Psychology Chapter 14 Attachment related Fears Separation Anxiety Fear When

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Chapter 14

EMOTIONS, ATTACHMENT,

AND SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

After reading and studying the material in this chapter, the student will understand the following

ideas/concepts:

14.1 EMOTIONAL DEVEOPMENT

• Distinguish between primary and secondary or self-conscious emotions, giving examples

14.2 PERSPECTIVES ON RELATIONSHIPS

• Outline the main argument of Bowlby and Ainsworth’s attachment theory, with emphasis

14.3 THE INFANT

• Discuss how both the caregiver’s attachment and the infant’s attachment grow during the

first year of life.

14.4 THE CHILD

• Describe how parent-child attachments and peer networks change during childhood.

• Explain how play becomes more social, more imaginative, and more rule-governed over

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14.5 THE ADOLESCENT

• Describe the significance of attachments to parents and friendships in adolescence.

• Distinguish between cliques and crowds, and describe their evolution and functions

14.6 THE ADULT

• Explain how social networks change over the adult years and how socioemotional

selectivity theory accounts for this change.

CHAPTER OUTLINE

I Emotional Development

A. First Emotions and Emotional Regulation

1. Primary emotions

2. Secondary or self-conscious emotions

B. Nature-Nurture and Emotions

Checking Mastery

1. What milestone in development must be achieved before an infant will show

embarrassment, and what kind of emotion is embarrassment?

➢ Answer: The milestone in development that must be achieved before an infant

2. What is an example of an emotional display rule?

3. According to Carstensen’s socioemotional selectivity theory, why do older adults

typically have good emotional well-being?

➢ Answer: According to Carstensen’s socioemotional selectivity theory, older

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II Perspectives on Relationships

A. Opening Vignette on Morality Issues

1. Mike Pohle, fiancée of Marcy Crevonis, was a victim of the mass murder of

students at Virginia Tech University

B. What Do We Gain from Social Relationships?

1. Social relationships important, but theoretical disagreement over which

relationships most critical to development

C. Attachment Theory

1. Attachment theory (Bowlby and Ainsworth) – influential ethological theory of

parent-child relationship

a. Draws on components of psychoanalytic (mother–child relationship) and

cognitive (expectations of self and others) theory

2. Attachment – strong affectional tie that binds a person to an intimate companion

3. Nature, nurture, and attachment

a. Ethologists assume all species (including humans) born with behavioral

tendencies to assist in survival

b. Ethological theory proposes existence of biological predisposition to form

attachments

c. Imprinting – innate form of learning in which a young animal will follow and

become attached to a moving object (often seen in chicks, ducks, or goslings)

i. Groundbreaking imprinting research by Lorenz using goslings

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vii. Hormone oxytocin plays a role in facilitating parent-infant attachments

and other relationships (Exploration Box on oxytocin as the love hormone)

viii. Infants programmed to respond to sight, sound, and touch of caregiver

d. Attachment in human infants may involve sensitive period

i. Sensitive period (first three years) – time during which attachment likely

early bonding does not have much significance for later development

4. Attachments and later development

a. Bowlby proposed the existence of internal working models—cognitive

representations of self and others constructed by infants—that guide the

processing of social information and behavior in relationships

i. Securely attached infants form internal working models suggesting that

they are loveable

D. Peers: The Second World of Childhood

1. Peer – a social equal who functions at a similar level of behavioral complexity

a. Peer relationships help children understand that relationships are reciprocal

and force them to learn role-taking skills

5. Neo-Freudian Harry Stack Sullivan

i. Interpersonal relationships are important throughout the lifespan, but

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Checking Mastery

1. How do ethological theorists explain why imprinting occurs in young goslings?

➢ Answer: Imprinting is said to have been built into the species over the course of

2. According to attachment theory, what is the mechanism through which early

experience affects later social development?

➢ Answer: Early experience shapes later development through the internal working

are.

3. Which two theorists believed that peers are at least as important as parents as

contributors to development?

➢ Answer: Jean Piaget (with his emphasis on the need for perspective taking with

III The Infant

A. Early Emotional Development

1. Izard maintains that basic emotions play critical role in motivating and organizing

behavior

a. Studied by videotaping infants’ reactions to events (e.g., toy taken away)

b. Infants express distinct “primary emotions”— contentment (smiling), interest

(staring intently at objects), distress (grimaces in response to pain)

c. Within the first six months, different emotions evolve from these primary

2. Nature, nurture, and emotions

a. Primary emotions (e.g., interest and fear) seem biologically programmed

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e. Nurture also helps shape patterns of emotional expression (e.g., attachment

relationship between infant and caregiver)

f. Infants display range of emotions (positive to negative) that change quickly

g. Mothers tend to display positive emotions (e.g., surprise, joy) and elicit

positive emotions from infants

critically) to their child’s expressions of emotion

3. Emotion regulation

a. Emotion regulation – process of initiating, maintaining, and altering emotions

b. Very young infants reduce negative arousal by turning from unpleasant

stimuli or sucking on a pacifier

c. By end of the first year, infants can regulate emotions by rocking themselves

e. Emotional development influenced by infant temperament and caregiver

behavior

i. Attachments help infants regulate emotions and teach them how to do so

ii. With age, infants gain control of emotions using methods learned in the

B. An Attachment Forms

1. The caregiver’s attachment to the infant

a. Caregivers’ emotional attachment may form before birth

b. Parents with opportunity to have skin-to-skin contact with newborns feel a

special bond (although such contact is not necessary to form an attachment)

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2. The infant’s attachment to the caregiver

a. Four phases of attachment

i. Undiscriminating social responsiveness – birth to 2-3 months; infants

3. Attachment-related fears

a. Separation anxiety – fear when separated from attached individual; appears

4. Exploratory behavior

a. Attachment facilitates exploration

C. Quality of Attachment

1. Four types assessed in the strange situation

a. Strange situation – method of assessing attachment involving child, parent,

and stranger interacting in different combinations

b. Ainsworth found four types of attachments

i. Secure attachment – 60-65% of infants comfortable exploring and using

mom as base (stay close and continuously monitor); proximity

2. The caregiver’s contributions

a. Freud suggests importance of oral stage pleasure

i. Whomever provides infant with oral pleasure will be the individual who

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b. Harlow and Zimmerman (working with infant monkeys and surrogate

mothers, one cloth and one wire) suggest importance of contact comfort

i. Half monkeys fed by wire mom and half by cuddly cloth mom, yet all

c. Parenting styles contribute to attachment formation

i. Secure attachments found in sensitive and responsive parents

ii. Parenting style inconsistency contributes to insecure, resistant pattern of

attachments

iii. Depressed moms have difficultly responding to infant’s signals

iv. Resistant attachment style linked to the development of negative internal

working images of self and parents in children as young as three years

2. The infant’s contributions

a. Infants’ cognitive development key to attachments

i. Must recognize caregiver

ii. Must have acquired person permanence—form of object permanence

concerning people

3. Contextual contributions

a. Poverty can make it difficult for parents to be sensitive and may contribute to

insecure attachment formation

b. Culture (society’s expectations concerning appropriate parenting) can play

role in attachment

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often classified as “avoidant”

iii. Eastern, collectivist cultures (e.g. Japan) encourage children to be

dependent

B. Implications of Early Attachment

1. Social deprivation

a. It is better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all (i.e., infants

raised in deprived institutional settings may never be able to form

attachments)

b. Research on Romanian infants raised in orphanages and adopted into U.S.,

Canadian, or U.K. homes

i. Ratio of children to caregiver was often 1 caregiver for every 10-20

children; result was that children spent most of the day with no human

situations)

iii. Impact may be due to lack of stimulation of brain

iv. Rapid recovery is possible, but many never recover; the longer the early

deprivation, the worse it is

v. Problems related to formation of disinhibited attachment—indiscriminate

friendliness, lack of appropriate wariness of strangers, and difficulty

c. Reason for damage from institutional deprivation

i. Lack of proper nutrition, hygiene, and medical care, but even those with

proper care who lack a stable team of caregivers often experience

to love

2. Separation

a. Long-term separation

i. Infants who become separated from the caregiver to whom they have

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b. Daycare

i. Daycare can have positive or negative effects, but does not normally

damage child development

ii. Major longitudinal study by the National Institute of Child Health and

Human development found that infants who received alternative forms of

care, even over 20 hours per week, were no less secure than infants tended

to by parents

3. Later development of securely and insecurely attached infants

a. Secure attachment may lead to more social competence in later childhood

i. Securely attached preschoolers are described as curious, self-directed, and

eager to learn

ii. Securely attached preschoolers more often popular with peers, curious,

self-directed

iii. Related to healthy emotional development

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C. First Peer Relations

1. Infants have evolutionary-based capacity for forming attachments to caregivers

and for establishing social relationships

a. Infants show an interest in other babies at an early age

b. By six months, infants will smile and babble at tiny companions, they will at

times share nicely and other times squabble, and they begin to relate in

Checking Mastery

1. What are two important types of fear that develop soon after infants form their first

attachments?

anxiety when separated from an attachment figure and stranger anxiety.

2. Compare how infants with a resistant attachment and infants with an avoidant

attachment react to separations from their caregivers and the reunions that follow.

➢ Answer: Resistant infants cry long and hard to get the caregiver back but are

3. What does research on infants from deprived institutions suggest infants most need in

order to develop normally?

➢ Answer: Infants most need responsive and sustained care from someone, whether

II The Child

A. Parent-Child Attachments

1. Attachments change qualitatively during childhood

2. Preschoolers learn to negotiate separations from parents to make sure rituals take

B. Peer Networks

1. From 2 to 12 years, increasing time spent with peers and less with adults (10% of

C. Play

1. Four general types of play in childhood

a. Locomotor play (e.g., tag), object play (e.g., stacking blocks), social play

2. Play becomes more social

a. Parten’s model of social development in play

i. Unoccupied play – child stands idly by

ii. Solitary play – play alone and are highly involved

3. Play becomes more imaginative

a. Pretend play – one actor and/or object stands for something else

i. By two years, will wipe up an “imaginary spill” of tea

ii. Toddlers capable of using symbolic capacity to construct mental

representation of pretend event and to act on this representation

4. Play becomes more rule-governed

i. Once in school, kids play more games with rules (e.g., tag, board games)

ii. May need to reach concrete stage of development to follow rules

5. What is good play?