Full Transcript for R. Chris Fraley || The Latest Science of Attachment

the child would vocalize as our distress, would run to the door, crawl to the door, and try to re establish proximity to the caregiver. But importantly, when the mother came back, the child might reach up his or her arms, sort of signal that they want to be picked up and comforted, and they were able to be soothed by physical contact with the mother. So Ainsworth called that pattern secure attachment because the signal that the child was able to regulate his or her emotions relatively effectively in this strange situation and was able to use the parent as a secure base to explore that environment and to eventually be soothed and recover from that stressful situation. But she noticed that not all children behave in the secure form. So this is where this idea of individual differences attachment patterns comes from. So some proportion of these children or what she called anxious resistant or sometimes called anxious ambivalent, So about fifteen percent to ten percent of the children exhibit this pattern where they're extremely distressed by separation, and when they're reunited with the caregiver, they want to be picked up and held, but they also kind of resist that contact. So they might reach their arms up to be held, but then when they're picked up, they might be arching their back and sort of flopping around, signaling that they are kind of pissed off about what has happened. Sometimes they might even bat at the parent as if they're kind of doing this kind of smacking behavior to sort of punish the parent for leaving. The key idea with anxious resistant attachment is that the presence of the caregiver provides a source of security and comfort, but in an incomplete sense. In other words, the child is sufficiently angry and upset about the situation that he or she is not able to completely restore that emotional equilibrium. The other pattern that Aimsworth in her students demarketed is what's now called avoidant attachment. So this characterized about twenty percent of the infants in the string situation. So avoidant children sometimes are distressed by the situation. Sometimes they're not visibly distressed by the separation. But importantly, what allows a child to be classified as avoidant is during the reunion episode, the child behaves as if he or she does not need comfort or contact or support. So sometimes these children become very engaged in the toys, where clearly in the separation episode they are a little distressed, we couldn't focus, but now that the mother's back, they're going to focus on this toy, as if I don't care that you just came back in this room, I don't necessarily need you to be here, or they simply don't navigate towards the parents, even though the parent might be sort of saying, hey, I'm back, everything's great. It's just kind of like bob any, let's move on. So that's sort of the origin of the idea of attachment patterns. Social psychologists call these attachment styles. That term doesn't exist in the developmental

literature, but that's sort of where the idea of individual differences and attachment organization emerged and how it took off. Thanks for doing such a great job describing that I want to just play you said in my class as having to do it, tild it myself. Maybe I'll play it myself too. I just got to have coffee here in that rooment. Yeah, you can just record it ahead of time and it saves your work. Now, what in the world is this? No one knows what to do with the disorganized one though, because the isart also found the insecure disorganized pattern. Right. One of her students, Mary Maine, and her colleagues discovered this pattern that was relatively difficult to classify, and the developmental literature there's three major attachment patterns, but it was always kind of challenging to get one hundred percent of kids to fall meekly into its categories. So for a while, there is a category called cannot classify that was typically used to characterize invents who maybe were in the border between let's say, avoidant and anxious behavior. Eventually this came derivativeness, came to be known as disorganized or disoriented attachment. And what was characteristic of these children was that sometimes they exhibited what might be like an approach avoid its conflict of sorts. So some of the prototypical cases that stand out in my mind is when the children are visibly upset by this operation, and when the mother comes in the door, they start crawling towards her. And when you're coding these things. You're watching this video, you're going, oh, yeah, this is going to be great. This is a secure child. I can sleep, I can sleep well tonight. And then the child just keeps going right down the hallway, right past the mother. So this would be an example where part you see some attachment behavior, but it's not organized in a way that allows it to fulfill the function that will be articulated for attachment behavior. It doesn't restore proximity between the attachment so suddenly mother returns and the child it's like maybe suddenly a robotic stillness emerges. So yeah, this pattern has been discussed and debated a lot in the development of literature. One of the probably the most prominent theories of what it means is that it's indicative of an interpersonal history when the child has not been able to find that the parent is a reliable source of security. Sometimes there are cases of abuse, sometimes there's cases of extreme neglect. The idea is that at times the attachment figure, potentially ironically could be the source of fear, that active is attachment for itself, and that puts the child in a difficult situation where he or she needs the attachment figure to feel secure. At the same time, the attachment figure I see a lot of discussions about how it has to do what they use. They say the word sensitivity. Does that mean sensitivity to the needs of the child, that the child is in distress? Yes, So sensitivity in the attachment literature doesn't mean like a

heightened tendency to experience distress, but a behavior on the part of the parent that reveals that the parent is in tune with the child's needs. But here she may be feeling and responding accordingly. So sometimes that may mean keeping your distance, and sometimes it might mean helping the child's solve the problem, pro writing comfort that's needed. It's a very contextually sensitive construct. Cool. So then a bunch of researchers came along and they were like, how can we measure this variation? And did they start with looking at measuring the variation children before they got to measuring it in adults. Yeah. So historically attachment theory emerged as a theory of child behavior. But it's curious because Bulby himself was he originally was inspired to develop this theory partly based on his observations of adolescence. So he was working in a home with foster children, some of whom had been moved around multiple times over the course of their childhood or never their parents died, and some of them weren't juvenile delinquents. And one of his observations was that these children had, these older children, I should say, had a difficult time forming close emotional bonds with others. So part of what inspired him to think about these issues was actually the study of older children than infants. But for the most part of the empirical momentum that developed in North America, thinks in part Mary Ainsworth and her students, has to do with the assessment of individual differences and attachment and infancy and trying to understand what the consequences are of secure and insecure attachment for children as they develop. It was only much later, like in the mid nineteen eighties, that people began to formally study individual differences and attachment among adults. So that's kind of interesting in its own right because it happened simultaneously in two very different research traditions to psychology. So in developmental psychology, people began studying, Hey, what is it about the mothers and the way they think about attachment issues that predict whether their children are going to be secure or insecure in the string situation. So Mary Maine and jup Cassidy and some of their colleagues got together and they would interviewed the mothers about their own attachment and experiences when they were growing up, but from the retrospective lenses as an adult now. And what they found when they tried to match elements of those transcripts from those interviews with the children their children's strange situation classification was that mothers who were able to describe their own attachment experiences in a relatively clear, coherent way were much more likely to have children who were classified as secure in the strange situation than mothers who were not able to provide a coherent narrative of their own experiences. So that was one tradition that emerged in North America on how to study attachment and adults, and it focuses on the adult attachment interview,

or what it's sometimes called the AAI, which is a way of getting people to tell the stories of their own developmental experiences and then coding their ability to do so in a clear and compelling way. An important part of the AI, by the way, is not that the person is saying, oh, yeah, my experiences of my parents were great. I hurt my knee, my mother was there to calm and comfort me. The important part is the coherence with which people tell those stories. So it's quite possible for somebody to say, my mother and I didn't get along. She was never there for me when I needed her. But the person can describe that without getting caught up kind of in an anxious way with respect to the experiences, and can provide a compelling and convincing narrative about what those experiences were like. So it's an interesting paradox of sorts that you can be considered secure with respect to the AI despite having let's just say, a bad attachment history, simply because you can kind of describe in own way that's compelling and coherent. Now, at the same time, around the mid nineteen eighties, social psychologists got wind of attachment theory and they started thinking, oh, how can we measure individual differences and attachment. So two of the leaders in this tradition were Phil Shaver, who was my graduate advisor, and Sending has On It was one of his students when they were both at the University of Denver. So what they did was they said, Okay, let's think about what these different strained situation types would look like. Let's say in the context of adult romantic relationships. So we might expect, for example, that somebody who is relatively secure is going to say things like, ah, I'm relatively comfortable opening up to others and being close to others and having them depend on me, and I'm able to depend on them, whereas people who are more avoidant may say things like, well, I'm not comfortable opening up to others and I'm not necessarily sure that I need others to feel good about myself. So anyhow, the idea is that right now we have two different ways of thinking about individual differences and attachment and adulthood, and they're based on very different measurement traditions and has on. In Shaver, the social psychologists adopted classic surveying methods. They basically ask people how do you think feel and behave and close relationships and ask people to self report on that. Under the assumption, which I think is a reasonable one, that people have a good sense of whether they feel secure or insecure in their relationships, they may not understand the deeper processes that make them secure or insecure, that they can tell you whether they're feeling anxious or feeling not, or whether they're hungry or not. You know, renovational states are typically salent to the conscious mind, whereas the developmental tradition is sort of a how do you describe your early caregiving experiences and do you do hope dirent way. So it's interesting because they're very different research traditions, very different measurement tools, and they're based on slightly different assumptions about what it means to be secure and how to assess it. Yeah, so Phil Shafer's research was really influential. I could just see though, just a clear difference between the way that these adult attachment styles are measured in a way, the infinite touchment styles, the infinite attached on it. It's all about the object, it's about the coding, it's about the systematic you know, watching videotapes. It's not like you can do self reports with infants, but with these adults, with these adults, you know, these adults, it's crazy adults. It's like self report measures seem to predominate. Now do they triangulate different? Do they triangulate like self report with like partner report. Do there are those correlated with each other? Yeah, those are I would say modestly correlated with one another. It's not a common research strategy to measure both. But there are a lot of researchers like Jeff Simpson University of Minnesota who will study attachment in a dietic context, So they will have reports from the partner and from the self, and sometimes they'll measure the partner's report of the other person's attachment. So those things tend to correlate relatively moderately, about the same magnitude that you would expect if you have other people's reports that big fought personality traits, for example. So they triangulate to some degree, but not perfectly, probably because everybody has slightly different access to their own internal insecurities and whatnot. Cool, what do you think that these individual differences in adult attachment style is really getting at? Now, there's been a construct there's been various theories that I've been thrown around. I know, I'm aware of this Bartholomew typology. It seems to be about it's all about like other versus self representations. How does that relate to internal working models? You know, theory, and then how does all that relate to your own motivational account? You have an alternative view, so could you go through all three of those and maybe so? Oh my gosh, yeah, sure. So the idea of internal working models is a fundamental one and attachment theory. This is part of where Bulby brought cognitive science into this emerging ethological control systems theory view of how the mind works. But his idea was that as children go through these interactions with their primary caregivers, essentially they're developing representational models allow them to forecast what is likely to happen in certain situations, that they behave this way or if they behave that way. And the foundation of these working models is the idea that individuals develop a representation of themselves. So this is comparable to something like self esteem or self worth. They can view themselves as a good person who is deserving of love, deserving of support, is competent, et cetera, or somebody who is not a good person, somebody who

others would not necessarily want to love or find unlovable. And at the same time, children are also developing representational models of other people. And I mean that both specifically like the primary attachment figure, for example, it could be generalized to other people in more broadly speaking, So other people might be trustworthy, they might be benevolent, they might be kind of people you want to spend time with and invest in. Or they could be they might be the kinds of people who are likely to reject you, are the kinds of people who are not worth your time, not worth your affection, not worth investing in. So the idea that you develop these representations of yourself and others is the key idea behind the concept of internal working models of attachment. That sort of is the foundation of thinking about individual differences and attachment, And it's the key idea that Kim Bartholomew imported when she was thinking about how to conceptualize individual differences among adults. So her basic taxonomy assumes, Hey, what happens if people have a positive model of the self and a positive model of others. Well, that's the prototype of what we would call a secure attachment style. These people are confident that they are good people, that they have high self worth or they have high self esteem, and they believe that others are trustworthy independable too. In some ways, that's the I guess you could call it the generic threat that cuts across many models of what it means to be an optimal person or to be self actualized appropriately, right, But you can also have other permutations in this two dimensional space. So you have some people who think positively of themselves, but they don't think so highly of others. So this is what Barthology referred to as a dismissing pattern of attachment. These are individuals who have a high degree of independence autonomy, and they're reluctant to count on others and even dismiss the need to develop close intimate relationships with others. She also described what's called fearful attachment, and this is more akin to what Hassen and shape Or had in mind when they were talking about avoid and attachment. But fearful attachment is characterized by having that negative model of the self and a negative model of others. So you're not comfortable opening up to others and depending on them, partly because you feel insecure about yourself and that makes you vulnerable. So you withdraw as from relationships in a way as a defensive maneuver to protect the self a vulnerable self. Whereas The final category, preoccupying attachment is characterized by having a positive view of others and a negative model of self. So this is characteristic of individuals who question their own self worth but are very dependent on feedback from others. They want the approval and acceptance of others and need that kind of intimacy and closeness. So that's the gist of the internal working moment's concept and how it plays into Bartholomew's theory of individual differences. We have a slight spin on it. It's not designed to be an alternative to them. The way it was originally framed was very much focused on this idea that you have a model of the self and it's kind of positive or negative, and you have a model of others which is kind of positive or negative. It doesn't necessarily capture the motivational flavor that we sometimes think about when we're thinking about attachment styles. So all attempted to do is just sort of annotate it a little bit and say, look, part of what this model of self dimension is all about is what we now call attachment anxiety. So it's sort of a concern with being abandon or being rejected. Do you believe that other people will fundamentally be there for you or not. So it kind of mixes the self and other a little bit more than moret all the new's original model does, in other words, to feel anxious about the whereabouts and availability attachment figure involves not only necessarily questioning your own self with but questioning their availability and responsiveness. So it throws a little bit of a motivational lens onto it sort of disregards the self other distinction a little bit. In turn, the avoidance dimension is something that we conceptualize as having a little bit less to do with that sense of safety or that sense of anxiety. It's less effective and more about how you regulate your motions and response to that ticular sense that things are not right. So you might turn towards others. So using others as a secure base or safe haven would be a secure strategy. And at the opposite end of that dimension, which we sometimes call avoidance, would be pulling it away from others and withdrawal from close relationships. So this quote unquote alternative model talks about anxiety and avoidance rather than a model of self model of others. But it's not so much an alternative model since that these are alternative scientific views that could pet against each other and show that one's right and one's wrong. It's just layering some motivational and affect of flavoring on top of the cognitive representation that Kim Bartholomew articulated. You just lost half my audience with that last line. But I think that but the other half are like salivating, amazingly nerdy this is and I'm one of them. That's really cool. I think it's cool and it's super cool. Yeah, I mean you're like, literally the torch has from Bowlby to you know, de Barthelmu has been passed on to you. Like, you're really like this pre eminent attachment How does it feel to be like one of, if not the most pre eminent attachment researchers of our generation. I think those are fighting words. I think there are many people would disagree. I think of myself as somebody who respects the tradition and finds that you do audioble up. So maybe I'm a bit of a steward when it comes to the attachment theory and its history and its legacy. But I think there are a lot of people out there who contribute to the field

who are kind of carrying the torch and doing an excellent job at it. That's fair, that's fair. It's fair. You're still up there. You don't have to agree with me, okay, Yeah, as long as my question committee agrees, will be okay, as long as you're what you're funding, as long as my promotion committed. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Well, I'll write a lot of recommendation if you want me to here, So tell me about your discovery that you actually think it's two dimensions that better represents the space than four. Yeah. So this turns out to be a really tricky issue in the theory. So if you think about a two dimensional space where you can sort of can you kind of see me in that stuff? Oh yeah, where your listeners can't. If you just take a two dimensional space where those dimensions are crossed, you can easily create four types. So that's the basic two by two logic that reoptive moves in social psychology. So the trick here is that there is to understand that there are not four distinct things. So when we talk about attachment styles and we talk about let's say the four type model of attachment, we don't literally mean that there are four distinct things that are mutually exclusive. What we really mean is that there's two fundamental distinctions. And because of the way math works, maybe the way nature works, that allows for a wide array of possibilities of individual differences that we sometimes say four because two by two is four. So the two dimensional model I think it's been a very useful one for research purposes. Now this part might lead some people to tune out, but when you're doing regression models and things like that, you don't want too much multicolinearity. So if you have four things in a model that really are just two things, then you're going to be breaking something from a data analysis point of view or a measurement perspective. I love the two dimensional approach. It just it appeals to the part of me that loves algorithms and loves Cartesian spaces and coordinate systems. However, having said that, whenever I am teaching on attachment or trying to explain it to a non technical audience, dimensions are the bomb. Nobody loves them. I don't mean the good kind of momb, I mean the bad kind of mom. So sometimes it's easier to talk about the styles as being to discrete categories and some sort of ether that exists out there in the emotional void. And that's fine. I can live with that. But ultimately I think these are two different ways of thinking about the same space, and some methods are appropriate I would say, more appropriate than others for research purposes, and maybe some ways of partitioning at space or more appropriate than others for science communication purposes. So you have you mentioned that two are so in Bartholo new system they're called model of self a model of other, and in this kind of motivational system they're called attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance. Those are different labels for similar kinds of individual

difference variables. So where would dismissing type of avoidance fall like? What would that be a combination of and what would the other kind of avoidance be? Because avoidance can break down into two types of avoidance, right, m hm, that's right. So people who tend to endorse our avoidance items are saying things like I'm not comfortable with opening up to others and depending on them. So where dismissing avoidance versus fearful avoidance breaks down on that access is with respect and how anxious you are about attachment relationships. So a dismissing person is not worried that others are going to break up with them or won't be there for them when they're needed, because I don't need others in the first place. So it's a motivational strategy that sort of makes relationships secondary and the interest of preserving one's own independence or autonomy. So it's low anxiety, high avoidance, Whereas the combination of high avoidance with high anxiety is fearful attachment. So it's the idea that I'm trying to turn away from relationships, not get too close to others, not because I don't need others, but because I'm scared I'm going to be hurt. Ultimately, I am vulnerable, I feel insecure. I'm not sure if others will really be there for me when I need them. So as a defensive maneuver, I push close relationships away. I don't allow myself to get to it attached to others if I can avoid it. So that's the fearful stereotype. If you will are the prototype and that two dimensional system, it's high attachment anxiety combined with low attachment avoidance. I'm sorry, Well, high avoidance combined with high attachment anxiety, gotcha. So going back to the dismissing aspect, I find that one, that particular one fascinating because there's a stigma against being single. I feel like in our society, like it's too easy to like pathologize that. We have a label we call it insecure attachment. But I mean, could it be there people who are just very secure in themselves and very independent people and they just don't need that area of their life and it's not do you know what I mean? It's almost like it's not they're anxious. They're like, yeah, you know what I could do without it? Like you know, there are people who go in clergy. I don't know. There are people who make various life choices where they decide that they don't need to be attached to anyone, right. Right. So the trick here is, how do we just ditinguished between let's say, dismissing avoidance and secure attachment, given that both of them involves some degree of independence and autonomy, right, And I think the key difference between this form of autonomy and let's call it secure independence is that secure people not only feel competent and autonomous, but they know others have their back should they stumble one fall. Sometimes we can't get through life challenges alone, so having that backup system can be an enormous source of strength, right, Whereas the dismissing strategy is essentially an attempt to remove that social backup system. So I am going at it alone, and I don't need others, and I don't need to worry about others being there for me assistingly along the way, what have you. So both of those are characterized by autonomy, and both of them can lead to competence. You can be very successful in your life. So you know, I guess it's a choice whether you want to have that safety net, that secure base, or that safe haven behind you or not. I don't think it's necessarily that you're pathological if you elect to live the dismissing lifestyle, right. And it's clearly the case that some clinical psychologists will try to pathologize you if you make those choices right, right, because they're abnormal. Right. But for the most part, when we study things like psychological distress or psychopathology, whennot most of that variation is predicted by the anxiety dimension rather than the avoidance dimension. So essentially secure and dismissing people tend to look okay with respect to many things that we measure. It is typically the high anxiety that is the fearful and preoccupy people who don't. So it's not necessarily the case that being dismissing is some sort of death sentence or with respect to your emotional well being. Now that's still a controversial claim. There are people out there who would argue otherwise. I'm looking at this paper right now by Sciota, Keltner and on that looked at correlations between various positive emotions and these attachment styles, and I'm just looking at this table of correlations right now, and I just find this fascinating. The dismissing. You don't see this if you don't parse it out into the four. If you just do the two anxiety and avoidance, you find that avoidance is negatively correlated with a lot of positive motions, but there are no positive correlations. But if you look at you break it up into the four and you look at dismissing, you actually find dismissing as positively correlated with contentment in life as well as pride as well as amusement. I think I thought that was cute amusing. You must this whole process of easy. Yeah. Yeah, Well they're like they're like, oh, look at all these like attached people. Like I'm much more amused, like just living my own life. And it is negative correlated love and compassion, but it is positively correlated with contentment, pride, and amusement. And you don't see that when you fold them into just the two dimensions anxiety and avoidance. So again, I am just totally fascinated by there's something special about this dismissing aspect, you know what I mean, It's fascinating. I've been kind of preoccupied to use the attachment language with dismissing attachments since I was in grad school. And one of the things we learned in some of our early studies is, are you familiar with Dan Wagner's white bear phenomenon? The idea absolutely? Okay. So the idea is that if you ask people to not think of a white bear, they have a much more challenging time doing so than if you

hadn't asked them to suppress the idea in the first place, and that at least in the attachment literature, the idea of trying to keep something out of your mind, partly because of the psychodynamic origins of the theory, is considered a defensive maneuver. So if I don't want to think about how that conversation with my partner made me feel, the idea is I try to put it out of my mind. And if you take the Wagner ideas seriously, what they suggest is that people should have a very different cult time doing this. The idea of trying to put that conversation out of your mind should make it more salely, atten should make you more upset. And what we found in some of these early studies is that people who are relatively dismissing didn't experience this kind of rebound. So we would ask them to think of a time when they felt upset with their partners. Essentially, imagine that your partners at leaving you for someone else, and then spend the next bive minutes not thinking about it at all. Not only were they able to do so, they actually showed diminished skin concntents levels relative to control conditions when we measured the electrophysiology. So there's something interesting about dismissing attachment where they might actually be capable of protecting themselves against some of the slings and errors about age's fortune, if we will. But at the same time, there's some other studies that suggests that this can only go so deep. So Mario makulencerf As colleagues in Israel were able to reproduce some of these findings, but they showed that if you depleted people's cognitive resources, so these cognitive low tasks where you're counting numbers backwards by threes and things like that, if you undermined a dismissing person's ability to control their emotions or their cognitive state, they were less capable of controlling this attachment response. So they looked just like everybody else when they didn't have the cognitive resources available to them. But when they did have the cognitive resources available, they were able to sort of behave in a relatively resilient way. So it's an interesting psychological pattern, I think, because it involves elements of security, involves elements of autonomy, but it doesn't involve that sense of connectedness that we typically focus on and attachment theory absolutely, and you see this clearly. You see if you just compare to secure correlations with the dismissing correlations. You see, It's like secure is dismissing plus you know, plus what is it at? What else does it buy you? Love and compassion? Because so you find it, the correlation is stronger. So if I had to choose, I'm saying I would choose secure. I'm not saying I would choose dismissing over secure. That's not my argument because with secure you get joy whereas you don't get joy. With dismissing. You get a higher correlation with contentment than dismissing. Even though dismissing was correlated with contentment. You get a higher correlation with pride. But in addition to what you didn't get at all with dismissing, you get, or at least what was negative with dismissing is a lot of love point four e correlation and point two two correlation with compassion. So yeah, I just think that argues in favor of this maybe even this just this two this two. Now I'm back to the two, the two model, because you can say, like, you know, secure is just a combination of the two, Like if you're very very high in both sorry low on both low and anxiety and low and avoidance, then you just are secure. Right. Yeah. By the way, I like the way you describe this. I just have this image of we're all kind of pre birth and we're sitting in this big control room and there's we have this little iPad in front of us, right, and we have these options. Do you want your life to be filled with joy, with love, with contentment, with compassion? You get to check off which boxes And I'm imagining you young Scott going through this, going I'll take some joy, I'll take some compassion. Yeah. And then but then you can measure pre needle attachment styles, because the ones who are going to be avoidant dismissive are the ones who be like, yeah, I'm okay with just contentment. Yeah, get me a contentment I can live without. Might be individual differences, I'm saying. It might be individual difference in that choice. Right. It gets really recursive, doesn't it. Yes, all the way down with the turtles anyway. Whoo, okay, so that's great, let's move on. Are there things that have been shown to change people's attachment style or change infants and the effects it has? Wow, Scott, So that's something I don't know A whole lot about. Okay, sure, because I don't have a clinical bone in my body, I'm too dismissing why I can move on to another topic. Yeah, that sounds good. So it looks like there's a corresponse between parental and infant attachment patterns right now, the question is we don't really we haven't used the word the dirty word genes yet in this discussion. It does seem like Bulby's smart different kind of genes. I'm talking about Bolby, you know, talked about he had this theory that it was really independent of pre existing personality traits. This really had to do with sensitivity of parental and the research has kind of bear that out borne that out that attachment style seems to be go above beyond just pre existing personality patterns. But could it be that there's such a strong correspondence between children's genes and adult genes that you're seeing like parental attachment stuff ailes kind of developing the same thing in their children because of what they're modeling. Does that make sense? Does that even make sense? Can you state in a slightly different way, perhaps I just want to make sure I win well. Children are so astute in learning about how the world should be from their parents. You know, if their parents through genetics, you know, predisposition tend to be a certain attachment style. We know there's a there's gene concordance

between parents. How much of that correlation as a result of similar genes between adult and children as opposed to environmental differences? So this is a bit of a Pandora's box and attachment theory. Heck, yeah, heck yeah, I know. So we can't have a simple conversation about this. Are you prepared to have a really complicated, noisy conversation? Yeah, oh of course. Okay, So I think a fair reading of Goolby, who was writing about these issues way before behavior genetics took off, he believed that whatever is taking place in those parent child interactions to lead some children to, let's say, question the availability and responsiveness of their parents, reflected real transactions between parents and their children. That is, it reflected real developmental effects, if you will. And part of the reason he made that argument was he was kind of departing from his object relation colleagues who believe that most of psychopathology and childhood was due to the fantasy life children rather than real events. So He would get frustrated when his advisors said, why are you asking about the kid's mom who's dad when you should be asking him about what he fantasizes about what he's thinking about families and stuff. So his attempt us he was trying to understand how it is that real experiences shape the way people children think and behave in the world. But he believed that all those dynamics, those interpersonal relations and transaction were layered on top of pre existing temperamental dispositions. So children do differ from one another at day zero. You know, some are more fussy than others, some are more fearful than others. Right, And when we talked about the parental sensitivity earlier, part of what I was trying to do is explain that what a sensitive parent is doing is being responsive to the child's needs in part on the basis of that child's temperament dispositions, whatever's going on in the family and the life context. That's not the same recipe that's necessarily followed for every child. So the way Bowlby thought about this, and I would say this fairly similar to the way I think about it too, is that you do have this preexisting let's call it dispositional variation that makes some children different from others, and that may create constraints on how it is that as parent child interactions play out. But ultimately, whether the child comes to view the parent is available and responsive is a function of the history of those interactions, which in turn could be a function to some extent, of genetic differences between parents or between children that are shared between parents and children themselves. So this is getting a little lack of doodle, So let me just wet just simplify it. There's two distinct ways to think about this problem. This is the reason why there's debates. If there are genes that are shared between parents and children that give rise to let's say, secure attachment, then it could very well be the case that secure parents beget secure kids not because of the way they interact with each other, but simply because they have a common genetic disposition. The alternative approach would not say that that common genetic disposition or that share genetic dispositions don't exist. But on top of that, and maybe because of those genetic dispositions, the way parents trut their children is encoded by those children and is responsible for the way in which children come to construe themselves in their social world, so that the correlation between parents and children is not only a function of shared genes, but those interactional experiences have taken place. So the difference between those two frameworks, if we will, is that one assumes that parent child interactions matter, or if we're talking about adults, that actual conversations we have with our romantic partners, actual conflicts and betrayals, those things matter in terms of how we think about and trust others, and the other model assumes that those things don't matter, that it really is, at the end of day, just parents at the same genes as their children, and that's how we explain those kinds of parenting effects, if you will. I don't think we're quite at the point yet where we can say definitively how we should be thinking about this based on empirical data, partly because there are a whole lot of behavior genetic studies out there on attachment. It's kind of a mixed bag. If you try to do the strange situation and a twin design, imagine putting one twin into the strange situation to be separated from mom. Well, the other twin who's waiting in the other waiting room is also separated from mom. See it's a pragmatically challenging thing to do because it's hard to separate twins in a way that conforms to the procedure entailed by the strange situation. Well, can we find you know, twins that are attached, you know, like they haven't been separated. Yeah, yeah, that's the word those. So I think you're right, Scott. The solution to this problem is to get a large level joint twin. Let's get a grant. Let's get a grant to that. I'll submit, but you get to do all the work. Well, but people have done it, so they've tried it, and what you find is that there's not much evidence of harotability and attachment patterns and children. Instead, what you get are huge environmental effects and some modest shared environmental effects, which in the behavior genetic literature is the way of talking about whatever's common between the twins that might be shaping the attachment patterns. There are four or five studies now that have done behavior genetic analysis on self report measures of attachment and adults, and those also are a little kind of they're kind of a mixed bag in terms of the findings, but I think the fairest way to summarize it is that there is some evidence of harotability for tax related anxiety, maybe close to forty percent, and kind of hit or miss for avoidance. So there probably are some genetic influences that help shape

whether people become relatively anxious which respect to attachment issues. But it's probably the case, at least according to attachment theory, that whatever those differences are, they're correlated with environmental influences that matter. So separating those correlated influences is the really tricky empirical problem. It's tricky, and I guess the question about when you say they matter. They certainly matter in infancy we see it's correlated with emotional regulation issues and other problems. But the discussion I think it's really tricky is the question of continuity. You know, I've looked at these men analyzes looking at the relationship between childhood attachment and adult attachment, and they're quite small. So I have a lot of questions relating to that, the fact that the continuity is not as high as people might in the general population think. And one is how much. Does Bowlby's theory even rest on there being continuity. Yeah, I've always viewed that as being sort of the I don't let me see how to describe it. It's kind of like the wild card and attachment theory because we all make this assumption that there's some degree of continuity between childhood and adulthood with the respons like to insecurity your patterns of attachment. But the theory never specifies a just how much continuity should be observed. In other words, there's not a quantitative prediction here. And the second part is Bolby's theory involves a paradox, if you will, between what I like to call socialization effects and selection effects. So the idea of socialization is part of what motivates the developmental approach to attachment theory. The idea is that the way in which your primary care givers relate to you and treat you helps to shape who you become, whether you become relatively secure in your attachment style or relatively insecure. The selection idea comes out of sort of the individual differences or the personality way of thinking about things, and the idea is that people who are relatively insecure select themselves into situations that reinforce their insecurity. Or conversely, if you're reallatively secure person, you select yourself or shape your environments in ways that are consistent with the working models that you hold. There's this great study by Nancy Collins I think it was their dissertation and it was published in the late nineties showing that in the adult attachment realm, if you ask people to okay, imagine Scott that you're going to a cocktail party okay, and you have your significant other with you while you go to mix a new drink. You look across the room and you see that she's talking to this strikingly attractive man. Okay. She seems to be enjoying herself. Okay, she's experiencing joy and pleasure and these things we were talking about earlier, maybe amusement. Amusement. Now, how do you think about that? And how would you behave how would you attribute his actions and her behaviors? And you know, this is a standard situation. If you

ask you to ask people to say, Okay, how do you think about this? Secure people tend to say, oh, I'm really glad that she's having a good time. This must be an old high school friend, I'm glad that they finally had a chance to reconnect. Maybe I'll go over there and introduce myself. Whereas people who are relatively insecure, it will be like, what what kind of culplaning situation is this? Right? This guy's trying to make his move. She's into it, right, she's already giving. So the idea is that the working models or attachment styles that people have can shape the way people construe the social world in which they have. It influences the attributions they make about the behavior of others and whether people are violating their trust or whether people are relatively safe and secure individuals to trust him. So you have what's called selection effects, where working models shape the social world, and you have these socialization effects, where the social world shapes the working models people have. So the consequence of these two things working in tandem is that it's unclear from a theoretical perspective whether there should be a lot of continuity from infancy to adulthood. The selection idea implies, yes, there should be continuity, right, because if I am relatively secure and I'm continuing to interact with others who reward that security or who reinforce the views that I have. There's little reason for me to change my mind about things. But the socialization idea suggests that we should be revising our working models in ways that reflect changes in our ongoing worlds. And we're not in the same social environment at age one that we're at age fifteen. For example, we have friends, we have romantic partners, we have parents who may be lost jobs or divorced. Lots of things change, and so the idea is that working models have to be sensitive to those kinds of things as well. So to the extent to which you accept that proposition of attachment theory, you might not expect much continuity at all, because for the theory to be correct, what you need is for the working models to reflect it zonegoing experiences. You don't need the assumption that there's ongoing experiences themselves. Else should be fully continuous across time. Now, having said that, let's say a test Rey testability point two ZHO between F and C and adulthood is quite in line, which is about everything else we study in psychology. So in other words, I think from an absolute point of view, you could say, well, that's kind of low because that correlation is closer to the zero than it is to one, So mathematically it seems small. Well, actually, point one point one two is what I'm seeing right now and probably the best meta analysis on this topic. Which one is the best? The completion recent completion of an age eighteen year AI assessment of the se c CYD that included over eight hundred and fifty participants are ecal point one two. Okay, so that's one study. It's not an analysis per se, but it's an important one because it's a relatively large sample of individuals. The reason meta analysis of these samples found are ecal point one four and that's a pink couirt food, yes incorporate. Okay, So it is relatively small, but it's in it's small in the same way that everything else in psychology is small. So if you look at meta analyzes of personality and temperament from let's say early childhood to adulthood, you also get test retest correlations that are between let's say zero at point two wish. If you look at cognitive ability, you find, yeah, the correlations are a little bit higher there, but kind of like what you see in some of these other areas. The overall stability tends to be elevated among adults relative to childhood. So I think it's a little tricky because what you see is a thread of continuity, and the way you interpret that, I think depends on what message you ultimately want to take away from attachment theory, Right, So one way of interpreting that is, huh, that's interesting if I want to understand part of why Scott is the way he is, the value in reaching back into his past and seeing what his early interactions were like, not just in childhood, but throughout adolescents and later adulthood as well, because attachment theory suggests that there is going to be some sort of thread that might allow us to provide some sort of better understanding or make some attributions about the meaning of why Scott thinks that what he does, or what he feels that what he does, or the choices he may make. Now, if you're a betting person, you're still going to take the bed based on the small odds, because correlation at point one, let's say, is still going to earn you money over the long run, compared to correlation at zero, which would lead you to break either. But if you wanted to use attachment theory to prophesize what people will be like on the basis of early experiences, You're going to have a lot of misses. And I would think that's an important thing to understand. If the correlation is between point two and point one, when everything is said and done, you're going to have a lot of peace people who had positive early experiences who are now relatively well adjusted from an attachment theory perspective, as well as people who were neglected or didn't feel like their parents really understood them, who now are not well adapted socially or interpersonally. You're going to have a lot of people also in those off diagonals, people who had let's say, less than optimal childhood experiences but don't seem any more software now, as well as people had great experiences but just can't seem to find their way of life, to find that need to find meaningful in their personal relationships. So those off diagonal cases will exist, and I think that's a natural consequence of imperfect continuity over time. That makes a lot of sense. I am thinking about this from the original spirit. The original Boldi spirit was very much grounded in evolutionary

considerations and if you think about it from an evolutionary point of view, these are just we're talking about like activation of strategies based on environmental contingencies. So it's you know, the gene environment interaction is very very strong there, and if we throughout our lifespan are constantly recalibrating our gene, you know, we have this genomic plasticity based on environmental input. It seems just to me to make a lot more sense just to approach adult attachment kind of divorce from what you were as a kid, but look at your current relationship. You can imagine a case where someone had a very secure attachment in childhood and then maybe they get an abusive relationship and as a result of that, then they start to become they go more on the insecure, anxious, and even avoidant if they're really severely abused, that might be a coping mechanism from an evolutionary strategy perspective, Right, does that make sense? Yeah? Absolutely? And so here's I think a couple of ways to think about the problem. And let me just say I completely agree with everything you said here. I think if one's goal is to understand, now, why are some adults relatively secure and some are insecure. You want, from an attachment theoretical perspective, if you want to think about the history of their interpersonal relationships, where history begins, let's say, at birth, when you're filling out the iPad list of whether you want joy in your life or not, or pre birth, all the way to one sentence ago. Okay, So that's a big way of thinking about interpersonal history, and from that point of view, you would want to wait more heavily what has happened recently in that person's experience is relative to things that happened in the distant past. Okay, the entire history is relevant, but you know, this is the way most calibration and algorithms and machine learning processes work. It's sort of the recent inputs, the recent perturbations, that have the most effect on the system, rather than the starting values per se. And I think that's true in the context of attachment as well. Now, having said that's not always the case that we're trying to, either for scientific reasons or humanitarian reasons, understand why the person is the way they are right now. In terms of maximizing prediction, we're trying to do something that's more biographical we're trying to understand that person's history at large. So if I'm trying to understand why I'm relatively secure, I'm only going to get so far. Even if my prediction is correct. By saying whether I was in a good mood five minutes ago, right, that would be the most boring biography of Chris Frail or Scott Coleman that you could ever read. Right. So, part of what attachment theory entails is you can think of development as an architectural process where you lay a foundation and then you begin to build a scaffolding and you begin to build a framework. And the way development works is you start at that ground level and that kind of constrains what you can do from that point forward, but it doesn't determine how high the building will ultimately be. That's a function of what you continue to do as you climb up the scaffolding and continue to construct the structure. So those early experiences are relevant for understanding the big picture, but the early experiences are laying the foundation for what comes next. So those early experiences, as you said, may play a role in shaping how secure the young child is, and then that young child might bring those experiences to pure relationships, and that might bias the individual to have more positive and harmonious relationships with others than it would if the relatively insecure. But that doesn't mean that the kid can end up with a teacher who makes the kid feel like a complete loser, completely incompetent questions, certain choices, and aptitudes, and you know, these things can spiral out of control sometimes, and so you can't expect perfect continuity. If you want the big picture from the Goldian perspective, you want to be telling the story from the beginning under the assumption that things can evolve in ways that are not always easy to predict. We can't always tell what the future will be by knowing something about the past. We know something more than nothing, but we can't predict it perfectly. But if you want to tell that big story and tell it well that it's make it emotionally compelling and descriptively rich, you need the whole history of those interactions rather than what just happened the previous relationship to the person. Thank you. That really helped add a lot of nuance to this. I found this interesting study that found attachment security is not especially stable even if it's not especially stable across the first two decades of life. When discontinuity exists, it can be explained at least partly by attachment relevant changes in the caregiving environment. There's a study that found, for example, in the SECCYD study, participants who remain secure between early childhood and age eighteen, compared with those who change from secure to insecure, experience lower levels and a greater decline. And in maternal sensitivity, we're less likely to be living with their fathers, and their mothers reported to large or increase in negative life events in the intervening years. So I think that's consistent with the perspective I was just telling you about just how like throughout our life span, that doesn't just matter how sensitive our mothers were or fathers, but also how sensitive is our current partner, how sensitive have all of our partners been in our adult relationship life. And also I think another wrinkle to this from a genetic point of view is that it looks like heritability of all psychological traits tends to increase as we age. So I don't know how much some of these effects you find that genetic effects in adolescents than you do in infants, for instance, And I don't know how much that as a result of kind of a

hardening of what was already there or crystallizing. So that just adds there's so many nuances to all this. I'm not saying I know the answers. Yeah, we're trying to get a grant to do the behavior genetic research calling that topic. One of the issues we want to dress is something we haven't talked about yet that might be relevant or interesting. Is the distinction between being secure or insecure in general versus being secure or insecure in the context of a specific relationship. So some people, for example, are relatively secure in general. When we administer these self report inventories, for example, we typically just ask people to think about close relationships generally in their life, and some people will be secure, some people will be insecure. But even people who are secure might be insecure with specific individuals. So they might have, let's say, a very hostile relationship with their father, feel very distant from them and angry, but have a very healthy relationship with the romantic partner. Now there's a thread throughout this. To use the word thread again, So people who tend to be secure in one domain also tend to be secure in other domains as well, So there's some degree of general attachment that sort of colors every relationship that we're in. There's also uniqueness. So I think that's a really interesting question when you start thinking about behavior genetic perspective. Namely, if you have, let's say, relatively secure relationship with your spouse, but maybe a relatively insecure relationship with your parents, it seems that the only way to really explain that, and it's still fallible, is that has something to do with the history of relationship you've had with that spouse, something about it must be better than the relationship you have with your parents. But this strong genetic perspective would suggest that I don't think you could make sense of that distinction in the first place from a strong genetic perspective unless you are willing to make the assumption that there are specific genes for attachment with your parents, and specific genes for attachment and friendships, and specific genes with attachment to God, and specific genes for attachmental men. Are there differences in mothers and fathers and the impact of sensitivity. So what you find is if you do the strange situation for example, with mothers and fathers, you get a relatively weak association there. Children who are secure with mom also tend to be secure with dad. Okay, but in a correlation metric that's about a correlation of point one point two, so it's certainly not terministics. Well, I guess what. Let me just get right to the evolutionary question I'm asking you, are do you see stronger of differentiations in the strange situation with the mother than the father, because you could see that genes could be sculpted in ways for whatever kind of over evolutionary time, whatever gender caregiver was more there for you. And I don't know if I mean I'm just making this up, but maybe you know over everych time, where the males were out hunting, you know, I don't know where the females staying home. More so, what could genes have been sculpted to be more reactive to a female voice for instance? You know, that's an interesting idea. And I don't know if what you proposed about the way individual differences break out in a strength situation works in the way you predicted it. In otherwords, I'm not disagree, you're disaffirming it. I have no idea. I'm ignorant on that point, but I think the general argument and attachment theory is that that would be unlikely. There was this interesting paper by Lisa Diamond and the two thousands where she was trying to she was trying to make the case that there's an important distinction to be made between sexual desire and attachment, which is an interesting idea in the attachment field because we tend to think of a romantic law as being an attachment process, and from that point of view, love this sort of a combination of sexual desire and attachment and caregiving as well. Sort of it's the apple phenomenon of the configuration of those three motivational systems. But it's interesting because most people have a sexual preference for same gendered or other gendered individuals. Having a preference is stronger in our society than being agnostic with respect to gender person you desire. So the argument Lisa Diamond makes is that that's not true with attachment, and because those two systems sometimes get conflated in our psychological experience, will become when we're becoming attached to some way, we become preoccupied with them or curious about their whereabouts, we wonder how they feel about us, And that sense of infatuation is very similar to what you experience with sexual desire as well. So sometimes people per argument is that it's not always easy to keep those things distinct, and parents might get upset with their children. WHOA, you know what's going on with you? You're spending all this time with us a person? Are you gay? Things like that, and children don't understand what the question is all about. Ultimately, but her basic argument is that whatever the motivational systems are that underlie sex may be gender oriented. In other words, there might be a propensity for some people to seek out the same sex individuals versus opsite sex individuals, but that is not true of the attachment system. It is specifically gender neutral, and in fact, one of the fun I don't know if fun is the right word for this, but one of the curious things about attachment is it partly because of its ethological heritage. Part of what inspirable was Conrad Lorenz's studies of them in printing and geese for example, are you familiar with these? Oh? Yes? So the idea is that the young geese are born, and the ideas that they're kind of programmed to in print or attach it on the first moving object they see. Now, under normal circumstances, that should be the mother, right, But you can

create these interesting experimental situations where it's a football instead, or it's Conrad Lorenz himself and suddenly the geese are following Conrad Lren's around that he's their parent or their attachment figure. So the idea is that the attachment system isn't necessarily looking for a mother, It isn't necessarily looking for something with a feminine weighte soll no protect them. According to Bowlby, it's looking for somebody who's stronger or wiser. But I think you met that metaphorically. I don't think he considered the mind to be looking for wisdom at age one, yeah, or something like that. We still can't solve that problem at age forty five, so yeah, oh yeah. So it's looking for something that's there essentially, and more often than not that is going to be a biological parent, and it shouldn't matter whether it's a male or female. So from that aversion of perspective that you articulated, I don't know if the system's smart enough. If you will to make that distinction. It might not be I think it's open to more testing. But no, this idea though that you are I think this is you're really onto something here, you know, looking at security in different domeans. But we're not talking about demeans outside. We're not talking about other demeans, Like what about your work or your like take a broader perspective on security. How do these you know, like can you feel unlovable but still have a high self esteem for your math ability? For instance? You know, like, how can we take your scale? What if we started adding in other life domeans? Then how would it all correlate with each other? So my guess, based on some of the things we've done is that you would find some modest positive co variation here. That is, people who are relatively secure in their close relationships are also going to be relatively secure in the ways in which they think about other domains in their life, including let's say they're satisfaction with their jobs, the extent to which they view themselves as competent and talented and leisure domains that they enjoy and appreciate, or those who are insecure may question their ability to accomplish some tasks that are completely non relational, not interpersonal at all. Now, most of the research on attachment hasn't looked necessarily whether people who are secure in general, let's say, are also secure with respect to their jobs. But what you do find is that how securely attached you are is related to all kinds of crazy things in life. So it is related to things like job satisfaction, It is related to how well you cooperate with others, it's related to the alliance you built with your therapist. So the bottom li ise that it sort of bleeds over into all kinds that can make absolutely I mean, you could see how someone who can go through the same exact insecure attachment processeds to their work, like if their writing isn't going well initially saying oh I'm a failure or I'm on the equivalent of unlovable and work is I have no talent.

Yeah, thanks for describing my morning, but I didn't mean to bring that up, do you know what I mean? Like, the same principles can apply to non physical human entities. Well, that turns out to be one of my favorite miniature topics, if you will. And attachment theory, which is attachment to non human entities. So that Lee Kirkpatrick is an evolutionary psychologist who studied attachment a lot earlier in his career, and one of the art ements he made in early on was that people, especially in Christian religions, have conceptualized God as an attachment figure, and that you can be securely attached to God, for example, or insecurely attached to God. And you have this famous ram song about losing your religion, which is kind of this realization that the relationship doesn't mean what you thought it meant, in this sense of feeling betrayed by an attachment object and trying to find your way without that secure base. So I think the basic principles, as you said, cannot be applied to many different areas. And you know, on the one hand, that's great because I could spend all day thing about how attachment is mental guise of things such as how tidy my closet is or is not. But on the other hand, it also raises the specter of if it explains too much, does it really explain anything. So this is a common problem we have to deal with in psychology sometimes when we strive to come up with relatively inclusive models. It's unclear whether we've reinvented the wheel or whether we're just sort of over exerting ourselves in some ways. First of all, great point, but I just am thinking, I want to do a study to see the correlation between how your relationship you have with your mother and how securely attached you are to God. So Lee kor Patrick has done those stuffies, Oh what's the correlation the magnitude of correlationships because this is back when everybody was doing types of attachment. But generally people who are secure with their parents are sort of retrospectively reflecting on it now also tend to be secure in the relationship with God. So he was the reason he cared about this idea in part was there were different ways of thinking about how the developmental processes could work. So on the one hand, it could be the case that people turn to God when they have a deficit in their human interpersonal relationships. So it could be the case that if you're in if you're insecure in your relationship with your parents, maybe try to have those needs met and reship with God, so you might end up with insecure parental relationships. Predicting some like secure relationships with God. But it's really more of an assimilation phenomenon. In other words, people who are I guess you could say, empowered by the secure relationships with they have with their parents also imview that security and the relationship with the God or vice versa. If you're insecure in the relationship with your parents, that God the Father is necessarily a reliable one. That is so fascinating. Unfortunately, I had to run to a date right now. It's going to be a secure date, I hope. So I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for being so generous with your time and talking through all these issues with me. It was a true honor to be able to talk to you today. This was super fun. Thank you for inviting me to do this. Get thank you. Thank you so much for listening to The Psychology Podcast with doctor Scott Barry Call. I hope you found this episode just as thought provoking as I did. If something you heard today stimulated you in some way, I encourage you to join in the discussion at the Psychology podcast dot com. That's the Psychology Podcast dot com.