Attachment – Normative

development
The Ontogeny of attachment

H. Mooya
 Intro . . .
• During 1940s & 1950s studies emerged
• suggesting children separated from mothers pass
through series of reactions called
i. Protest
ii. Despair
iii. Detachment

• Bowlby concluded that

• the loss of a specific mother figure was the most
significant factor in these reactions
– Led him to develop the “ethological-control systems”
theory of the infant’s tie (attachment) to his/her mther
• Why does a young child become so distressed by the
loss of his/her mother?
• What processes account for each of these three phases
of loss?
• What is the bond that ties a child to its mother?
• What are its forms and how do they emerge?
• What happens to these forms as the child matures?
• Do such bonds exist in the adult and if so, in what
form?
• How do we understand form and functioning when
things go wrong?
• Led to the study of early development of this bond in
normally developing children
– Ainsworth’s Uganda & Baltimore studies
– First volume of Bowlby’s trilogy on attachment
• Attachment and loss – Book 1, 2, 3

• “Only by studying individual pathways through the

course of development will we truly understand the
origins, nature, and sequelae of the attachment
bond”
 Bowlby’s control systems model of
(attachment) development
• Developmental pattern takes place within context
of complex network of affectional bonds, of which
the close attachment of infant to mother is one

• Affectionate bond
– Relatively long-enduring tie in which the partner is
important as a unique individual, and non-
interchangeable (Ainsworth, 1967)
– e.g. attachment bond; parent’s complementary caregiving bond;
sexual pair bond; sibling/kinship bond; friendship bond
The ontogeny of attachment
Development of attachment during the first
year of life
• Four phases
• First three – 1st year of life
• Fourth – 3rd birthday
 Phase 1
Orientation and signals without discrimination

• Soon after birth, babies respond to stimuli in

manner that increases likelihood of continued
contact with other humans
• Adaptive for eliciting interest and caregiving from other
people so predictive of proximity, physical contact,
nutrition and warmth.
• Discrimination is relatively poor and respond
to most people/humans
 Phase 2
Orientation and signals directed toward one or
more discriminated figures
• Shift from 1 to 2 is gradual
• Three key issues
1. Elaboration of simple behaviour systems to more complex
ones
2. Restriction of range of effective activating and terminating
conditions
• e.g. termination of crying; crying when caregiver leaves; vocalisation;
visual-motor orientation etc
3. Increased tendency (of the infant) to initiate attachment-
caregiving and sociable interactions with the principal
caregiver(s)
• Children become active in actively seeking infant interaction than
passively responding to it
 Phase 3:
Maintenance of proximity to a discriminated figure
by locomotion and signals
• Consolidates attachment to its caregiver(s).
• At this stage that most experts would consider an infant to be
attached due to the organisational changes in behaviour.
Changes include
1. New attachment behaviours
• Onset of locomotion
– Provides infant with a vastly increased ability to control proximity to
the attachment figure and move off to explore to expand his/her
horizons (but to also to place him/her in danger)
2. Information processing and IWMs
• An elaboration of the infant’s cognitive skills
– Infant has an internal image of an end state or set goal s/he would like
to achieve
3. Communication skills
• Both language and non-verbal
– Infant uses communicative signals in a goal-corrected manner, as
part of a repertoire of plans of achieving a set goal, often involving
the regulation of others’ behaviours
» First, through the display (of the infant) and understanding of
non-verbal utterances and signals and later through single-
word utterances
4. The exploration system
• Elaboration in the exploration system of the infant
– Development of locomotion and object permanence, a more
sophisticated understanding of means-ends relations and the
increasing ability to organise exploration of the basis of a goal-
corrected behaviour, emerging imitation and conversational skills
5. The sociability system
• Infants at this stage are particularly likely to display
wariness to conspecifics, yet tend at the same time to
be attracted to them
– Infants may stop exploration when confronted with a strange
person and may away and toward the attachment figure
» After a few moments, if stranger displays positive affect,
not intrusive infant is likely to interact sociably with
decreasing social wariness.
6. The wariness system
• Infants tend to be more weary of unfamiliar human
adults than unfamiliar nonhuman objects, despite the
earlier bias toward responding to human stimuli
– If wariness system is highly activated, infants tend to retreat
to the parent as a haven of safet
7. Sensitive periods
• From 6 to 18-24 months, infants become more, rather
than less wary towards unfamiliar humans
– First, infants are more vulnerable to danger from other
humans
» Second, the infant comes to approach more familiar and
retreat from unfamiliar individuals
 Attachment during toddler and pre-school
years
• Research in this age range focused mostly on
other issues than attachment
• e.g. autonomy; self-control; independence;
socialisation etc
– Implying a decline in attachment behaviour
– However, attachment to caregiver remains crucially important
to the child’s survival and socialisation
• attachment in post infancy shouldn’t lose focus on
behaviour as the child’s representational and
communicative abilities become increasingly noticeable
• Tendency in attachment research post infancy
to focus more on cognitive emotional
representation, to the relative exclusion of
behaviour
– However, Bowlby’s theory is based on the linkage
between IWMs and behaviour
• Reality is that older children become able to process
and manipulate plans and goals at an internal level and
increasingly control behaviour with that internal
processing
 Dynamics of attachment behaviour during
toddler/pre-school years
• Few naturalistic studies (Blurton-Jones, 1972;
Konner, 1976) have provided a general outline
of normative course of attachment behaviour
over toddler/pre-school years
– During the 2nd and most of the 3rd year of life,
attachment behaviour is shown neither less
intensely nor less frequently (Bowlby, 1969/82)
 2 years 3 years 4 years
Maintain as much proximity to Able to follow mother
mother (as 1 yr olds) around more effectively

More extensive exploration of

environment (with elaborate
cognitive/motor skills)

When separated from mother Mildly distressed by brief Mildly distressed by brief
(not on own initiative), tends separation, and requires separation, and requires
to be very distressed and may less contact upon return of less contact upon return
need few moments of physical adult of adult
contact before wondering
away

Tend to accept or protest Tend not to be distressed

departure but do not if they negotiated
negotiate a shared plan caregiver’s departure
• Whereas there is a clear decrease in physical
proximity and contact across pre-school age,
an older child is still as attached as an infant to
the caregiver.
– Research shows that the organisation of the
attachment system changes significantly between
the ages of 3-5 years.
 Developmental changes and behaviour
systems
• Locomotor and self-care skills
– By age 3, locomotor skills have developed to the
point where a child can assume much of the
responsibility to gain and maintain proximity to
caregiver, engage with peers and to a large extent
feed themselves
• Communication skills
– By age 3, children are increasingly able to
recognise, understand and converse about feelings
and behaviours of other people.
• By this time, children understand complex rules for
social interaction, interpret others’ feelings and goals
and use such rules to manipulate others’ internal states
(Dunn, 1994)
• Information processing skills and IWMs
– By the end of 2 through to 6 years, children
elaborate more sophisticated and accurate IWMs
of both their own and others’ behaviours
– They are also developing sophisticated IWMs for
implicit and explicit rules for social interaction