psychologists believe that your attachment to your caregiver your first significant relationship will go on to shape all your future relationships including the quality of your friendships how you behave in your romantic relationships and even how you will parent your own children hey everyone welcome back to Bear it in mind in this video we're going to explore the influence of early attachment on childhood and adult relationships and we're going to do so under three headings friendships rtic relationships and parenting but before we explore each of those in turn one of the key ideas you need to know for this section comes from John bal's attachment Theory and that is the internal working model which you may remember as one of the features of bal's monotropic theory it's called internal because it's inside your mind it's called working because it's what you are using when relating to others and it's called Model because it's the example and template for how to relate to others according to Balby your primary attachment relationship acts as a model or template for later relationships it provides the blueprint or for those of you remembering your cognitive psychology it leads to the formation of a mental representation or schema of how to relate to other people in other words the relationship you have with your caregiver leads to the expectation of the same experiences in later relationships you may remember the work of answorth strain situation which proposed three main attachment types secure insecure avoidant and insecure resistant for a reminder of the strain situation and the different Detachment types you can watch that video using the link above or in the description below the first attachment we form to our caregiver depends on how sensitive the mother's care was if the mother was sensitive and responsive to the needs of the child they would feel safe and loved this would be a secure attachment if the mother was unresponsive to the needs of the child when distressed they would become emotionally distant avoiding intimacy this would be an insecure avoidant attachment if the mother was inconsistent in their behavior so that the child didn't know whether they would receive love or be neglected they will be overly needy of affection often anxious of them leaving this would be an insecure resistant attachment so how does all this play out in friendships romance and parenting some research suggests that your attachment type is associated with the quality of your peer relationships in childhood in other words your friends I'll be Katherine Kars in 1994 found a difference in the quality of relationships between secure and insecurely attached children securely attached children were more likely to have good friendships during childhood whereas children with insecure attachments had more difficult difficulties not only making friendships but maintaining them furthermore she writes that children who are more securely attached form more positive relationships with peers cooperate more with adults and regulate their emotions more effectively interestingly she goes on to say that insecurely attached children tend to have higher levels of anxiety and that this may be in part because they are less likely to develop the skills needed to effectively interact with others in other words for and maintain friendships secondly let's consider how your early attachment can influence your romantic relationships has an in Shaver in 1987 conducted an investigation into the association between attachment and adult relationships through what they called The Love quiz the quiz contained nearly 100 questions this was published in a local newspaper the Rocky Mountain news where people could fill it in and send it off they received 620 replies to their questionnaire and they found a positive correlation between attachment type and later love experiences securely attached adults were the most likely to have good and longer lasting relationships and believed that love endures it lasts insecure avoidant attached adults were most likely to fear closeness in relationships and believe that love doesn't last an insecure resistant attached adults were most likely to be needy for love they fell in love very easily the data demonstrated the idea of an internal working model because the participants attachment style when they were younger predicted their attitudes towards love and their experience of love as an adult thirdly let's consider how your early attachment can influence how you parent and here we will consider two studies firstly the famous and controversial study by Harry harlo in 1966 we covered this in detail in the video on animal studies on attachment which if you've not seen before or want to watch as a refresher I'll link above and in the description below what harow and his research found was that the long-term effects of not having formed an attachment of not forming a bond with a caregiver in this case a mother monkey caused significant damage they reported that the monkeys lacked skills in how to be social and interact often being timid and not knowing how to behave around other monkeys and most notably in terms of the internal working model was what happened to those they called motherless monkeys those who never experienced mother love when these motherless monkeys became mothers themselves they were inadequate mothers they were not caring nurturing and comforting to their own children because they had never experienced that themselves they lacked a model an example of how to form positive relationships however it is worth noting here that the use of haro's research to tell us about the internal working model can be criticized because the research was entirely based on monkey and as such calls into question how much the findings can be generalized to human attachment relationships now in terms of a study with human participants biley atal in 2007 assessed 99 mothers attachments with their own one-year-old babies and their relationship with their own mother they assess the mother child relationship using the strain situation and they assess the relationship with her own mother using an attachment interview they found that mothers who reported poor attachment to their own mothers were much more likely to have a poor quality attachment with their own baby as judged by the strange situation which provides evidence for the influence of early attachments on later adult relationships however there are limitations with the research of baile atal and the research of Hazard and shaver that we covered earlier firstly both these pieces of research cannot establish cause and effect in other words they are unable to say that a person's early attachment and specifically their internal working model was the cause of the behaviors in future adult relationships this is because those studies were correlational studies and lack control of extraneous variables which can influence future relationships so in Hasen and shaver study perhaps there may have been other factors involved that could have significantly influenced their adult romantic relationships besides their early attachment relationship and with Bailey study perhaps there may have been other factors involved that influenced how mothers parented their children besides their relationship with their mother secondly though both of these studies can be criticized for the potential subjectivity and social desirability as well as retrospective nature of their data in terms of subjectivity when participants completed H and Shaver's love quiz they were giving their subjective opinion and rating on their own relationships rather than an objective assessment from someone independent in terms of social desirability there's the problem that participants may be more likely to give answers that make them look more favorable I mean if someone was to ask you about how good your relationships are you might be tempted to make it sound a little better than it might actually be and in terms of retrospective data remember that in these studies participants are either filling in a questionnaire in a newspaper or completing an interview in both cases participants are required to recall me memories from many years ago and this can sometimes be a problem perhaps for some participants the memories they recall are more negative about their early attachment than events really were or perhaps there are certain memories that they failed to recall which might have led to a different conclusion being drawn about their relationship with their mother is what they are recalling a true and genuine account of what happened all those many years ago when they were children all of this raises questions about how accurate the data provided Ed by these participants in these studies actually was and as a result leads us to question the extent to which early attachment influences our later relationships so far we've seen evidence which points to how our early attachment influences both childhood and adulthood however there is research that points to how the internal working model we have for relationships is not fixed and can actually change firstly Research into the Romanian orphans adopted in the UK by Ral in 2010 if you haven't watched that I'll link it up here and down below for you many of these children were sent to their orphanages when they were less than 1 month old and were raised in institutions with very little care and little to no opportunity to form an attachment with a caregiver could they recover would they be able to form positive relationships in the future with such a poor internal working model they found that for most of the orphans the damaging effects of institutional care could be reversed providing they were adopted early enough and given a supportive and strong adoptive family secondly there is the research of colover in 1976 and the case of the twin boys in Czechoslovakia they tragically lost their mother shortly after being born and were then raised by their father and his new wife who banished them to the Sellar of their house for the next five and a half years of their life clearly they would have had a very poor internal working model for how to relate to others after they were discovered and rescued at the age of 7 they were later legally adopted by a dedicated woman as a result they caught up academically with Children of their own age and emotionally their development was normal later in life they completed formal education gained jobs in electronics and most interestingly for the purposes of this video both later married and had children the internal working model which was certainly a very poor one in the early years of their life was something they could recover from so that they could go on to form effective adult relationships congratulations that's the last video in the attachment topic now there are many more topics in Psychology to explore so how about exploring the topic of Psychopathology where we look at different mental disorders the first video explores what we mean by abnormality and how psychologists go about deciding what counts as abnormal behavior I hope you found this video helpful and we'll see you in the next one