John Bowlby Attachment Theory

☆ What is Attachment?

A strong & affectionate tie we have, with special people in our lives gives us pleasure whenever we interact with them and provides a sense of comfort in times of stress.

Through psychoanalytic and behaviorist perspective, feeding can be seen as a central context, where the care-giver and babies develop attachment.

☆ Attachment Theory

First relationship of a child is a love relationship that will have profound everlasting influence on an individual’s mental development.

Mothers (Caregivers) who are available and responsive, establish a sense of security in the infants such that they know that the caregiver is dependable, creating a secure base for the child to explore the world.
Attachments must build a good foundation for being able to form other secure relationships.

☆ Components of Attachment

Safe Haven: A child can return to the caregiver for comfort and soothing whenever the child feels threatened or afraid.
Secure Base: A secure and dependable base is provided by the caretaker for the child to explore the world.
Proximity Maintenance: The child strives to stay around the caregiver, which provides safety.
Separation Distress: The child will become upset and distressed during the separation from the caretaker.

☆ BOWLBY’S ETHOLOGICAL THEORY

Ethological Theory of Attachment recognizes infant’s emotional tie to the caregiver as an evolved response that promotes survival.
John Bowlby induced this idea for infant-caregiver bond.
He retained the psychoanalyst idea that the quality of attachment with the caregiver has profound implication for child’s security and capacity to form trustworthy relationship. He said ‘FEEDING IS NOT THE BASIS FOR ATTACHMENT’.
The central theme of this theory is that the mothers who are available and responsive to their infant’s needs create a sense of security among their children. Knowing the dependability of the caretaker on them creates a secure base for the child to then explore the world.

Please note that the ages below are just in one of our groupings. However, attachments occur at ALL ages but the first attachments determine how the successive ones go! So when you are doing your attachments, you must show how they connected to your first attachment.

☆ 4 PHASES OF ATTACHMENT DEVELOPMENT

Babies are born with behaviors like crying, babbling and laughing to gain adult attention & on the other side, adults are biologically programmed to respond to their signals.

He viewed the first 3 years as the most sensitive period for the attachment.

According to Bowlby, following are the 4 phases of attachment:

Pre attachment Phase (Birth – 6 Weeks)
“Attachment in Making” Phase ( 6 Weeks – 6 to 8 Months)
“Clear Cut” Attachment Phase ( 6-8 Months to 18 Months-2 Years)
Formation Of Reciprocal Relationship (18 Months – 2 Years and on)

1. PRE ATTACHMENT PHASE (BIRTH -6 WEEKS)

The innate signals attract the caregiver (grasping, gazing, crying, smiling while looking into the adult’s eyes).
When the baby responds in a positive manner ,the caregivers remain close by.
The infants get encouraged by the adults to remain close as it comforts them.
Babies recognize the mother’s fragrance, voice and face.
They are not yet attached to the mother and don’t mind being left with unfamiliar adults as they have no fear of strangers.

2. “ATTACHMENT IN MAKING” PHASE (6 Weeks – 6 to 8 Months)

Infants responds differently to familiar caregivers than to strangers. The baby would smile more to the mother and babble to her and will become quiet more quickly, whenever picked by the mother.
The infant learns that his/her actions affect the behavior of those around.
They tend to develop a “Sense of Trust” where they expect the response of caregiver, when signalled.
They do not protest when they get separated from the caregiver.

3. “CLEAR CUT” ATTACHMENT PHASE (6-8 Months to 18 Months -2 Years)

The attachment to familiar caregiver becomes evident.
Babies show “separation anxiety”, and get upset when an adult on whom they rely, leaves them.
This anxiety increases b/w 6 -15 months, and its occurrence depends on the temperament and the context of the infant and the behavior of the adult.
The child would show signs of distress, in case the mother leaves, but with the supportive and sensitive nature of the caretaker, this anxiety could be reduced.

4. FORMATION OF RECIPROCAL RELATIONSHIP (18 Months – 2 Years and on)

With rapid growth in representation and language by 2 years, the toddler is able to understand few factors that influence parent’s coming and going, and can predict their return. Thus leading to a decline in separation protests.

The child can negotiate with the caregiver to alter his/her goals via requests and persuasions.
Child depends less on the caregiver along with the age.

SOURCE: https://studiousguy.com/john-bowlby-attachment-theory/

How cute things hijack our brains and drive behaviour

July 4, 2016 11.11am EDT

Authors

Morten L. Kringelbach
Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow in Neuroscience, University of Oxford
Alan Stein
Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, University of Oxford
Eloise Stark
PhD candidate in Psychiatry, University of Oxford

Disclosure statement

Morten L. Kringelbach receives funding from the ERC.

Alan Stein receives funding from: MRC UK NIHR Wellcome Trust Grand Challenges Canada Barclay foundation ERC DFID UK

Eloise Stark receives funding from the MRC.

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University of Oxford provides funding as a member of The Conversation UK.

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What is the cutest thing you have ever seen? Chances are it involves a baby, a puppy or another adorable animal. And chances are it is forever imprinted on your mind. But what exactly is this powerful attractive force and how is it expressed in the brain?

Together with our colleagues Marc Bornstein from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and Catherine Alexander from the University of Oxford, we have reviewed the existing research on the topic and discovered that cuteness is more than something purely visual. It works by involving all the senses and strongly attracting our attention by sparking rapid brain activity. In fact, cuteness may be one of the strongest forces that shape our behaviour – potentially making us more compassionate.

Babies are designed to jump to the front of the queue – our brain-processing queue, that is. They get ahead of everything else going on in our minds, which makes them difficult to ignore. They also grab our attention even before we have time to recognise that they are babies. They do it by being cute.

Babies not only look cute, with their big eyes, chubby cheeks and button noses, their infectious laughs and captivating scent also make them sound and smell cute. Their soft skin and chubby limbs may even make them feel cute. Together, these aesthetic qualities act as a crucial mechanism that enables babies to attract us through all our senses. Babies need constant attention and care to survive, and cuteness is one of the main ways they get it.

We find infants and baby animals (left) cuter than adults (right). Cuteness can be further manipulated by exaggerating the roundness of the face, high forehead and big eyes, small nose, and mouth (high vs low). Frontiers/Getty images, Author provided

This nurturing instinct could even be driving our wider perception of cuteness – research has shown that we typically feel affection for animals with juvenile features. Dogs, for instance, have been bred to have similar features to babies, with big eyes, bulging craniums and recessed chins. They are also soft to touch. Whether we want it or not, we may also feel a certain affection for adults and even inanimate objects with infant-like features such as dolls, teddies and even miniature products.

Cuteness on the brain

Cuteness may help to facilitate well-being and complex social relationships by activating brain networks associated with emotion and pleasure and triggering empathy and compassion. When we encounter something cute, it ignites fast brain activity in regions such as the orbitofrontal cortex, which are linked to emotion and pleasure. It also attracts our attention in a biased way: babies have privileged access to entering conscious awareness in our brains.

As a result, we like looking at babies and other cute things. Research has shown that people would rather look at cute baby faces than adult faces and that they would rather adopt or give a toy to babies with cuter faces. Studies have also shown that even babies and children prefer cute baby faces and that cuteness affects both men and women, even if they are not parents. Cute babies also spur us to action: research reveals that people will expend extra effort to look longer at cute baby faces.

Human orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). The top image shows the OFC on a slice through the middle of the brain, while the bottom image shows the brain seen from below, revealing the OFC covering the part of the brain just over the eyeballs. Morten Kringelbach

Neuroimaging research has shown that in adults, the orbitofrontal cortex becomes active very quickly – 140ms or a seventh of a second – after seeing a baby face. The orbitofrontal cortex is strongly involved in orchestrating our emotions and pleasures, so its rapid activity may partly explain how babies appropriate our attention so quickly and completely.

Cuteness also initiates a response that happens much more slowly. The initial fast attention triggers slower, more sustained processing in large brain networks. This kind of brain activity is associated with complex behaviours involved in the caregiving and bondingthat are the hallmarks of parenting. Caring for a baby calls for a set of skills that take time to acquire and hone, and this slow attainment of expertise changes the caregiver’s brain. This kind of considered behaviour cannot be reduced to the fast, instinctual rapid reaction to cuteness.

Can cuteness make us better people?

Parenting is a good example of how cuteness can trigger slow, sustained brain processing in networks associated with emotion, pleasure and social interactions. Still, as shown by our interest not only in our own infants but in other infants and baby animals, cuteness can help trigger empathy and compassion beyond parenting. Activating this network of brain activity may also enable cuteness to boost moral concern by expanding the boundary around what we regard as worthy of moral consideration. For example, an image of a cute infant or baby animal can help charities nudge us to donate more money.

Double cuteness: Can you resist smiling?

Research on cuteness could also help us to understand how problems in parent-child bonding arise, such as following postpartum depression or an infant being born with a cleft lip and palate. We know these things can disrupt caregiving by changing how people process signals from babies.

Both parental depression and infant cleft lip are associated with developmental difficulties in infants. These conditions are relatively common: post-partum depression affects 10-15% of parents in high-income countries and up to 30% in middle- and low-income countries. Cleft lip affects one in 700 live births in the UK. A better understanding of how we succeed and sometimes fail to receive and interpret baby signals that are crucial for caregiving may help us to develop better treatments for families affected by problems such as these.

We are currently developing early interventions to help increase caregivers’ ability to properly interpret infant signals and provide appropriate responses. We have developed a “baby-social-reward-task” to do this, where participants learn about the temperament of infants through the use of emotional infant vocalisations and faces. Babies that were initially perceived as less cute became more cute through the positive feedback of infant laughter and smiles.

Psychology

Tuesday, December 11, 2018