The Handy Psychology Answer Book. Lisa J. Cohen
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Название: The Handy Psychology Answer Book
Автор: Lisa J. Cohen
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Общая психология
Серия: The Handy Answer Book Series
isbn: 9781578595990
isbn:
What contributions to psychotherapy research did Carl Rogers make?
Rogers was a pioneer in the scientific investigation of psychotherapy. He believed the methods of empirical research could and should be applied to the practice of psychotherapy. He was the first to record psychotherapy sessions despite vehement opposition from the psychoanalysts who believed the privacy of the therapy hour should never be violated. Rogers also systematically measured improvement by administering psychological tests pre- and post-treatment and then compared the results of subjects in therapy with those in a control group. These methods became fundamental tools in psychotherapy research, which has since blossomed into a discipline all its own.
ATTACHMENT THEORY
What is attachment theory?
Attachment theory was one of the first movements to provide empirical support for the key concepts of psychoanalytic theory, specifically that early childhood relationships with caregivers have profound impact on later personality development. Similar to Carl Rogers, attachment theorists believed that scientific methods could be usefully applied to the study of emotional and interpersonal phenomena. Thus attachment theory was the first movement to bring scientific methods to bear on psychoanalytic ideas. Not surprisingly, this occasioned resistance at first but over time attachment theory has been accepted by most psychoanalytic schools.
Attachment refers to a biologically based drive in the child to form an enduring emotional bond with the caregiver, generally the mother. Attachment theory originated with John Bowlby, who wrote a trilogy of books entitled Attachment and Loss (1969, 1973, 1980). Bowlby’s theory was greatly expanded by Mary Ainsworth (1913–1999), who developed an experimental procedure to study attachment. It was Ainsworth who put attachment theory into the lab.
Who was John Bowlby?
John Bowlby (1907–1990) was a British psychoanalyst who became concerned with the devastating impact of early mother–child separations, which he frequently witnessed when working in post-World War II England. Disturbed by the dismissal of real-life events in the psychoanalytic world view, Bowlby’s insistence on the real-time influence of the mother’s presence often put him at odds with his colleagues. Bowlby was also interested in ethology, the study of animal behavior, and eventually synthesized both psychoanalytic theory and ethology into his theory of infant-mother attachment.
What was John Bowlby’s concept of attachment?
Generally, attachment is seen as a biologically based, evolutionarily adaptive drive for the infant to seek protection from the mother. When the child is frightened or is separated from the mother, the attachment system is activated and the child will seek proximity or physical closeness to the mother. The child will reach toward the mother, cry to be picked up, or crawl close to the mother. In Bowlby’s view, the child is motivated to attain a sense of felt security, a subjective experience of safety and wellbeing—perhaps a kind of cozy contentment. When the child feels secure, the attachment system is deactivated and the exploratory system is turned on. At these points, the child will venture away from the mother to explore the world, to play. If the relationship with the mother is disrupted through separation or loss, the child will experience great sadness and distress, which can have long-lasting and even lifelong impact, depending on the severity of the loss.
According to attachment theory, children’s powerful attachment to their caregivers evolved to help keep them safe and cared for while they are too young to take care of themselves.
What was Bowlby’s concept of the internal working model?
Although his description of the infant attachment system was largely behavioral, Bowlby addressed the psychological aspects of attachment through the notion of the child’s internal working model of attachment. This is a kind of mental map or script of the caregiver and the self. Through repeated attachment experiences, the child develops expectations about the availability and responsiveness of the mother (or caregiver). The child develops a working model of how the mother-child interactions will play out and then modifies attachment behavior according to these expectations.
How did Mary Ainsworth create a scientific means to measure attachment?
Although John Bowlby was always interested in translating his concepts into empirical research, his colleague Mary Ainsworth (1913–1999) is credited with taking attachment theory into the lab. While Bowlby had initially been interested in the universal effect of mother-child separation, Ainsworth was interested in individual differences in the quality of attachment based on the nature of the mother-child relationship. Her initial research was in Uganda, where she had traveled with her husband in 1954. By observing twenty-eight Ugandan babies, she noted individual differences in the quality of mother-infant attachment.
This research would be further developed in Baltimore at Johns Hopkins University, where she and her husband moved after leaving Uganda. Here she studied mother-child interactions both in their homes and in the laboratory during an experimental procedure she termed the strange situation. Based on the child’s responses to separations and reunions with the mother, the child could be classified into secure and insecure attachment categories. Ainsworth also found that attachment status in the lab correlated with the mother’s behavior toward the child in the home. Ainsworth’s publication of this data in her 1978 book Patterns of Attachment was a milestone in attachment research. This fairly simple experimental paradigm would dramatically change psychological research into child development.
What does it mean to be securely attached?
A securely attached child (B baby in Ainsworth’s system) showed interest in the toys when the mother was in the room. Some babies showed mild to moderate distress in the separation episodes. Most importantly, in the reunion episodes, the child directly sought out contact with the mother. If the child was distressed after the separation, contact with the mother was effective in soothing the child. This pattern of behavior is seen to reflect the child’s felt security in the mother’s availability and responsiveness to the child’s attachment needs.
What is the “strange situation” and what does it show?
The strange situation is a twenty-minute procedure in which infants of twelve to eighteen months and their mothers are introduced to a room full of toys attached to an observation room by a one-way mirror. A sequence of separations and reunions follow. There are eight episodes to the strange situation, the first lasting only thirty seconds and the rest up to three minutes. The baby’s reactions during the two separation and reunion episodes are carefully observed through the oneway mirror. Based mainly on these behaviors, the baby is classified as either securely attached or into one of three insecurely attached categories.
What does it mean to be insecurely attached?
A child who is insecurely attached is viewed as feeling insecure about the mother’s emotional availability or responsiveness to the child’s attachment cues. The child then modifies his or her attachment behavior to adapt to the mother’s behavior. There are several categories of insecure СКАЧАТЬ