ABSTRACT
In this chapter I discuss attachment, as metaphor and as process. I then survey some behavioral criteria of attachment, in particular cued-infant crying. Following that, I discuss the highly influential but ultimately uninterpretable report by Bell and Ainsworth (1972), showing an inverse relation between maternal responding to infant crying and subsequent infant crying. That report’s questionable conclusion (as will become apparent) serves as my point of departure for considering how operant crying can enter the human infant’s (interaction) repertory, how it can be maintained, modified, eliminated, or come under discriminative control, and how, in the process of its conditioning, cued crying can come to control diverse concurrent maternal responses to that infant. Finally, I consider how the conditioning of that cued operant crying (or, for that matter, the conditioning of various cued responses) can index the acquisition of a focused attachment.
