Evolutionary Theory

Evolutionary Theory

1. Proposed by John Bowlby

2. Three important features

   • Infants are 'programmed' to become attached
   • Attachment is a biological process, must take place during critical period or not at all
   • Attachment plays a role in later development

3. Summary of Bowlby's theory

   • Attachment is adaptive and innate
   • Elicit caregiving through social releasers
   • Bonds are formed with adults who respond most sensitively
     • Must occur during critical period
   • Infants form one special relationship
     • Referred to as monotropy
       • Leads to an internal working model and the continuity hypothesis

4. Innate programming

   • A characteristic we have developed in order to survive
     • Enables us to become attached to adults
       • Through the use of social releasers
         • Smiling
         • Crying
         • Looking appealing
     • Lorenz's Goslings
       • Automatically formed an attachment with the first moving thing they saw

5. Critical period

   • Bowlby suggested that if a child does not form an attachment by 2 and a half, then it would not be able to after that
     • Studies such as Rutter's Romanian Orphans suggest that there is a sensitive period rather than critical period
       • Sensitive period
         • The time at which an attachment is most likely to form

6. Continuity hypothesis

   • Monotropy provides an infant with an internal working model of relationships
     • Secure children develop a positive model of themselves based on their feelings of security from a sensitive PCG
     • Avoidant children have a working model of themselves being unworthy and are assumed to have a rejecting PCG
     • Ambivalent children have inconsistent caregivers and so have negative self images and exaggerate responses for attention
     • Monotropy forms a secure base
       • Infants will regard their secure base as someone that brings them comfort
         • Harlow's Monkeys
           • Chose the cloth monkey over the wire monkey who fed them because of the comfort
   • Provides a possible explanation of how early patterns of attachment are related to later life
     • Hazan and Shaver (1987)
       • Newspaper study - questionnaire
         • Found a positive correlation between childhood and romantic relationships