ABSTRACT
In this chapter we address the issue of the universality and sociocultural specificity of individual differences in attachment behavior, and we try to examine whether any sociocultural limits to the emergence of organized patterns of attachment can be found. In light of the more than 1200 different cultures (past and present), and at least 186 different cultural areas, any claim to cross-cultural validity of a theory can only be considered a bold but tentative hypothesis. Nevertheless, there is some evidence for the idea that intracultural differences in the development of attachment may be larger than the cross-cultural differences (Van IJzendoorn & Sagi, 1999). The implication of this finding is that we should investigate attachment in diverging sociocultural contexts, in order to maximize the probability of a refutation of the cross-cultural hypothesis, and to test attachment theory to its limits. Here, we broaden our scope and discuss in more detail recent attachment research in Africa, the United States, Israel, and Japan in search of the sociocultural limits of attachment theory.
