Attachment Styles Essay

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The phrase “attachment” was initially introduced by Bowlby in 1958. Edward John Bowlby was a British psychologist who was distinguished by his interest in children’s development and his revolutionary work in attachment theory which was the starting point in psychology. From Bowlby to Mary Ainsworth who was a developmental psychology known for her experiment The strange situation. There are different ways in which we attach to the people in their lives and how we categorise the types of attachment. The main study that assesses attachment styles is by Ainsworth and Wittig in 1969. There are three attachment styles that the Ainsworth study that states that are Securely attached infants, Anxious/Avoidant infants and Anxious/Resistant infants. Securely …show more content…
The strange situation is an experiment by Ainsworth in 1970s to observe the attachment relationships between a parent and their child. Usually the child is between the age of nine months to eighteen months. The Adult attachment interview was developed by Carol George, Nancy Kaplan and Mary Main 1984 to explore parents’ mental representations of attachment as manifested in language during discourse of childhood experiences. The AAI was intended to predict the quality of the infant-parent attachment relationship as observed in the Ainsworth Strange situation. The other study that supports the claim that attachment styles do not in fact changed is called “Continuities and changes in infant attachment patterns across two generations” it was conducted by K. Lee Raby, Ryan D. Steele, Elizabeth A, Carlson and L. Alan Sroufe in 2015. This study compares the attachment styles across two generations from mother to daughter then the daughter to her …show more content…
The Adult Attachment Interview is based on two expectations: Firstly, that the first-person memories are the continuing reconstruction of their personal past, in light of new experiences and, secondly that the glorification of their past, specifically the negative childhood experiences, can be traced by researching the form and content of the first-person narrative separately. The Adult Attachment Interview is quasi structured interview that analyses for a general description of relationships, specific supportive or contradicting memories and descriptions of their current relationship with their

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