Abstract
Steele, Perez, Segal, and Steele (2016) provide an important piece of empirical data, which addresses central questions of attachment theory that have bothered attachment researchers from the beginning and are still unanswered. These questions refer to continuity of attachment differences from early childhood to adolescence and adulthood, and to the trans-generational transmission of attachment patterns.
Steele and colleagues reported that reflective functioning in adolescence could not be predicted by quality of early infant attachment, but was associated with maternal (but not paternal) attachment representation, assessed before the adolescents’ birth. Although reflective functioning is not equivalent to the classification of attachment representation, it constitutes an essential component of it and therefore the findings provide valuable information for the central questions mentioned. The important main message of the study is: There is no continuity of attachment differences from infancy to adolescence, but attachment in adolescence (in the same way as in infancy) can be predicted by maternal attachment representation. The same message was portrayed almost 20 years ago by Klaus Grossmann’s group, based on findings from the Bielefeld Longitudinal Study (Zimmermann, Fremmer-Bombik, Spangler, & Grossmann, 1997).
For a long time, the majority of attachment researchers cherished the idea of long-term stability of individual differences from infancy to adulthood based on a small number of studies (Hamilton, 2000; Waters, Merrick, Treboux, Crowell, & Albersheim, 2000), despite contradictory findings in Klaus Grossmann’s German Longitudinal Studies (Zimmermann et al., 1997) as well as other studies in the United States (e.g. Weinfield, Sroufe, & Egeland, 2000). Finally, the findings of the NICHD Longitudinal Project (Groh et al., 2014), a multi-center study including a very large amount of subjects, taught us that long-term stability is very close to zero.
There are several explanations for the lacking stability, among which only some should be emphasized here. First, from a methodological perspective, age and assessment procedure confound with one another, as assessment of attachment differences is accomplished on the behavioral level in infancy and, in contrast, on the representational level in adolescence and adulthood (e.g. Spangler & Zimmermann, 1999). Second, there is no theoretical model and no systematic data to explain how specific attachment experiences with different caregivers (i.e. the dyadic attachment relationships) contribute to a final “general” attachment representation as a personality characteristic. Thus, we might not even expect a high prediction of attachment representation in adults by a subset of dyadic experiences. Finally, from a developmental psychology perspective, high stability of individual differences from infancy to adulthood would not really represent a developmental model including dynamic change from the background of the developmental context.
The findings of Steele et al. indicating trans-generational transmission to attachment representation in adolescence support the hypothesis – already stated by Zimmermann et al. (1997) based on the Bielefeld Longitudinal Study – that stability of attachment differences occur more likely when there is stability in the caregiving environment. Assuming that parental attachment representations are quite stable during adulthood, it could be expected that they contribute to attachment differences in their children at any age. In addition, the Steele et al. study again raises the question of paternal relevance for attachment development. Their findings indicate that mother’s rather than father’s attachment representation contributes to the adolescent’s attachment representation. Similarly, findings from Klaus Grossmann’s Regensburg Longitudinal Study indicated that the children’s behavior in preschool could be better predicted by quality of infant-mother than infant-father attachment (Suess, Grossmann, & Sroufe, 1992). Does this support the monotropy hypothesis? I do not think so.
There are at least two alternative explanations. First, as long as caregiving in western cultures, despite enduring efforts on equally distributing caregiving tasks to mothers and fathers, is mainly accomplished by the mothers, they might be more influential simply because they provide the children with more experiences than fathers do. Thus, it is not the mothers specifically who are influential, it is the caregiver who spends more relevant amounts of time with the child. Accordingly, we would expect more influence of the fathers in cultures in which fathers take on their appropriate share of caregiving. The second explanation (also addressed by Steele et al.), has been provided by Klaus Grossmann and his colleagues who, based on their findings from their German longitudinal studies, concluded that mothers and fathers may be influential in different domains, with the father’s influence on social outcome of children lying in the domain of experiences during play situations.