The Study of Attachment
We are born with immature brains and cling to our mothers long after the umbilical cord is cut. Our caretakers are the most salient aspects of our new world, becoming the central axis of our early learning. The first things we learn about our caretakers are how good they are at making us feel calm and safe. Their skills as parents will depend on their empathic abilities, emotional maturity, and how they themselves were parented as children. Because these traits are embedded within implicit social memory and transferred to the same systems in their children, caretaking links the childhood experiences of parents and children. In this same way a parent's unconscious becomes a child's first reality. Young social brains are not small versions of adult brains but rather are optimally designed to react to the attachment behavior of caregivers (Moriceau & Sullivan, 2005).
Attachment schemas are a category of implicit social memory shared by our early experience with caretakers. Our best guess is that these schemas reflect the learning histories that shape experience-dependent networks connecting the orbital, frontal, insula, and cingulate cortices with the amygdala and the many neural networks regulating arousal, affect, and emotion. It is within these neural networks that interactions with caretakers are paired with feelings of safety and warmth, or anxiety and fear. How attachment schemas are established has widespread ramifications for both our children and their children.
Positive attachment schemas enhance the formation of a biochemical environment in the brain conducive to regulation, growth, and optimal immunological functioning. Negative attachment schemas have the opposite effect, correlating with higher frequencies of physical and emotional illness throughout life. Insecure attachment schema are correlated with decreases in hippocampal cell concentration hypothesized to be related to the neurotoxic effects of higher sustained levels of cortisol (Quirin et al., 2010). The first step for attachment researchers was to develop strategies for reliable measurement of interactive behaviors. They began by going into the homes of young families to observe the ways in which mothers and children interact in their natural setting. These observations eventually led to the development of four broad categories of mother-child attachment patterns: (1) free-autonomous, (2) dismissing, (3) enmeshed/ambivalent, and (4) disorganized (Ainsworth et al., 1978; Main & Solomon, 1986). Each of these categories came to describe characteristics of mothers' behaviors, attitudes, and styles of communication with their children.
The free-autonomous mothers were available, sensitive, and perceptive of their children's feelings and needs. These mothers were seen as effective in their interactions with their children. Dismissing mothers were rated as unavailable, rejecting, and distant. Ambivalent mothers demonstrated inconsistent availability fluctuating with over-involvement with their children. Mothers in the disorganized category appeared to create conflictual situations for their children. They often seemed to be both frightened by and frightening to their children. Many of these mothers were subsequently shown to be suffering from trauma and/or unresolved grief.
Measuring Attachment II-Abandonment, Stress, and Reunion
The next stage of exploration was to see if the children of these mothers demonstrated different kinds of attachment behaviors. The research method developed to study the attachment behavior of children was the Infant Strange Situation (ISS). The ISS takes place in the laboratory and consists of first placing a mother and child in a room and allowing them some time to settle in. After a while a stranger joins them, usually one of the researchers, who goes in and takes a seat off to the side. After a period of time, the mother exits the room, leaving the child alone with the stranger, and later returns. When the mother returns, she sits back in her chair, allowing the child to respond in his or her own way. This method was chosen based on Bowlby's experience with mother and child primates in the wild. Bowlby observed that the absence of the mother combined with the presence of a stranger would create anxiety and evoke a distress call from the child (Ainsworth et al., 1978). This situation was chosen based on the assumption that attachment schema would most likely manifest under stress.
The ISS rates reunion behavior, which is the child’s reaction to the mother upon the mother’s return. Researchers observed these interactions with some questions in mind:
Does the child seek comfort from the mother or does the child ignore her?
Does the child go over to the mother or keep his or her distance?
Is the child easily comforted or does he or she have a hard time being soothed?
Does the child go back to play, or remain anxious, clingy, or withdrawn?
From these observations, four categories of behavior emerged: (1) secure, (2) avoidant, (3) anxious-ambivalent, and (4) insecure-disorganized. Strong correlations were found between these categories of children’s' reunion behavior and the attachment styles of their mothers. Children rated as secure - about 70% of the sample - generally belonged to mothers rated as free autonomous. When their mothers returned, these children sought proximity, were quickly soothed, and soon returned to exploration and play. These children seemed to expect that their mothers would be attentive, helpful, and encouraging of their continued autonomy. They had learned that when they were distressed, interacting with their mothers would help them to regain a sense of security. Securely attached children seem to have internalized their mothers as a source of comfort, using them to feel safe while they are still able to seek stimulation elsewhere (Stern, 1995).
Avoidantly attached children tended to have dismissing mothers and, in turn, ignored them when they came back into the room. They might simply glance over to mother or would avoid eye contact all together. Despite their anxiety about the stranger, these children appeared to lack an expectation that their mothers would be a source of soothing and seemed to decide it would be easier to regulate their own emotions. They may have learned that whatever stress they may be experiencing may well be compounded by their mothers' inattention or dismissal.
Children rated as anxious-ambivalent sought proximity but were not easily soothed and were slow to return to play. Anxious-ambivalent children, often of enmeshed or inconsistently available mothers, seem to have their stress worsened by their mothers' distress. Their slow return to play and continued emotional dysregulation may reflect the internalization of their mothers’ anxiety and their lack of a safe haven. These children tended to be clingier and engaged in less exploration of the room.
The children rated as disorganized were interesting yet sad to observe. Upon reunion, these children often engaged in chaotic and even self-injurious behaviors: they would spin, fall down, hit themselves, and did not know what to do to calm themselves. They would be overcome by trancelike expressions, freeze in place, and maintain uncomfortable bodily postures. It was as if they were attempting to simultaneously approach the mother for security and avoid her for safety. The resulting inner turmoil would dysregulate these children to the point that their adaptation, coping, and even their motor abilities appeared to crumble.
It was later found that these chaotic behaviors were often demonstrated by children with mothers who were suffering from unresolved grief or trauma. These mothers suffered from a variety of post-traumatic like symptoms and employed dissociative and other primitive defenses as coping strategies. It appears that the chaos of the mothers' internal world can be witnessed in the child's behavior even when it is not evident in the behavior of the mother. Consistent with this is the finding that frightening behavior on the part of a mother, regardless of the mother’s attachment style, can result in disorganized types of behavior (Schuengel et al., 1999). Dismissing mothers tend to minimize emotions in themselves and their children while unresolved mothers experience the most regulatory instability (DeOliveira et al., 2005).
Attachment in infancy is usually conceptualized as relationship specific while attachment in adulthood is thought of as a general aspect of character. Early attachment patterns may become generalized and self-perpetuating because of their impact on our neurobiology, our ability to regulate our emotions, and the expectations we have of ourselves, others, and the world. The sensory, emotional, and behavioral systems influenced by early attachment experiences can shape our brains in ways which make the past a model for creating the future.
We have learned a great deal from attachment research: how our primitive bonding instincts regulate anxiety, how categories of attachment reflect a parent’s behavior and a child’s reaction to stress, and how attachment schema are carried into adulthood, affecting our choice of partners, the nature of our relationships, and the way we parent our own children. The enthusiasm we have about the power of attachment categories to explain emotional development often fails to acknowledge the considerable fluctuation of attachment styles over time. In our search for a straightforward explanation of intimate human relationships, it is easy to overlook the instability of attachment.
In an attempt to support the predictive power of attachment schema, fluctuation and change are often attributed to methodological limitations or small sample sizes. We seldom consider that attachment schema should change because we tend to think of them as a personality trait. In animal research, maternal attention to pups was mediated by the environment in ways that made pups fit better into the environment being experienced by the mother. Perhaps because our brains are so much more complex, it takes greater effort and time for us to change, but the role of attachment may be essentially the same in humans.
This is an excerpt from Dr. Cozolino’s book The Neuroscience of Human Relationships.