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Attachment & Human

Development
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Developmental origins of
attachment styles
a
Jay Belsky
a
Institute for the Study of Children, Families and
Social Issues, Birkbeck College, 7 Bedford Square,
London, WC1E 7HX, UK
Published online: 14 Oct 2010.

To cite this article: Jay Belsky (2002) Developmental origins of attachment styles,
Attachment & Human Development, 4:2, 166-170, DOI: 10.1080/14616730210157510

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 Attachment & Human Development
Vol 4 No 2 September 2002 166–170

Developmental origins of
attachment styles
JAY B E L S K Y

Attachment theory, as developed originally by Bowlby (1982/1969, 1973, 1980) and

further reŽ ned by Ainsworth (1973), Sroufe (1988), and a host of other scholars, is a
sophisticated and even complex theory of the development of personality and capacity
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for close relationships, among other things. But when boiled down to its essence, there
seem to be two core theoretical ideas, at least with respect to individual differences in
attachment security. The Ž rst is that attachment security (and attachment insecurity)
re ects and in uences the internal working model (IWM) of the individual, shaping
the way he or she sees himself or herself, others, and close relationships more gener-
ally. As such, attachment security works as kind of an internal guidance system, Ž l-
tering and appraising experiences in the world, especially social experiences, and
thereby guiding behavior, especially behavior in close relationships. Given the cen-
trality of emotions to relationships, and especially to close relationships, it is not sur-
prising that the regulation of emotion is regarded as central to current conceptions of
attachment theory.
The second core proposition underlying attachment theory, at least with respect to
individual differences, is that variation in security and thus the IWM are a direct
function of lived experiences, especially experiences in the earliest portion of the life
span (i.e. Ž rst 3–5 years of life). Sroufe and others have made clear, though, as Bowlby
did himself, that because individual differences in the IWM derive from actual relation-
ship experiences, it is mistaken to presume, as too many critics of attachment theory
have done (e.g. Breur, 1999; Lewis, 1997), that once the IWM is established, it cannot
be changed. Indeed, the very word ‘working’ in the phrase ‘internal working model’
was chosen originally by Bowlby to make clear that this developing affective-cogni-
tive information processing system was a work in progress. At the same time, of
course, he acknowledged that with development the model would be likely to become
increasingly consolidated and thus resistant to change.
Shaver and Mikulincer have made an outstanding case for their claim that the social
psychological, in contrast to the developmental psychological, approach to measuring
attachment in adulthood, via survey type questions about self in romantic relationships,
is a valid way of tapping into the IWM and core notions of deactivating, activating, and
hyperactivating emotion-regulation strategies. Although the measurement itself does not
make reference to unconscious or psychodynamic processes in the way that the Adult
Attachment Interview (AAI) developed by Main and Goldwyn (1998) does, it never-
theless taps into such processes. Consider in this regard some of the evidence which
Shaver and Mikulincer present about individuals who score high on security, high on
anxiety, or high on avoidance, as measured by brief questionnaires.

Correspondence to: Jay Belsky, Institute for the Study of Children, Families and Social Issues, Birkbeck
College, 7 Bedford Square, London, WC1E 7HX, UK. Email: j.belsky@bbk.ac.uk

Attachment & Human Development ISSN 1461–6734 print/1469–2988 online © 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/1461673021015751 0
 B E L S K Y: C O M M E N T A RY 167

Secure individuals appraise stressful events as less threatening than do less secure
persons. They hold optimistic expectations about their ability to cope with the causes
of their distress. And they have ready access to painful memories (i.e. sadness, anger,
anxiety), but such memories do not automatically and uncontrollably spread to other
unrelated painful memories (i.e. intrapsychic emotional contagion). Persons who score
high on social psychological assessments of security also are more likely to disclose
personal information and feelings toward signiŽ cant others and express their emotions
in a relatively open way (especially relative to avoidants). Moreover, they are inclined
to adopt support-seeking as an affect-regulation strategy for dealing with distressing
situations, and to deal with interpersonal con icts in close relationships by compro-
mising and integrating their own and their partner’s position. Thus, they openly
discuss problems and resolve (rather than avoid) con ict. Further, secure individuals
can acknowledge physiological signs of anger, engage in adaptive problem-solving, and
express anger outward in a controlled and non-hostile manner. Finally, for secure indi-
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viduals, the experience of positive affect fosters creative problem-solving.

Insecure individuals who score high on the attachment-anxiety dimension (i.e.
preoccupied tendencies) tend to focus on their own distress, ruminate on negative
thoughts, and adopt emotion-focused coping strategies that exacerbate rather than
diminish distress. Although they have greater access to painful memories than do
others and easily remember angry experiences, they are susceptible to intrapsychic
emotional contagion (of negative affect). In them, unlike secures, the experience of
positive affect undermines rather than enhances their creativity in solving problems.
In sum, anxious individuals ‘exhibit a variety of effects compatible with the notion of
hyperactivating strategies, including projective identiŽ cation, ready access to painful
memories, automatic spread of negative emotion from one remembered incident to
another, and paradoxical cognitive closure in response to a positive affect induction’
(Shaver & Mikulincer, p. 000).
Insecure individuals who score high on the attachment-avoidance dimension (i.e.
dismissing tendencies) are inclined to distance themselves cognitively and behaviorally
from the source of distress, apparently by diverting attention and inhibiting deep,
elaborate encoding of information (rather than actively repressing it from memory).
Such persons have the least access to memories of sadness and anxiety (i.e. defensive
exclusion of painful memories). Moreover, they seem unaware of their own anger, even
while showing intense physiological signs of distress and reporting intense hostility
(i.e. dissociated anger). The experience of positive affect fails to produce enhanced
creative problem-solving, suggesting perhaps that defensive exclusion of negative
affect is applied to positive emotions as well. In sum, avoidant individuals ‘exhibit a
variety of effects compatible with the notion of deactivating strategies, including
defensive exclusion of painful thoughts and memories, segregation of mental systems,
and dissociation between conscious and unconscious levels of responding’ (Shaver &
Mikulincer, pp. 000–000).
In light of these Ž ndings, it seems to me that the burden of proof, in some respects,
shifts to critics of survey-research type methodologies for measuring attachment.
Indeed, even though developmentalists have successfully used the AAI to discover
much of interest related to attachment theory, one would be hard pressed to Ž nd
evidence – beyond that included in the scoring of the AAI itself – that state of mind
with respect to attachment, as measured by the AAI, is systematically related to inde-
pendently measured phenomena such as the repression of memories, intrapsychic con-
tagion of negative emotions, dissociated hostility (but see Dozier & Kobak, 1992),
 168 AT T A C H M E N T & HU MAN DEVELOPMENT VOL. 4 NO. 2

styles of coping, and effects of positive affect on creative problem-solving, to cite just
a few of the emotion-regulation correlates of attachment styles studied by social psy-
chologists to date. Yet, as Shaver and Mikulincer make eminently clear, these corre-
lates of attachment are exactly what should be a focus of systematic inquiry given
Bowlby’s original theorizing. It seems indisputable, therefore, that whatever its limits,
the social psychological approach to measuring attachment has done a great deal to
test important elements of attachment theory.
But then there is the issue of the failings, or at least omissions, of the social psycho-
logical approach. And they pertain to the second core proposition of attachment
theory mentioned in the opening of this commentary, that having to do with the
developmental origins of individual differences in attachment security. Repeatedly in
discussions of attachment theory by social psychologists reference is made to develop-
mental origins, even early rearing experiences, but to my knowledge there are no data
available demonstrating that individual differences in attachment style, as measured by
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social psychological questionnaire procedures, are systematically related to antecedent

developmental experiences – of any kind. In contrast, non-questionnaire assessments
of attachment have been found to be systematically related to antecedent develop-
mental experiences in ways consistent with Bowlby–Ainsworth attachment theory.
Not only does variation in maternal sensitivity predict individual differences in attach-
ment security as measured by means of the Strange Situation in infancy and early
childhood (for meta-analytic review, see de Wolff and van IJzendoorn, 1997), but state
of mind with respect to attachment as assessed by the AAI has been linked, longitu-
dinally, with early attachment as measured by the Strange Situation (Waters, Merrick,
Treboux, Crowell, & Albersheim, 2000; Hamilton, 2000; but see Lewis, Feiring, &
Rosenthal, 2000 for contrasting data). Moreover, the research of Waters and associates
(2000) demonstrates not simply that early security/insecurity predicts later state of
mind with respect to attachment, but highlights some of the experiential conditions
that disrupt such anticipated continuity in development, further illuminating the role
of developmental experience in shaping state of mind with respect to attachment.
Because it is just such data that are still missing in the social psychological research
reviewed by Shaver and Mikulincer, one is left with contrasting views of the yield from
this research tradition. On the one hand, as noted above and throughout the Shaver
and Mikulincer paper, the questionnaire approach to measuring attachment styles has
proven itself to be a powerful ‘window’ on the IWM, especially in terms of emotion-
regulation strategies, as conceptualized by Bowlby and as discussed by many devel-
opmentalists (Cassidy & Shaver, 1999). Indeed, the argument can be made that the
research reviewed by Shaver and Mikulincer using the attachment-style questionnaire
has done more to breathe empirical life into the heuristic concept of the IWM than has
that produced by those working in the developmental tradition. Although develop-
mentalists have done an excellent job by means of the AAI of measuring individual
differences in state of mind with respect to attachment and in relating such differences
to a variety of aspects of social functioning, most notably parenting (e.g. Cohn,
Cowan, Cowan, & Pearson, 1992; Crowell & Feldman, 1991; Phelps, Belsky & Crnic,
1998), with few exceptions they have failed to glean empirical insight into the psy-
chodynamics of the IWM, other than via interpretation of what is going on during the
interview processes itself (e.g. coherence, idealization). Instead, they have been mostly
content to link AAI classiŽ cations with outcomes such as parenting and then specu-
late that such linkages emerge because of still unmeasured psychological processes
central to the IWM. A continual source of surprise and disappointment is that more
 B E L S K Y: C O M M E N T A RY 169

than 15 years after Main, Kaplan and Cassidy (1985, p. 77) astutely observed that
internal models of relationships ‘provide rules for the direction and organization of
attention and memory, rules that permit or limit the individual’s access to certain forms
of knowledge’ and that ‘internal working models are best conceived as structured pro-
cesses serving to obtain or to limit access to information’, so few developmentalists
have sought to link AAI or Strange Situation classiŽ cations with such psychological
processes. Fortunately, social psychologists have taken up this challenge.
But, in so doing, they have totally ignored the issue of developmental origins. For
social psychologists, then, attachment theory seems to be more a theory of personal-
ity and close relationships than a developmental theory of personality and close
relationships. What the study of attachment risks remaining, in consequence, is just
what it appears to be now – two separate Ž elds of inquiry that use many of the same
concepts and draw on the same theoretical foundation, but ask more or less different
questions and thus provide answers that are difŽ cult, at least empirically, to integrate.
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Work carried out in the developmental tradition informs us not only about the nature
of individual differences in attachment security, whether measured in childhood or
adulthood, but about their developmental origins, whereas social psychological work
informs us about the intra-psychic and relationship correlates of the same individual
differences. Were it the case that the two traditions relied upon the same measurement
strategies, it would be fairly straightforward to move from developmental origins to
individual differences to external correlates. But the fact is that they do not. So even
though we might be tempted by the rules of logic (and theoretical bias) to infer that
(1) because early experiences are systematically related to individual differences in
attachment, whether measured by the Strange Situation in infancy or the AAI in adult-
hood, and (2) because individual differences in attachment style measured by means
of a brief questionnaire are related to a host of fascinating and theoretically anticipated
psychological and psychodynamic processes in adulthood, and thus (3) the intra-
psychic processes of which Shaver and Mikulincer have written so thoughtfully have
their origins in the early experiences that developmentalists have invested so much
time and energy investigating, we simply cannot.
Indeed, given that the association between individual differences measured using the
AAI and those assessed by means of social psychological self-reports is only modest
(e.g. Crowell, Treboux, & Waters, 2000; Shaver, Belsky, & Brennan, 2000), there is the
real possibility that Ž ndings relating to the developmental antecedents of attachment
security as measured by developmentalists and those pertaining to psychological and
relationship correlates of attachment styles as measured by social psychologists are vir-
tually unrelated to each other. Put statistically, the variance explained in attachment
security or state of mind regarding attachment by antecedent developmental experi-
ence and that explained in psychological and psychodynamic processes by attachment
styles could very well be non-overlapping. Were that the case, would it simply re ect
differences in measurement or, instead, problems with the very theory of attachment
that gave rise to both Ž elds of inquiry? Currently, we simply cannot choose between
these alternatives, though the former is surely more attractive to most students of
attachment theory than the latter.
This is a sorry state of affairs and requires a greater degree of methodological, not just
theoretical, collaboration between developmentalists and social psychologists. Although
Shaver and Mikulincer make a convincing case that the social psychological study of
attachment has contributed greatly to the testing of theoretical propositions derived
from attachment theory, and even to extending it, until they link up their methods and
 170 AT T A C H M E N T & HU MAN DEVELOPMENT VOL. 4 NO. 2

measurements with indicators of antecedent developmental experience, developmental-

ists will have reason to question whether they are testing the same attachment theory as
that developmentalists believe themselves to be testing. After all, and as noted at the
outset of this commentary, attachment theory is not just a theory of the nature and func-
tioning of the IWM of self, other and of the self in close relationships, but a theory of
the developmental origins of these very individual differences. Ignoring developmental
antecedents while studying concurrent psychological and relationship correlates exclus-
ively, risks – literally and Ž guratively – leaving the baby out of the bath-water.

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