Infant Attachment Theory

The theory of infant attachment is a topic that has been widely researched and discussed for many years. As research has progressed, how variables can effect this state has become a topic of focus, one of which being the intergenerational effects and links, especially the result a mother can have on their offspring and their attachment type. The two papers I shall be comparing and contrasting in this essay are investigations into this subject. Whilst Gratz et al. (2015) and Raby, K. L., Steele, R. D., Carlson, E. A., & Sroufe, L. A. (2015) follow a similar methodology whilst looking into this concept, they do also differ in several ways such as how they decided to class the children in regards to attachment, what they specifically looked into

(2015) used participants from The MLSRA. This variable could have influenced their findings that infants were more likely to form disorganized attachment relationships if their mothers had histories of attachment disorganisation as these participants were born into poverty and, as such, could have experienced disorderly home experiences from a young age as a link between poverty and the maltreatment of children has been found (Drake, B., & Pandey, S., 1996.). Whilst bringing forth the argument that environmental factors could have been at play in affecting the child’s attachment type, this also contributes to lowering the papers generality to the larger population. Similar findings were also found with Gratz et al. (2015), where results observed significant effects of both maternal negative affective intensity and impulsivity on their young, solidifying the idea that intergenerational issues do effect a child’s

(2015) used questionnaires – Such as The Impulsive Behavior Scale (Whiteside & Lynam, 2001). This can provide limitations as, being retrospective, the questionnaires depend on the individual’s memory and can also fall prey to social desirability, where an individual gives the answer they believe the researcher wants or which makes them look as good as possible, thus resulting in a counterfeit outcome, purposefully or otherwise which lowers the research’s ecological validity. Whereas Raby et al. (2015) conducted a longitudinal study which allowed them to test both mothers and their children in the same way before comparing the results, adding to the reliability of the paper as each observation was recorded and