Attachment: the state of art, lecture

Attachment: the state of art
Lecture 5 14-12-2016

Attachment across the life span

Relevance
 All ages
 Adolescence and adulthood, relevance:
- Parenting and parent-child bonding
- Romantic relationships
- Health

Adult attachment: theory
 Lifespan attachment: Bowlby
- John Bowlby
- Mary Ainsworth

Overview
 Measures of Adult attachment
 Intergenerational transmission
 Continuity of attachment across the life-span
 Attachment and Psychopathology
 Infant attachment and later adaptation

Internal working models
“IWMs” these information is stored in this internal working models:
 Internalized representations of the "self" and "other" based on a child's interactions with
their main caregivers, very early on. Develop certain expectations about the interactions.
 How others perceived as supportive, available, protective and self as worthy of support,
competent
 Influences future expectation and interpretations, in how you are going to regulate your
emotions, also in new relations with others then the caregivers.
Early bond affects later capacities and functioning.

Measures of adult attachment
Various measures of adult attachment
 Adult Attachment Interview. Mary Main, representations, focus on early experiences
and their evaluations
 Attachment Script Assessment
 Attachment Styles and other questionnaires Focus on romantic relations, comes from
personality theory tradition

Adult Attachment Interview
 Assessing attachment representations “…set of conscious and/or unconscious rules for
the organization of information…and for obtaining or limiting access to that
information…” (Main, Kaplan, & Cassidy, 1985) Conscious: we have access to this
dynamics and know that we behave in a certain way and others are more automatically
and unconscious.