Journal of Anthropology Reports

Abstrakt

Psychiatrists and forensic psychology 2016: Early attachment trauma and the effects on child development – ​​Doris D'Hooghe – EMDR practitioner

Doris D'Hooghe

What is attachment: Children are considered attached when they seek closeness and contact with a specific caregiver in times of distress, illness, and fatigue. Attachment to a protective caregiver helps infants regulate their negative emotions in times of stress and distress and explore the environment, even if it contains somewhat frightening stimuli. Attachment, a major developmental feature in a child's life, remains an important theme throughout life. In adulthood, representations of attachment shape the way adults deal with the strains and stresses of intimate relationships, in concrete parent-child relationships, and how they perceive the self.

 

Attachment development:

 

It is recommended that attachment develops in four phases. In the first phase, in which the baby orients itself randomly towards people and gives them signals, it seems to be "tuned" to certain wavelengths of signals from the environment. These signals are usually of human origin. Only when the baby can show active attachment behavior, i.e. actively seeks proximity to a caregiver and follows them, does it enter the third phase, the phase of staying close to a specific person in a way that is appropriate to the attachment through signals and movement. Children enter the fourth phase of goal-corrected partnership when they can imagine the strategy and perception of the parents or caregivers and align their own strategy and activities accordingly.

 

research context:

 

The basic model for explaining individual differences in attachment relationships assumes that sensitive or insensitive parenting explains children's attachment (in)security. Ainsworth2 and colleagues initially defined parental sensitivity as the ability to correctly recognize and interpret children's attachment signals and to respond quickly and effectively to these signals. In fact, it has been found that lack of vigilance or inconsistent sensitivity is associated with hesitation in children, while consistent sensitive responsiveness is associated with secure attachments.

 

However, some proponents of the behavioral genetic approach have confirmed most correlational findings on child development to be gravely imperfect because they are based on traditional research designs focusing on between-family comparisons, which confound genetic similarities between parents and children with evidently shared environmental influences. for example, claims that there is an urgent need to radically rethink and de-emphasize the role of parents in child development. Plomin more newly argued that parents matter but do not make a difference in shaping their children's developmental trajectories except at conception. In spite of the prevalence of this presence of thought, attachment theory continues to lay emphasis on the important role of parental sensitivity, for some good reasons. Twin studies and molecular-genetic studies on attachment security in infancy did not show an extensive genetic component, and randomized intercession studies documented the causal -if not exclusive- role of sensitivity.

 

Recent Research Results:

 

Regarding the heritability question, at least four twin studies on child mother attachment security using behavioral genetic modeling have been published. Three of the four studies recognized a minor role for genetic influences on differences in attachment security and a rather considerable role for shared environments. Twin Study, investigate the quality of attachment in identical pairs with a customized separation-reunion process originally designed to review nature The large role shared environmental factors play in attachment remarkable. Later in the development attachment of genetic differences might become more important, as Fearon and his team showed in a great sample of adolescent twins. In search for differences in structural DNA associated with infant attachment we were, however, not able to mark out their influence on the level of specific dopaminergic, serotonergic or oxytonergic genes, or on the level of genome-wide (SNP) analyses.

 

Is sensitive parenting the central part ingredient of the shared environment? In 24 randomized intercession studies (n = 1,280) conducted before 2003, both parental sensitivity and children's attachment security were assessed as outcome measures. In general, attachment insecurity appeared more tricky to alter than maternal insensitivity. When interventions were more efficient in attractive parental sensitivity, they were also more effective in increasing attachment security, which experimentally ropes the notion of a causal role of sensitivity in shaping attachment. Randomized control trials of the past 15 years appear to support this conclusion but a systematic meta-analytic assessment still is outstanding.

 

For more than 25 years, the intergenerational attachment program hypothesis has been studied, with a particular focus on the so-called communication gap. The intergenerational transmission model can be summarized with the assumption that the security of parents' attachment representation influences the degree of their sensitivity to the child, which in turn shapes the security of the child's attachment to the parents. Although there is ample evidence for this mediation model, there is still room for complementary mechanisms besides sensitivity, as a troublesome transmission gap remains visible. Closing this gap has been a major challenge, but by combining numerous data sets relevant to this topic in a meta-analytic method based on individual participant data (IPD), part of the puzzling transmission gap could be bridged.

 

Conclusions:

Attachment, the affective bond of the infant to its parents, plays an essential role in regulating stress in times of distress, fear, or illness. Humans are born with an innate tendency to attach to a protective caregiver. However, infants develop different types of attachment relationships: some infants attach securely to their parents, while others develop an anxious attachment relationship. These individual differences are not hereditary but are rooted in interactions with the social environment during the first years of life. Sensitive or insensitive parenting plays a key role in the formation of secure or insecure attachments, as documented in twin studies and experimental involvement studies. In the case of attachment theory, the parenting assumption is indeed justified. Many findings support the core hypothesis that sensitive parenting induces attachment security in infants, although other causes should not be excluded and the puzzling transmission gap may require complementary mechanisms in addition to parental sensitivity, such as the influence of the broader social context.

This work will be presented in part at Psychiatrists and Forensic Psychology on 10 and 11 November 2016 in Alicante, Spain.