Factors That Influence Attachment Security

Among the many factors that seem to influence the kinds of

attachments that infants establish are the quality of caregiving they
receive, the character or emotional climate of their homes, and
their own health conditions and temperaments

1.) Quality of Caregiving: -

Mary Ainsworth (1979) believes that the quality of an infant’s
attachment to his or her mother (or any other close companion)
depends largely on the kind of attention he or she has received.
• According to this caregiving hypothesis, mothers of securely
attached infants are thought to be sensitive, responsive
caregivers from the very beginning. And apparently, they are. A
review of 66 studies found that mothers who display the
characteristics tend to have infants who form secure
attachments with them. So, if a caregiver has a positive attitude
toward his or her baby, is usually sensitive to his or her needs,
has established interactional synchrony with him or her, and
provides ample stimulation and emotional support, the infant
often derives comfort and pleasure from their interactions and
is likely to become securely attached
• Babies who show a resistant rather than secure pattern of
attachment often have parents who are inconsistent in their
caregiving—reacting enthusiastically or indifferently depending
on their moods and being unresponsive a good deal of the
time. The infant copes with this inconsistent care giving by
trying desperately, through clinging, crying, and other
attachment behaviors, to obtain emotional support and
comfort and then becomes angry and resentful when these
efforts often fail. There are at least two patterns of caregiving
that place infants at risk of developing avoidant attachments.
Ainsworth and others find that some mothers of avoidant
infants are often impatient with their babies and unresponsive
to their signals, are likely to express negative feelings about
their infants, and seem to derive little pleasure from close
contact with them. Ainsworth (1979) believes that these
mothers are rigid, self-centered people who are likely to reject
their babies. In other cases, however, avoidant babies have
overzealous parents who chatter endlessly and provide high
levels of stimulation even when their babies do not want it.
Infants may be responding quite adaptively by learning to avoid
adults who seem to dislike their company or who bombard
them with stimulation they cannot handle. Whereas resistant
infants make vigorous attempts to gain emotional support,
avoidant infants seem to have learned to do without it.
• Finally, Mary Main believes that infants who develop
disorganized/disoriented attachments are often drawn to but
also fearful of caregivers because of past episodes in which
they were neglected or physically abused). The infant’s
approach avoidance (or totally dazed demeanor) at reunion is
quite understandable if she has experienced cycles of
acceptance and abuse (or neglect) and doesn’t know whether
to approach the caregiver for comfort or to retreat from her to
safety. Available research supports Main’s theorizing: although
disorganized/disoriented attachments are occasionally
observed in any research sample, they seem to be the rule
rather than the exception among groups of abused infants. This
curious mixture of approach and avoidance, coupled with
sadness upon reunion, also characterizes many infants of
severely depressed mothers, who may be inclined to mistreat
or neglect their babies

Infant Characteristics
Thus far, we have talked as if parents are totally responsible for the
kind of attachments infants establish. But because it takes two
people to form an attachment relationship, we might suspect that
babies can also infl uence the quality of parent–infant emotional ties.
Jerome Kagan (1984, 1989) argued that the Strange Situation really
measures individual differences in infants’ temperaments rather than
the quality of their attachments. This idea grew from his observation
that the percentages of 1-year-olds who have established secure,
resistant, and avoidant attachments corresponds closely to the
percentages of babies who fall into Thomas and Chess’s easy, diffi
cult, and slow-to-warm-up temperamental profi les (see Table 11.5).
And the linkages make sense. A temperamentally diffi cult infant who
actively resists changes in routine and is upset by novelty may
become so distressed by the Strange Situation that he or she is
unable to respond constructively to his or her mother’s comforting
and thus be classified as resistant. A friendly, easygoing child is apt to
be classified as “securely attached,” whereas one who is shy or “slow
to warm up” may appear distant or detached in the Strange Situation
and will probably be classified as avoidant. So Kagan’s temperament
hypothesis implies that infants, not caregivers, are the primary
architects of their attachment classifications and that the attachment
behaviors that a child displays reflect his or her own temperament .

The Combined Influences of Caregiving and

Temperament
Although the findings just cited seem to favor Ainsworth’s caregiving
hypothesis over Kagan’s temperamental model, research suggests a
more complicated relationship among various factors. One study
clearly illustrates the important link between sensitive caregiving and
secure attachments while also demonstrating how child
temperament can sometimes contribute to the kinds of attachments
infants’ form. Grazyna Kochanska (1998) sought to test an
integrative theory of infant-caregiver attachments—one specifying
that (1) quality of caregiving is most important in determining
whether an infant’s emerging attachments are secure or insecure,
but (2) infant temperament is the better predictor of the type of
insecurity infants display, should their attachments be insecure.
Kochanska began by measuring the quality of caregiving mothers
provided (i.e., maternal responsiveness to her infant and the
synchrony of positive emotions between mother and infant) when
their babies were 8 to 10 months and 13 to 15 months old. She also
assessed the aspect of infant temperament known as fearfulness.
Fearful children are prone to show strong distress in new and
uncertain situations and are similar to those children that Kagan calls
behaviorally inhibited. Fearless children, by contrast, are largely
unperturbed by strange settings, people, or separations, and are
similar to children that Kagan refers to as behaviorally uninhibited.
Finally, Kochanska used the Strange Situation to assess the quality of
infants’ attachments to their mothers at age 13 to 15 months. Thus,
she had data allowing her to determine whether caregiving or
temperament con tributed more strongly to the security and specific
type of attachments that infants display. The study produced two
particularly interesting sets of results. First, as anticipated by the
integrative theory, quality of caregiving (but not infant
temperament) clearly predicted whether infants established secure
or insecure attachments with their mothers, with positive,
responsive parenting being associated with secure attachments. And
yet, quality of caregiving did not predict the specific type of
insecurity that infants with insecure attachments displayed. What,
then, predicted type of insecurity? Infant temperament did! As
anticipated by the integrative theory and a knowledge of the
fearfulness/fearlessness dimension, temperamentally fearful
children who had insecure attachments were prone to display
resistant attachments, whereas the insecure infants who were
temperamentally fearless were more likely to display avoidant
attachments.