Three Attachment Styles by John Bowlby

Three Attachment Styles by John Bowlby

Introduction

Over the past 15 years, attachment theory has generated two lines of research based on slightly different conceptualizations and assessments of individual differences in adult attachment (Ainsworth, 2010). The first was begun by developmental psychologists who used observational techniques to study infant-parent relationships, and was subsequently extended by developmentalists and clinicians who used interviews to study parents' state of mind with respect to attachment (Bartholomew, 2008).

The second line of research was initiated in the mid-1980s by social psychologists who applied Bowlby and Ainsworth's ideas to the study of romantic relationships and developed self-report measures suitable for use in experiments and surveys. Although both lines of research deal with secure and insecure strategies of affect regulation (the latter sometimes called hyper activating and deactivating strategies, and both kinds of measures can be used to classify individuals into categories thought to be psychodynamically similar to those first identified by Ainsworth and her colleagues (2010) in studies of infants, researchers have found only modest to moderate associations between the two kinds of measures.

More important for present purposes, researchers working within the two traditions have tended to ignore each other's work. Most social psychologists do not use the Adult Attachment Interview, a clinical interview focused on mental representations of parent-child relationships, and have not attempted to link their self-report measures to earlier assessments of attachment quality in Ainsworth's Strange Situation. Most developmental and clinical psychologists who use the AAI do not also use the social psychologists' self-report measures, and generally do not attempt to use other rigorous methods of measurement that can distinguish conscious from unconscious processes and do not test causal propositions experimentally.

Even more important, there are professional ingroup-outgroup tensions between researchers in the two traditions, based (in our opinion) on clinical and developmental researchers' assumption that self-report measures, which seem at first glance to capture only conscious mental processes, cannot plumb the psychodynamic depths revealed by the AAI, and on social psychologists' observation that AAI researchers do not generally use other rigorous research procedures and measures (e.g., semantic priming, affective priming, reaction times, physiological recording) to test causal hypotheses about the workings of the attachment system (Crowell, 2006).

Self-Report Measurement of Attachment Style

In social/personality psychology, attachment styles are conceptualized as systematic patterns of expectations, needs, emotions, emotion-regulation strategies, and social behavior that result from the interaction of an innate attachment behavioral system and a particular history of attachment experiences, usually beginning in relationships with parents. Three major styles - secure, anxious, and avoidant - were first noticed and carefully described by Ainsworth (2010) in her studies of infant-mother attachment. Their adult parallels in the romantic/marital domain were first studied by Hazan (2009), using a qualitative (three-category) self-report measure. Subsequent studies revealed that adult attachment styles are best conceptualized as regions in a two-dimensional space that is conceptually parallel to the space defined by two discriminant functions in Ainsworth (2010) summary of research on infant-mother attachment. The two dimensions defining the space ...