John Bowlby Attachment Theory

Attachment theory has been a topic of extensive research in developmental psychology and viewed as psychology’s most influential theory of relatedness. Attachment is defined as “a strong emotional bond with special that endures over time” (Huffman and Dowdell, 2015, p. 305). John Bowlby, a British psychoanalyst was the original founder of the attachement theory after World War II, where, he found many children became orphans at a very young and concluded that attachment was crucial for development. As Psychologist Patricia Miller (2011) notes in her book of Theories of Developmental Psychology, Bowlby’s theory of attachment originated from the knowledge that infants need protection and biologically infants know that separation could cause them terrible consequences without the protection; and the instinct is to attract the mother attention for protection (p. 25). Attachment in the eyes of Bowlby is therefore an evolutionary adaptive behavioral …show more content…
The attachement theory was later extended by another developmental psychologist, Mary Ainsworth, as the psychologists Huffman and Dowdell (2015) indicates in their book Psychology in Action, Ainsworth looked attachment as “secure base” for the ability of children to explore instinctively at the mother is a place to come back for reassurance and safety (p. 306). In addition, using “the Strange Situation Procedure” (SSP), Ainsworth and other researchers described four attachement styles namely securely attached, insecurely avoidant, insecurely ambivalent and disorganized disoriented. Consequently, infants with secure attachement styles generally had caregivers who were