Evolutionary Theory

Evolutionary Theory.

Bowlby believed that attachment is innate and adaptive, we are all born with an inherited need to form attachments and this is to help us survive.

Internal working model - Bowlby believed that the first relationship formed is a template or schema                                                     that gives the child a feel for what a relationship is, and it is used in future                                                     years to develop others.

Monotropy - Bowlby in 1969 claimed that there was a hierarchy of preferred                                               attachments with a primary care giver at the top, this is usually the mother.

Maternal deprivation hypothesis - If a child does not form any attachment within the sensitive                                                                           period this is likely to result in serious long term developmental                                                                     consequences later in life.

Sensitive period - Being innate Bowlby believed there would be a period in which                                                  attachments were most likely to develop,similar to the critical period for                                    imprinting.

Social releasers - Babies are born with the tendency to display certain innate behaviors                                       (called social releasers) which help ensure proximity and contact with                                      the mother or mother figure

Evaluation.

Zimmerman et al 2000 found that early attachment style was not a good predictor of later relationships and also discovered that life events such as parental divorce had a much greater impact.  Which is against the internal working model aspect of the evolutionary theory.

Hazan and Shafer in 1987 asked people to volunteer to take part in the study. They were given 2 questionaries one to determine their early relationships with parents and one to determine their later, adult relationships. they found three basic types of childhood attachment

Secure - close warm relationship with parents meant a stable relationship with partner. Avoidant - mother was cold and rejecting, led to a fear of intimacy later in life Anxious Ambivalent - Father was percieved as unfair, resulting in obsessive, jealous tendancies in later relationships.

Thus supporting the idea of the internal working model suggesting that primary attachments are templates for later in life.

Black and Schutte found that people who recalled having a positive relationship with their mothers were more trusting and more likely to seek comfort from partners 

�Schaffer and Emerson conducted a longitudinal study of 60 Glasgow babies. They found multiple attachments seemed to be the norm. This is against the idea of monotropy and the hierarchy of preferred attachments.

Evolutionary theory

Evaluation