Attachment in Developmental Perspective

We are now at the point where we are trying to evaluate the place of early attachment experiences in development. But to do that requires a comprehensive study. It requires a bigger prospective longitudinal study, and it also requires looking at temperament and cognitive functioning. It requires looking at early attachment but of course also later caregiving experiences. And it involves looking at caregiving experiences that we don't conceive as part of the attachment system. There is a lot to care beyond providing a secure base for children. Even beyond emotional regulation, there are a lot of aspects of care. And finally, we must examine development in context, and that's for two reasons. To understand a place of care, you need to look at it in context. And it also turns out that context is very relevant to change. When I get to the lessons from this study, one of the main lessons is that development is complex and that you must understand both continuity and change. And context plays a large role in both continuity and change. I'll come back to that point.

I'll give you a summary of results before I get into the more interesting developmental features. We have found that early individual differences in attachment strongly predict certain outcomes. The strongest predictions actually are to later social relations. Competence with peers, for example, in preschool, middle childhood, and even adolescence is strongly predicted by attachment history (Sroufe 2001, Sroufe et al. 1999b). Now we are studying romantic relationships in adulthood and still the relationships are, to me, remarkable. The correlation, for example, between disorganized attachment in infancy and hostility in romantic relationships is close to .40.

I'll also discuss briefly an overview of attachment and psychopathology. This is very interesting. Yes, anxious attachment is a risk factor for problems of various kinds. If you look at child behavior problems using the child behavior checklist or other teac