ABSTRACT
All the major theories of social development in infancy we discussed in Chapter 2 have addressed the development of attachments; however, no theory has been as enduring as the one provided by John Bowlby
(1969; see Roisman & Groh, 2011). Bowlby, a psychoanalyst who was much impressed by the capacity of ethological theorists to explain early emotional communications and the formation of social bonds in nonhuman species, assumed that the behavioral propensities of infants and parents are most profitably considered in the context of the environment in which our species evolved. In that environment of evolutionary adaptedness, the survival of infants would have depended on their ability to maintain proximity to protective adults to obtain nourishment, comfort, and security. Unlike the young of many other species, however, human infants are unable to move closer to or follow adults for several months after birth, and they are even incapable of clinging to adults to stay in contact. Instead, human infants have to rely on signals of various sorts to entice adults to approach and stay near them. For these signals to be effective, adults must be predisposed to respond to them. The best example of such a signal is the infant cry, which very effectively entices adults to approach, pick up, and soothe the infant (LaGasse et al., 2005; Soltis, 2004). As they grow older, infants develop a variety of other means to achieve proximity or contact, including independent locomotion, and they gradually come to focus their bids on people with whom they are most familiar, thereby forming attachments. It was first believed that infants developed attachments to the individuals responsible for their basic care and feeding. In a classic study involving rhesus monkey infants, however, Harlow and Zimmermann (1959) showed that infants formed attachments to cuddly terrycloth mother surrogates rather than the wire surrogates that fed them (Figure 11.1). This study helped pave the way for Bowlby’s theory of attachment, which placed emphasis on proximity and contact seeking rather than feeding and reduction of physical needs as a basis of attachment.
