Psychobiological Roots of Early Attachment

Abstract

New laboratory research has revealed a network of simple behavioral, physiological, and neural processes that underlie the psychological constructs of attachment theory. It has become apparent that the unique features of early infant attachment reflect certain unique features of early infant sensory and motor integration, learning, communication, and motivation, as well as the regulation of biobehavioral systems by the mother-infant interaction. In this article, I will use this new knowledge to answer three major questions that have remained unsettled in our understanding of early human attachment: What creates an attachment bond? Why is early maternal separation stressful? How can early relationships have lasting effects? I will discuss the implications of these new answers for human infants and for the development of mental processes. Attachment remains useful as a concept that, like hunger, describes the operation of subprocesses that work together within the frame of a vital biological function.The word attachment has assumed new meanings as it has spread from literature to psychology, and most recently to biology. These changes have spanned the half century since the Second World War, when the vast numbers of displaced and orphaned children made the importance of a child's early tie to its mother evident to all. As different groups within psychology used the concept, there developed champions and detractors of one or another formulation. I think that a crucial change came when concept of attachment as a unique motivational system was gradually found to be incapable of generating testable hypotheses that could explain several puzzling observations. Developmental psychobiology researchers focused instead on simpler processes at work within the interactions between infant and parent-such as orientation, nursing, early learning, thermoregulation, and sensorimotor-system development. There was a period between the early 1970s and late 1980s when attachment was seldom used by developmental psychobiologists. In the last decade, however, the word has found a new usefulness as a general descriptive term for the processes that maintain and regulate sustained social relationships, much the same way that appetite refers to a cluster of behavioral and physiological processes that regulate food intake.The concept of attachment provides a good example of how a psychological construct can be analyzed at the level of the component processes that underlie it. This approach does not attempt to reduce psychological questions to the most basic units of biological organization. Rather, the focus is on the processes of behavioral and physiological regulation that closely underlie psychological constructs, providing a much-needed link between psychology and the cellular/molecular mechanisms of brain function. New knowledge at the level of behavior and integrative physiology promises to deepen our understanding of psychological constructs rather than eliminate the need for them.In order to illustrate this point, I will describe how...

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