Attached to love...

I really enjoyed the informative article below.. The topic is usually goes humble in most people’s minds.. part as denial of being motivated by their infant experience.. part as feeling proud about the obtained degrees which should make them better persons, regardless.. and part of complex psychological order drives them to look in opposite direction to who really they are.. Humane being has its magical attraction of being diverse and sometimes so complex to understand..!!

Filed under: attachment, social relations — Tags: adult attachment, ainsworth, attachment, bowlby, harlow, love —

By Cecilia Solis
If you were to ask a girl to describe the perfect man, her answer would most likely be something along the lines of- caring, loving, comforting, supporting, sensitive, and go...od to his mother. These are often the top qualities sought out it in man but do we really know where they come from? Are they adaptive traits that give humans a selective advantage in finding sexual partners? Or does something else help to determine them?

Harry Harlow was one of the first psychologists to suggest the idea that contact comfort has always served the animal kingdom as a motivating agent for affectionate responses. The value and influence of a secure base was further explored by John Bowlby who developed the theory of attachment (Meyers, 2007). The theory of attachment tries to understand the intense distress experienced by infants who are separated from their parents. From an ethological perspective Bowlby concluded that crying and searching were adaptive responses to a separation from the attachment figure associated with protection and care- giving. His colleague Mary Ainsworth was influential in expanding the basic understanding of attachment behaviors through her study of infant-parent separations. Her research showed that there are three different categories of infant-parent attachments: secure, anxious resistant, and anxious avoidant. Not all infant-pair bonds, however, can be classified into these categories. Presently these categories have been modified and expanded by different researchers to describe attachment in terms of romantic partners. Ainsworth demonstrated that these differences were connected to the quality of the parent-infant interactions during the first year of life. But just how much of an effect does the quality of early life attachments affect an individual?

Bowlby for example believed that attachment characterizes human experience from “the cradle to the grave”. His theory that adult relationships could be attachment relationships was not empirically tested until later. Research on adult attachment was conducted by Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver in 1987. Their study explores the association between differences in adult attachment and the way people think about their romantic and filial relationships.

Hazan and Shaver (1987) tested the attachment-theory approach to romantic love through diverse questionnaire studies. The first questionnaire known as the “love quiz” sought to measure the three-attachment styles by translating Ainsworth’s descriptions of infants into terms of adult romantic partners. The quiz asked individuals about their most important relationship, whether it was current or past, about their childhood relationships with their parents and about how they generally felt in relationships. One portion of the questionnaire asked individuals to classify themselves as avoidant, anxious/ambivalent, or secure in their most important romantic relationship by having to choose from fairly simple descriptions of the three attachment styles. The resulting figures from the study were comparable to proportions reported in other studies of infant-mother attachment (62% secure, 23% avoidant, 15% anxious/ ambivalent) displaying a relative pervasiveness of attachment patterns in adulthood similar to those in childhood.

Hazan and Shaver found that adults who were secure in their romantic relationships were likely to report having had affectionate, caring, and accepting relationships with their parents. Other research on adult attachment has shown that secure adults tend to be more satisfied in their relationships than insecure adults. They are also more likely to seek support from their partners and to provide the same support in situations of distress. It is possible however for a person’s early attachment pattern to change or to show inconsistencies over time. Hazan and Shaver concluded that romantic relationships, like infant-parent relationships are closely-related forms of attachments. R. Chrish Fraley also found a fair degree of overlap in individual’s self-report measures of their current attachment style both with a parent and with a current romantic partner. He found correlations ranging from .20 to .50 (small to moderate) between the two kinds of attachments. So, although on a different behavioral dimension, our experiences in childhood can influence our attachment styles as adults (Fraley & Shaver, 2000). It might not be such a bad idea thus, to ask potential partners about what kind of relationship they have with their parents.

References:
Fraley, C. (2004). A brief Overview of Attachment Theory and Research. Retrieved february 27, 2009 from http://www.psych.uiuc.edu/~rcfraley/attachment.htm.
Carey, B. (June 29, 2004). Addicted to Mother’s Love: It’s Biology, Stupid. The New York Times. Retrieved February 27, 2009 from http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F06E5D91438F93AA15755C0A9629C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=2.
Hazan, C., Shaver, P. (1987). Romantic Love Conceptualized as an Attachment Process. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Vol 52(3), pp. 511-52. Retrieved March 27, 2009 from psycINFO (CSA) database.Read more