Summary Attachment Handbook Chapter 4: IWMs & Neuroimaging Research
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Module
Attachment, parenting and development
Institution
Universiteit Leiden (UL)
Book
Handbook of Attachment, Third Edition
Chapter organisation
- Brief summary of Bowlby’s IWM
- Limitations of neuroimaging research
- Multimodal integration (cortical sites)
- IWMs and Behavioural Choice
- Memory Research
- Attachment IWMs: Feelings of Love and Affection
Attachment Handbook Chapter 26: The Adult Attachment Interview
Attachment Handbook Chapter 19: Multiple Facets of Attachment in Adolescence
Attachment Handbook Chapter 18: Measuring Attachment in Infancy/Early adulthood
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Universiteit Leiden (UL)
Master Psychology
Attachment, parenting and development
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Chapter 4: The IWM Construct in Light of Contemporary Neuroimaging Research
Internal working models (IWMs) → relationship representations
Organismic model → working knowledge of one’s own behavioural skills/potentialities in that environment
“In order for humans to make plans for achieving desired goals, they must acquire IWM of their environment and organismic
model.”
Chapter organisation
- Brief summary of Bowlby’s IWM
- Limitations of neuroimaging research
- Multimodal integration (cortical sites)
- IWMs and Behavioural Choice
- Memory Research
- Attachment IWMs: Feelings of Love and Affection
“Despite centrality of IWM, Bowlby never developed a systematic account of formation, development, function
intergenerational transmission of IWMs”
Bowlby’s Major Postulates Regarding IWMs
1. Humans possess equipment that enables them to organise information about the world into
schemata/maps. IWM’s are derived from processing of physical + social environment. Depends on and is
limited by the particular organism’s perceptual and effector equipment
2. People with more adequate WMs → make more accurate predictions →in turn improves likelihood of the
organisms’ survival and eventual reproduction.
3. Function of WMs is to transmit, store, and manipulate information regarding behavioural choices for
achieving the set-goals of behavioural systems
4. IWMs include selective appraisals that are often experienced as conscious feelings or, as Bowlby
preferred, “felt.” Appraisals about self, environment in terms of good/bad. Appraisals can be used to
monitor one’s own current states, urges, and situations.
5. IWMs ensure a certain degree of continuity in an individual’s interpretation of and interaction with the
social and physical world.
6. IWMs should be able to be extended to imaginative realities, not just similar recurrent events in order to
be of use in new situations.
7. A key feature within a person’s working model of the world is who his or her attachment figures are,
where they may be found, and how they are likely to respond. Also important is whether he or she feels
accepted by attachment figures and is confident that they will respond for support.
8. Although IWM-building begins before the onset of speech, language acquisition allows children to draw
on and learn from the working models of others
9. Young children’s growing competence in perspective taking enables them to develop a degree of insight
into their parents’ feelings and motives
10. Infant–caregiver relationship patterns worked out in the first 12 months tend to persist at least for the
next few years because the IWMs of two people are in play. Reciprocal expectations tend to be
confirmed, thus increasing the stability of their relationship patterns and IWMs
11. Many of the mental processes of which we are most keenly conscious are processes concerned with the
building, revising, extending and drawing on of models for making a novel plan to reach a set goal.
12. When cognitive and action components of IWMs become highly ingrained or overlearned, they are
applied automatically and without conscious awareness.
13. Much psychopathology can be attributed to fully or partially out-of-date IWMs that are fraught with
inconsistencies and confusions because defensive processes (e.g., denial, self-deception, distortion, and
misattribution) obstruct adaptive IWM revisions
14. A child might construct qualitatively different IWMs in relation to different attachment figures. The
model of self-interacting with-mother may be most influential because, in most cultures, the mother is
likely to be the child’s principal caregiver
, 15. Internalisation according to Bowlby refers to the process whereby relationship-specific IWM patterns
increasingly become a “property of the child himself, and these are likely to be imposed on new
relationships.
IWMs & developmental research
- For Nelson (1996) as well as Bowlby, the everyday function of representation is to guide actions in the
present and anticipate future events/interactions in light of what has generally happened in the past
- 16-month-olds can demonstrate their memory for unique events they had experienced in a laboratory by
reenacting them in the same context weeks to months later (scripts!)
- Young children’s world models are derived from their generalised event representations (GERs).
- GERs develop when each new instance of a recurring event overwrites memories of the previous one
GERs vs. other memory systems
- Nelson (1996) treated GERs memory as distinct from the episodic and semantic memory systems
- Episodic memories → temporally dated, autobiographical episodes or events (“i remember…”)
- semantic memories → undated and unlocalized factual knowledge (“i know…)
- GERs → are the source from which general knowledge categories are created. Can provide a framework
for organising autobiographical memories of unique events. Should not be confused with procedural
memory.
- Procedural memories → operates outside awareness, about doing something
Relationship Scripts
- WMs are organised, multilayered, partially hierarchical network or web of interrelated GERs with
different levels of generality
- Relationship-specific attachment memories in infancy would be nonverbal
- The question is: do general expectations about others derive from experiences with several attachment
figures or just the primary caregiver?
- Main and Weston (1981) → showed that toddlers deemed secure both with mother and father in
separate Strange Situations showed greater readiness to engage with a friendly stranger than
infants deemed insecure with one parent and not the other.
- Van IJzendoorn, Sagi, & Lambermon (1992) → showed that children with secure relationships to
father, mother, and child care provider in infancy had greater ego resilience as kindergartners
- Main, Kaplan, & Cassidy (1985)/Grossmann, Grossmann, & Kindler (2005) → reported that infant
attachment classifications to mother, but not father, predicted the quality of representational
attachment measures in early childhood and at school entry (assessed with separation pictures).
Verbal descriptions
- Children and early as 3 years old can provide verbal descriptions of sequentially ordered generic events
- Even more complex interpersonal event representations are possible at this age if children are permitted
to combine verbal with enactive or mimetic narration by using family figures and small props to create
attachment- and other family-related stories
- But what are the brain processes that underlie these developing abilities?
Answers from neuroimaging research:
- Has showed that Bowlby’s notions about “a working model in the brain” were remarkably visionary
- Neuroimaging studies reveal that mental models rely on the same brain sites that perception (e.g., vision,
audition, touch), action (e.g., movement), proprioception (balance), and interoception (e.g., visceral,
emotional, and cognitive states rely on
Limitations of neuroimaging methods
- However, the neuroimaging research methods are not yet as precise as one would wish
- PET/fMRI → increase blood low in specific brain regions, but have less than ideal temporal and
spatial resolution
- TMS → although useful for temporally inactivating specific cortical sites, cannot reach cortical
areas buried in fissures/sulci
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