What Is an Adult Attachment Interview?

Whether an adult feels secure in their adult relationships may partly reflect his / her attachment experience in early childhood. Ballby believes that a child's relationship-related mental representations or work patterns (that is, behavioral and thinking expectations, beliefs, "rules" or "scripts") are a function of his / her caregiving experience. According to Ballby, this process should improve the continuity of attachment patterns throughout life, although if a person's relationship experience does not meet his expectations, his / her attachment patterns may change. Simply put, if we assume that adult relationships are attachment relationships, children who feel safe will also feel safe in love relationships when they grow up.

Whether an adult feels secure in their adult relationships may partly reflect his / her attachment experience in early childhood. Ballby believes that a child's relationship-related mental representations or work patterns (that is, behavioral and thinking expectations, beliefs, "rules" or "scripts") are a function of his / her caregiving experience. According to Ballby, this process should improve the continuity of attachment patterns throughout life, although if a person's relationship experience does not meet his expectations, his / her attachment patterns may change. Simply put, if we assume that adult relationships are attachment relationships, children who feel safe will also feel safe in love relationships when they grow up.

Chinese name

Adult attachment

Applied discipline

psychology

Application range

Developmental psychology

Adult attachment theory

Attachment theory was originally developed by British psychoanalyst John. Bowlby argues that he is trying to understand the intense distress experienced by babies when separated from their parents. Ballby observed that separated babies try to resist separation from their parents or approach parents who have disappeared in extreme ways (such as crying, holding on, and looking frantically). At the time, psychoanalytic authors believed that these expressions of infants were a manifestation of infants' immature defense mechanisms, and they were mobilized to suppress emotional pain. But Ballby pointed out that this expression is common in many mammals, and he believes that these behaviors may have biologically evolutionary functions.

Ballby makes a hypothesis based on behavioral theory: These attachment behaviors, such as crying and searching, are adaptive responses that separate from the original attachment object (that is, the person providing support, protection, and care). This reaction occurs because neither humans nor other mammals and young children can obtain food and protect themselves, and they all rely on "older and smarter" adult individuals to provide care and protection. Ballby believes that in the course of evolution, babies who can maintain a close relationship with an attachment target (by looking cute or maintained through attachment behavior) are more likely to survive to reproductive age. In Ballby's view, natural selection gradually "designed" a set of motivational control systems that he called an "attachment behavior system" to adjust the close relationship with the objects he is attached to.

Attachment behavior system is an important concept in attachment theory, because it connects the two as a whole: a modern theory of behavioral patterns of human development, emotional regulation, and personality. In Ballby's view, the attachment system essentially "questions" such fundamental questions as: Is the person to be attached nearby? Does he accept me? Does he follow me? If the child perceives the answer to this question as "yes," the child will feel loved, safe, and confident, and will engage in exploring surroundings, playing with others, and communicating. However, if the child perceives the answer to this question as "No", the child will experience anxiety and show various attachment behaviors: from searching with eyes to actively following and shouting. These behaviors will continue until the child re-establishes sufficient levels of physical or psychological closeness to the person with whom he or she is attached, or until the child is "exhausted", the latter of which can occur in situations of long-term separation or disappearance. Ballby believes that children will experience disappointment and depression in this helpless situation.

Adult attachment

Although Ballby focuses primarily on understanding the nature of baby-caregiver relationships, he believes that all stages of life, from the "cradle to the grave," are attached. But it was not until the mid-1980s that researchers began to seriously consider the possibility of the attachment process continuing into adulthood. Hazan and Shaver (1987) conducted an early examination of Ballby's views in the context of love relationships. According to Hazan and Shaver, the emotional bond between adult partners and the emotional bond between infants and their caregivers are caused by the same motivational system, the attachment behavior system. Hazan and Shaver point out that baby-caregivers and adult romantic partners share some characteristics: ^[1]

* Both feel safe when the other party is around and able to respond to themselves

* All have intimate, personal physical contact

* Feeling unsafe when you cannot get close to the other party

* Both share their findings with the other party

* Will bother the other's face and both show a crush and focus on each other

* Both "physical intercourse"

Based on these similarities, Hazan and Shaver concluded that adult relationships are just as infant-caregiver relationships as attachments, and that romantic love is characteristic of attachment behavior systems and motivational systems that produce care behaviors and sexual relations. Related phenomena.

Love relationships may be attachment relationships, and contemporary research on intimate relationships is deeply influenced by this view. From this perspective, at least three important conclusions can be drawn:

First, if adult romantic relationships are attachment relationships, then the individual differences that Ainsworth observes in infant-caregiver relationships should also be observed in adult relationships. For example, we should expect some adults to feel safe in their relationships-believing that their partners will appear whenever they need them, and will be able to rely on and make others dependent on themselves. We would also expect adults to the contrary who feel insecure in the relationship. For example, some insecure adults may be anxiety-resistant: they worry that others will not love them completely, and are prone to frustration and anger when their attachment needs are not met. There will also be evasive adults: they don't seem to care much about intimacy and may prefer not to depend on others or to rely too much on themselves.

Second, if the adult relationship is an attachment relationship, then the "work" of the adult relationship should be similar to that of the baby-caregiver relationship. In other words, the same factors that encourage children to explore the environment should also encourage adults to explore the environment. For children, there is a caregiver who responds in a timely manner, and for adults, a partner who responds in a timely manner. . The same kind of things that make the attachment object conform to the baby's "mind" (that is, timely response and closeness) should also meet the wishes of adult love partners. It is important that individual differences in attachment should affect relationships and personal activities in adulthood, just as it does in childhood.

Whether an adult feels secure in their adult relationships may partly reflect his / her attachment experience in early childhood. Ballby believes that a child's relationship-related mental representations or work patterns (that is, behavioral and thinking expectations, beliefs, "rules" or "scripts") are a function of his / her caregiving experience. For example, a safe child believes that others will help them because past experience led him to this conclusion. Once a child has this expectation, he / she looks for relationship experiences that meet these expectations and perceives other relationships with these beliefs. According to Ballby, this process should improve the continuity of attachment patterns throughout life, although if a person's relationship experience does not meet his expectations, his / her attachment patterns may change. Simply put, if we assume that adult relationships are attachment relationships, children who feel safe will also feel safe in love relationships when they grow up.

The above discussion briefly discusses these three conclusions in the context of early and contemporary research on adult attachment.

Measurement of adult attachment

Hazan and Shaver (1987) developed a simple questionnaire to measure these individual differences. (These individual differences are often referred to as attachment styles, attachment types, attachment tendencies, or organizational differences in attachment systems.) In short, Hazan and Shaver asked subjects to read the following three paragraphs and point out that the best Describe their thoughts, feelings and behaviors in intimate relationships:

A. Being intimate with others makes me feel a little uncomfortable; I find it difficult to trust them completely and make myself dependent on them. I get nervous when others are too close to me, and others want me to be closer, which makes me uncomfortable.

B. I find it not difficult to be intimate with others, and to be able to depend on others and make others dependent on me with peace of mind. I don't worry about being abandoned by others, nor are they too close to me.

C. I find others unwilling to be as close to me as I hope. I often worry that my partner doesn't really love me or doesn't want to be with me. I want to be very close to my partner, which sometimes scares people away.

Based on the results of this three-category measurement, Hazan and Shaver found that the distribution of adult types is similar to that of infants. In other words, about 60% of adults consider themselves safe (B), about 20% describe themselves as avoidant (A), and about 20% describe themselves as anxiety-resistance (C segment).

Adult attachment development

(1) Is the "working" method of adult love relationships the same as the "working" method of baby-caregiver relationships?

More and more studies have shown that adult relationships and infant-caregiver relationships have the same mechanism of action, with obvious exceptions. Observational studies of adults who farewell to their partners at the airport under natural conditions have shown that these adults clearly exhibit attachment-related protests and caring behaviors, and that their regulation of these behaviors is associated with their attachment styles. For example, partners who are bidding farewell usually show more attachment behavior than those who do not separate, and strong avoidance adults show much less attachment behavior than weak avoidance adults.

Cross-cultural studies seem to indicate that the infant's attachment security model is generally considered the most desirable model for mothers. Obviously, similar studies cannot be conducted on infants, because infants cannot be asked whether they like attachment subjects that provide a sense of security. For an adult seeking a long-term relationship, the qualities of a potential caregiver who can make her respond to the baby's caregiver, such as focus, enthusiasm, and sensitivity, are the most attractive. ^[2]

(2) Safe base and safe haven behavior

Among babies, safety babies usually adapt the best, that is, they are more resilient, have good relationships with their peers, and are loved. Similar behavioral patterns have emerged in studies of adult attachment. In general, safe adults are more satisfied with their relationships than non-safe adults. Their relationship has some characteristics: long duration, trust, loyalty, and independence (Feeney, Noller, & Callan, 1994, etc.), and they are more likely to use a love partner as a safe base for exploring the world (Fraley & amp; Davis , 1997, etc.). A lot of research on adult attachment is to reveal the behavioral and psychological mechanisms that can increase adults' sense of security and safe base behavior. Two major discoveries have been made so far. The first finding fits the theory of attachment, namely that in anxiety, safe adults are more likely to seek support from their partners than unsafe adults. Moreover, they are more likely to provide support to their distressed partners (Simpsonetal., 1992, etc.). The second finding was that, during and after the conflict, the insecure individuals responded to their partner's behavior, exacerbating, rather than mitigating, their insecurity. ^[2]