“Fatal attraction” syndrome: Not a good way to keep your man

Abstract

This target article presents an integrated evolutionary model of the development of attachment and human reproductive strategies. It is argued that sex differences in attachment emerge in middle childhood, have adaptive significance in both children and adults, and are part of sex-specific life history strategies. Early psychosocial stress and insecure attachment act as cues of environmental risk, and tend to switch development towards reproductive strategies favoring current reproduction and higher mating effort. However, due to sex differences in life history trade-offs between mating and parenting, insecure males tend to adopt avoidant strategies, whereas insecure females tend to adopt anxious/ambivalent strategies, which maximize investment from kin and mates. Females are expected to shift to avoidant patterns when environmental risk is more severe. Avoidant and ambivalent attachment patterns also have different adaptive values for boys and girls, in the context of same-sex competition in the peer group: in particular, the competitive and aggressive traits related to avoidant attachment can be favored as a status-seeking strategy for males. Finally, adrenarche is proposed as the endocrine mechanism underlying the reorganization of attachment in middle childhood, and the implications for the relationship between attachment and sexual development are explored. Sex differences in the development of attachment can be fruitfully integrated within the broader framework of adaptive plasticity in life history strategies, thus contributing to a coherent evolutionary theory of human development.MARCO DEL GIUDICE is an evolutionary developmental psychologist at the Center for Cognitive Science, University of Turin, Italy. Still at the beginning of his research career, he has published in leading psychology and biology journals, including Developmental Psychology, Developmental Science, and Evolution. He is especially interested in the dynamics of developmental plasticity, the evolution of human life history, and the origins of individual differences in behavioral strategies.

Sex Differences in Attachment Emerge in Middle Childhood: An Evolutionary Hypothesis

“…Recently, Del Giudice (2008) reported that studies of children as old as 6 usually fail to discern sex differences in attachment, whereas nearly all of the available studies of children aged 7-11 presenting separate statistics by sex show remarkable sex-biased distributions of insecure styles (Corby, 2006;Del Giudice, 2008;Finnegan et al, 1996;Granot & Mayseless, 2001;Karavasilis, Doyle, & Markiewicz, 2003;see Kerns, Abraham, Schlegelmilch, & Morgan, 2007, for an exception). These sex differences emerge with both attachment questionnaires and doll-play tasks; however, and again paralleling adult findings (van IJzendoorn & Bakermans-Kranenburg, 1996, 2009), they are not evident when attachment interviews focused on past experiences with parents are used in middle childhood (Ammaniti, van IJzendoorn, Speranza, & Tambelli, 2000). Given the still limited database and the modest sample sizes of some investigations, it is clear that we need more work on sex differences, including meta-analyses, before we can draw strong conclusions about the presence-or absence-of sex differences in attachment in middle childhood.…”

“…The possible role of anxiety for girls is, to be honest, less clear, although dependent and closeness‐oriented behaviors may turn out to be advantageous in female group relationships (Del Giudice, 2009b). Some researchers have suggested that anxious attachment in girls may relate to relational and indirect aggression, which would make evolutionary sense in the context of female peer competition; unfortunately, up to now attachment research has concentrated almost exclusively on overt, physical aggression, so this possibility has yet to be tested empirically (see Campbell, 2009; Del Giudice, 2009b).…”

“…This view was consistent with Bowlby's (1969Bowlby's ( ⁄ 1982 classical model emphasizing the survival function of attachment and is more or less the default expectation in attachment research-for children and adults alike. Indeed, researchers have found no sex differences in adults when using interview-based assessments of attachment ''state of mind'' (reviewed in van IJzendoorn & Bakermans-Kranenburg, 1996, 2009. In contrast, research on adult romantic attachment often reveals the presence of sex differences, with men reporting greater avoidance and less anxiety than women.…”

The Development of Life History Strategies: Toward a Multi-Stage Theory

“…In contrast, anxious attachment could function for females as a means of keeping oneself in close contact with the kin network (Del Giudice, 2009a ;Goetz, Perilloux & Buss, 2009 ); more speculatively, emphasizing immaturity and dependency might work as an attractiveness display directed at males (Marquez & Rucas, 2008 ). In addition, attachment anxiety may predict increased relational/indirect aggression in the context of female peer competition (Campbell, 2009 ;Del Giudice, 2009b ), but since most attachment-aggression studies have focused on overt physical aggression, this intriguing possibility remains to be explored. Finally, insecure attachment in juvenility predicts the early appearance of fl irting and sexual contacts, even in pre-pubertal children (Sroufe et al, 1993 ); this further underlines the emerging functional coupling of the attachment and sexual systems.…”

Adaptive insecure attachment and resource control strategies during middle childhood

“…In this context, ambivalent attachment may be considered a useful strategy for extracting resource investment from kin and peers (Del Giudice, 2009). Such resource-acquisition behaviors driven by ambivalent attachment are not exclusively prosocial; they may also be coercive (Campbell, 2009;Del Giudice, 2009). Thus children who develop an ambivalent attachment style are more likely to adopt both prosocial and coercive strategies to control resources.…”