure attachment may be distressed upon separation but warmly welcome the caregiver back through eye contact and hug-seeking.
• Anxious-resistant attachment describes a child who is frightened by separation and continues to display anxious behavior once the caregiver returns.
• Avoidant attachment denotes a child who reacts fairly calmly to a parent’s separation and does not embrace their return.
• Disorganized attachment is manifest in odd or ambivalent behavior toward a caregiver upon return—approaching then turning away from or even hitting the caregiver—and may be the result of childhood trauma .

A majority of children tend to show “secure” attachment behavior in studies, while others seem “insecure,” showing one of the other patterns.

Secure attachment in children has been theorized to result from sensitive, responsive caregiving , and insecurity from its lack. While there is evidence that parenting can influence attachment security , it’s also clear that other factors—including genetics—play a formative role .

British psychoanalyst John Bowlby proposed that children’s attachment behaviors (such as showing distress at a parent’s absence) are part of an evolved behavioral system that helps ensure they are cared for. Psychologist Mary Ainsworth later began to experimentally study variations in how children respond to separation from parents. Others have expanded attachment theory to adult relationships .

Abuse and trauma in childhood may hinder the development of secure attachment and may be predictive of attachment insecurity later in life . In cases of severe neglect or mistreatment, a child may develop reactive attachment disorder (RAD) , characterized by difficulty forming a bond with caregivers.

Attachment security and behaviors have been studied in adult relationships, and attachment-related patterns that differ between individuals are commonly called "attachment styles." There seems to be an association between a person’s attachment characteristics early in life and in adulthood, but the correlations are far from perfect.

Many adults feel secure in their relationships and comfortable depending on others (echoing “secure” attachment in children). Others tend to feel anxious about their connection with close others—or prefer to avoid getting close to them in the first place. Studies of persons with borderline personality disorder , characterized by a longing for intimacy and a hypersensitivity to rejection, have shown a high prevalence and severity of insecure attachment.

Attachment styles in adulthood have labels similar to those used to describe attachment patterns in children:

• Anxious-preoccupied (high anxiety , low avoidance)
• Dismissing-avoidant (low anxiety, high avoidance)
• Fearful-avoidant (high anxiety, high avoidance)

However, attachment styles may be better thought of as dimensional, where a person rates as relatively high, low, or somewhere in the middle in their levels of attachment-related anxiety and attachment-related avoidance. Also, a person may not exhibit the same kind of attachment pattern in every close relationship.

A person may have high attachment anxiety if she worries a lot about being abandoned or uncared for. This is  measurable by one’s agreement with statements such as “I worry about being alone” and “I often worry that romantic partners don’t really love me." Someone high in attachment avoidance likely worries about other people getting “too close.”

People with a secure attachment style tend to fare better on outcomes such as relationship stability and sexual satisfaction , research suggests, and may be less likely to engage in disruptive acts such as partner surveillance or harmful sexual behavior .

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Home — Essay Samples — Psychology — Attachment Theory — Critical Analysis Of The Attachment Theory And Its Role In The Relationship Science

Critical Analysis of The Attachment Theory and Its Role in The Relationship Science

• Categories: Attachment Theory

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Published: Jun 9, 2021

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Introduction, works cited.

• Ainsworth, M. D. (1969). Object relations, dependency, and attachment: A theoretical review of the infant-mother relationship. Child Development, 40(4), 969-1025.
• Ainsworth, M. D., Bell, S. M., & Stayton, D. J. (1974). Infant-mother attachment and social development: Socialization as a product of reciprocal responsiveness to signals. In M. P. Richards (Ed.), The integration of a child into a social world (pp. 99-135). Cambridge University Press.
• Bartholomew, K. (1990). Avoidance of intimacy: An attachment perspective. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 7(2), 147-178.
• Bartholomew, K., & Horowitz, L. M. (1991). Attachment styles among young adults: A test of a four-category model. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 61(2), 226-244.
• Berscheid, E. (1999). The greening of relationship science. American Psychologist, 54(4), 260-266.
• Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and loss: Vol. 1. Attachment. Basic Books.
• Bradbury, T. N. (2002). Research on the nature and determinants of marital satisfaction: A decade in review. Journal of Marriage and Family, 64(4), 964-980.
• Butzer, B., & Campbell, L. (2008). Adult attachment, sexual satisfaction, and relationship satisfaction: A study of married couples. Personal Relationships, 15(1), 141-154.
• Fincham, F. D., & Beach, S. R. (2010). Marriage in the new millennium: A decade in review. Journal of Marriage and Family, 72(3), 630-649.
• Hazan, C., & Shaver, P. (1987). Romantic love conceptualized as an attachment process. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52(3), 511-524.

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The Implications of Attachment Theory in Counseling and Psychotherapy

Over the past decade, researchers have found that Bowlby ’s attachment theory (1973, 1988) has important implications for counseling and psychotherapy (Cassidy & Shaver, 1999, Lopez, 1995; Lopez & Brennan, 2000; Mallinckrodt, 2000). Attachment theory is a theory of affect regulation and interpersonal relationships. When individuals have caregivers who are emotionally responsive, they are likely to develop a secure attachment and a positive internal working model of self and others.

Currently, adult attachment could be described in terms of two dimensions, adult attachment anxiety and adult attachment avoidance. Adult attachment anxiety is conceptualized as the fear of interpersonal rejection and abandonment , excessive needs for approval from others, negative view of self, and hyper-activation of affect regulation strategies in which the person over-reacts to negative feelings as a mean to gain others’ comfort and support (Mikulincer, Shaver, & Pereg, 2003). Conversely, adult attachment avoidance is characterized by fear of intimacy, excessive need for self-reliance, reluctance for self-disclosure, negative view of others, and deactivation of affect regulation strategy in which the person tries to avoid negative feelings or withdraw from intimate relationships (Mikulincer et al., 2003).

Bowlby (1988) acknowledged that attachment patterns are difficult to change in adulthood even though it is not impossible. Studies related to examining mediators of the relation between attachment and mental health outcomes are particularly important for counseling and psychotherapy because mediators can be potential interventions to help individuals relieve their distress. In addition, identifying the mediators can help individuals reduce the impact of attachment patterns without having to change the patterns, which is a more difficult task (e.g., Bowlby, 1988). Below are some suggestions from empirical studies in this area.

First, attachment theory serves as a solid foundation for understanding the development of ineffective coping strategies and the underlying dynamics of a person’s emotional difficulties. Clinicians can help those with attachment anxiety and avoidance understand how past experiences with caregivers or significant others have shaped their coping patterns and how these patterns work to protect them initially but later contribute to their experiences of distress (Lopez, Mauricio, Gormley, Simko, & Berger, 2001; Wei, Heppner, & Mallinckrodt, 2003).

For example, those with attachment anxiety may learn that if they are “perfect,” they will be more likely to gain others’ love and acceptance (Wei, Heppner, Russell, & Young, 2006; Wei, Mallinckrodt, Russell, & Abraham, 2004). Conversely, those with attachment avoidance may drive themselves to be perfect in order to cover up their hidden sense of imperfections. They may think, “If I am perfect, no one will hurt me” (Flett, Hewitt, Oliver, & Macdonald, 2002). Unfortunately, perfectionism is associated with greater depressive symptoms (e.g., Chang, 2002, Hewitt & Flett, 1991). Therefore, potential clinical interventions can focus on modifying these individuals’ perfectionistic tendencies.

Second, clinicians can help those with attachment anxiety and avoidance find alternative ways to meet their unmet needs. Most people who seek help want to learn how to cope with dysfunction in their daily life and modify their dysfunctional or ineffective coping strategies. However, merely focusing on modifying the dysfunctional coping strategies does not guarantee that people will eventually cope well.

In particular, people have acquired and continued to use dysfunctional strategies because these have served an adaptive function by helping individuals meet their basic psychological needs such as connection, competence , and autonomy in the past. For example, people’s motivation to be perfect may stem from their attachment figures’ failure to meet basic psychological needs. In other words, some individuals may wish to be perfect because during their development, they have learned that others will like them (i.e., fulfilling a need for connections), view them as capable (i.e., fulfilling a need for competence), and respect them (i.e., fulfilling a need for autonomy) if they are perfect. Unless these individuals’ unmet basic needs are satisfied by other means and learn other strategies, altering these individuals’ maladaptive strategies may be limited in terms of effectiveness.

Also, if individuals believe their maladaptive strategies are the only ways to meet their psychological or emotional needs, then they may still choose not to give up these strategies, despite the negative mental health outcomes associated with these strategies. Therefore, helping people find alternative ways to meet their unmet needs is critical to solving their problems thoroughly. Wei, Shaffer, Young, and Zakalik (2005) provided empirical evidence that those with attachment anxiety and avoidance can decrease their shame, depression, and loneliness through meeting their basic psychological needs for connection, competence, and autonomy.

Therefore, clinicians not only need to focus on changing maladaptive coping strategies, but also need to understand the underlying unmet needs that are satisfied by the use of these strategies as well as help individuals learn alternative ways to satisfy their psychological or emotional needs.

Third, clinicians need to know that people with different insecure attachment patterns (i.e., anxiety and avoidance patterns) may use different coping strategies to manage their life difficulties, which are associated with increased distress. For example, consistent with the prediction of attachment theory, those with attachment anxiety tend to use emotional reactivity (i.e., a hyper-activation strategy in which the person over-reacts to negative feelings) as a coping strategy, which is associated with distress. Conversely, those with attachment avoidance are inclined to use emotional cutoff (i.e., a deactivation strategy in which the person tries to avoid negative feelings) strategy, which is related to increased distress (Wei, Vogel, Ku, & Zakalik, 2005).

Fourth, Mallinckrodt (2000) suggested providing counter-complimentary interventions when working with individuals with high attachment anxiety and avoidance. That is, counseling intervention can focus on breaking clients’ old patterns. For example, Wei, Ku, and Liao (2007) discovered that those with attachment anxiety, because of their negative view of self, can increase their well-being through enhancing their self-compassion.

Gilbert and Irons (2005) suggested that writing a compassionate letter to the self or making an audiotape filled with compassionate thoughts or self-soothing statements can increase self-compassion. Also, those with high attachment anxiety can imagine how they felt when they were being taken care of by therapists or supportive others who represent alternative attachment figures. Eventually, those with high attachment anxiety can learn to be their own attachment figures (i.e., be their own parent) to provide self-compassion or self-care .

Conversely, because of their negative view of others and the deactivated attachment system (e.g., actively keeping distance from others or suppressing emotions), those with high attachment avoidance may gradually become less able to understand others and lose touch with others’ feelings or thoughts (Wei et al., 2007). The counter-complimentary strategy is thus to help them learn new ways to react empathically to others’ emotional experiences. Pistole (1989, 1999) proposed the concept of care-giving from attachment theory as a metaphor for the counseling relationship and process.

In other words, therapists can be empathetic to individuals with high attachment avoidance in order to re-parent them. The therapists thus serve as role models for them so that these individuals can eventually learn to be empathetic to others, which may improve their subjective well-being.

Another study found that due to their negative view of self, assisting those with high attachment anxiety to increase their level of social self-efficacy (i.e., a strategy to increase their positive view of self) is an important strategy to decrease their loneliness and future depression. Conversely, those with high attachment avoidance tended to be reluctant for self-disclosure and hold a negative view of others. For these individuals, the study confirmed that counter-complimentary interventions which enhances their comfort level of self-disclosing to others (i.e., a strategy to decrease their reluctance in self-disclosure and increase their closeness with others) is an important strategy to decrease their loneliness and future depression (Wei, Russell, & Zakalik, 2005).

In summary, attachment theory can be used to understand the development of coping patterns or relationship patterns and the underlying dynamics of a person’s emotional difficulties. Clinicians not only can help those with high attachment anxiety and avoidance to modify their ineffective coping strategy, but also can help them understand the underlying unmet needs that are satisfied by their ineffective coping strategy and learn alternative ways to satisfy their psychological or emotional needs (e.g., a need to connection, competence, and autonomy). Moreover, clinicians need to know that people with different insecure attachment patterns (i.e., anxiety and avoidance patterns) may use different coping strategies to manage their life difficulties. It is recommended that clinicians provide counter-complimentary intervention to help break clients’ old patterns.

Meifen Wei, Ph.D.

Cite This Article

Wei, M. (2008, October). The implications of attachment theory in counseling and psychotherapy. [Web article]. Retrieved from https://societyforpsychotherapy.org/the-implications-of-attachment-theory-in-counseling-and-psychotherapy

Bowlby, J. (1973). Attachment and loss . Vol. 2: Separation. New York: Basic Books.

Bowlby, J. (1988). A secure base: Parent–child attachment and healthy human development .  New York: Basic Books.

Cassidy, J., & Shaver, P. R. (1999). Handbook of attachment: Theory, research, and clinical applications . New York: Guilford Press.

Flett, G. L., Hewitt, P. L., Oliver, J. M., & Macdonald, S. (2002). Perfectionism in children and their parents: A developmental analysis. In G. L. Flett & P. L. Hewitt (Eds.),  Perfectionism: Theory, research, and treatment (pp. 89–132). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Gilbert, P., & Irons, C. (2005). Focused therapies and compassionate mind training for shame and self-attacking. In P. Gilbert (Ed.), Compassion: Conceptualizations, research and use in psychotherapy (pp. 263-325). New York, NY: Routledge.

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Lopez, F. G., & Brennan, K. A. (2000). Dynamic processes underlying adult attachment organization: Toward an attachment theoretical perspective on the healthy and effective self. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 47 , 283–301.

Lopez, F. G., Mauricio, A. M., Gormley, B., Simko, T., & Berger, E. (2001). Adult attachment orientations and college student distress: The mediating role of problem coping styles.  Journal of Counseling & Development, 79 , 459–464.

Mallinckrodt, B. (2000). Attachment, social competencies, social support, and interpersonal process in psychotherapy. Psychotherapy Research, 10 , 239-266.

Mikulincer, M., Shaver, P. R., & Pereg, D. (2003). Attachment theory and affect regulation: The dynamic development, and cognitive consequences of attachment-related strategies.  Motivation and Emotion, 27 , 77-102.

Pistole, M. C. (1989). Attachment: Implications for counselors. Journal of Counseling & Development, 68 , 190-193.

Pistole, M. C. (1999). Caregiving in attachment relationships: A perspective for counselors.   Journal of Counseling & Development, 77 , 437-446.

Wei, M., Heppner, P. P., & Mallinckrodt, B. (2003). Perceived coping as a mediator between attachment and psychological distress: A structural equation modeling approach. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 50 , 438-447.

Wei, M., Heppner, P. P., Russell, D. W., & Young, S. K. (2006). Maladaptive perfectionism and ineffective coping as mediators between attachment and subsequent depression: A prospective analysis. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 53 , 67-79.

Wei, M., Ku, T.-Y., & Liao, K. Y.-H. (2007, August). Attachment, empathy to self and others, and subjective well-being . Poster presented at the 115th annual convention of the American Psychological Association, San Francisco, CA.

Wei, M., Mallinckrodt, B., Larson, L. A., & Zakalik, R. A. (2005). Attachment, depressive symptoms, and validation from self versus others. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 52 , 368-377.

Wei, M., Mallinckrodt, B., Russell, D. & Abraham, T. (2004). Maladaptive perfectionism as a mediator and moderator between attachment and depressive mood. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 51 , 201-212.

Wei, M., Russell, D. W., & Zakalik, R. A. (2005). Adult attachment, social self-efficacy, comfort with self-disclosure, loneliness, and subsequent depression for freshmen college students:  A longitudinal design. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 52 , 602-614.

Wei, M., Shaffer, P. A., Young, S. K., & Zakalik, R. A. (2005). Adult attachment, shame, depression, and loneliness: The mediation role of basic psychological needs satisfaction.   Journal of Counseling Psychology, 52 , 591-601.

Wei, M., Vogel, D. L., Ku, T., & Zakalik, R. A. (2005). Adult attachment, affect regulation, negative mood, and interpersonal problems: The mediating role of emotional reactivity and emotional cutoff. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 52 , 14-24.

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