R. Chris Fraley || The Latest Science of Attachment

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, and welcome to the Psychology Podcast with doctor Scott
Barry Kaufman, where we give you insights into the mind, brain, behavior,
and creativity. Each episode will feature a new guest who
will stimulate your mind and give you a greater understanding
of yourself, others, and the world we live in. Hopefully
we'll also provide a glimpse into human possibility. Thanks for
listening and enjoy the podcast. Now. I'm really excited to

(00:41):
have Chris Frehley on the show today. Chris the professor
of the University of Illinois Department of Psychology. In two
thousand and seven, he received the American Psychological Association's Distinguished
Scientific Award for early career contribution to psychology in the
area of individual differences. Chris's research involves the study of
attachment processes in close relationship, personality dynamics, and development and

(01:02):
research methods. He's also broadly interested issues at the interface
of social cognition, development, evolution, and psychodynamics. Thanks so much
for chatteling me today. Hi, Thanks for having me Scott.
What are you not interested in? I'm interested in everything,
but I'm completely inapt in most things, so it all
kind of balances out well. Well, I'd love to hear

(01:24):
what the emergence of cognition, development, evolution and psychodynamics is. Well,
the fastest thing about that is that's what attachment theory
is all about, essentially. So attachment theory is this really
deep and a relatively old theory now about how humans
develop close relationships and why they need to develop those
relationships and the applications they have for lifesban development. So

(01:47):
the founder of the theory, John Bolby, was a British
psychoanalyst who had kind of was this had self appointed
himself to be the person who would take the key
ideas from party and psychoanalytic theory and bring those up
to date with respect in nineteen fifty science. For him,
that meant bring integrating psychodynamic theory with the emerging field

(02:08):
of ethology, the evolutionary study of animal behavior, and sort
of what was going on in information theory at the time,
so cybernetic theory and how do you design systems that
function in intelligent ways that behave as if they have
purpose as a goals, basic information processing dynamics. So that's
sort of where it all comes together is in the
study of attachment and those kinds of issues continue to

(02:31):
fascinate me, both within and without the study of attachment. Oh,
me too, me too, and cybernetics has been applied to
so many areas other than attachment. Boy, you know, been
applied also to neural functioning and the way that neurons
communicate each other. Well, but while that's so cool and
you're right, you're absolutely right, amazing how much legs this

(02:51):
Bowlby theory has a lot as exactly six legs? Yeah?
Is that its spider like? Yeah? Yeah, Well, we actually
have six topics today I want to talk about. So
it's funny you said six legs to bring it on.
The first one I want to jump right into is measurement.
How do we measure attachment styles? Now, Bolby di is
not the one who came up with the idea of

(03:12):
attachment styles. That was Ainsworth, right, who then cuts the
strange situation procedure. Could you describe a little bit about
the strange situation procedure and what are the major attachment
styles she discovered? Sure? So, the basic idea with Bowlby's
theory was he was trying to envision how evolution would
work to create a behavioral system that would allow young

(03:34):
precocious infants to survive in an environment where they can't feed,
protect themselves, keep themselves warm, and so forth. So his
basic idea was that natural selection had created this motivational
system that was designed to regulate proximity between a young
infant and its primary caregiver, usually somebody like a mother
who's older, wiserly able to provide that kind of protection

(03:57):
and support. So when he was thinking about the dynam
of the way this system worked, he was imagining a
sort of normative process where the child feels anxious or
upset if the caregiver is too far away or if
there's a danger present, and behaviorally, what the child does
when that anxiety arises is engage what he called attachment
behavior in order to reduce or bring the caregiver nearby.

(04:19):
So that might involve looking around and sort of relatively
benign situations to see if the parent is nearby, or
in more dangerous situations, potentially running over to the caregiver
and clinging and holding on. So Ainsworth was interested in
studying those attachment dynamics in the laboratory, so she and
her students developed this strange situation procedure in which a parent,

(04:41):
usually the mother, and a twelve month old infant come
to the lab, and essentially what they do is they
go through a series of episodes where they are together
or separated, or there's a stranger present. So the lab
situation is a lot like a doctor's office, so it's
kind of innocent, it's kind of sterile. There's things on
the floor to play with and their doors. So the

(05:01):
way the procedure unfolds is the parent and the child
are in the room together. Eventually a stranger comes in
and this usually creates a little bit of anxiety on
the defense part. Usually that anxieties resolve pretty easily. That
chold might look at the mom, the mom signals that
everything's okay, and the child goes on playing, maybe bringing
the toy to the stranger. But eventually the mother is

(05:22):
asked to leap via a little subtle knock on the door.
So that provides the first separation scene in the strange situation,
and what researchers do is observe the way the child
negotiates that separation. It's typically relatively brief, but what's most
diagnostic in the strange situation is how the child behaves
upon reunion with the parent. So generally, what Ainsworth observed

(05:46):
is a pattern of behavior that's very consistent with the
way in which Allby described the norm net dynamics of
the attachment system. That is, when the parent was away,
the child would vocalize as our distress, would run to
the door, crawl to the door, and try to re
establish proximity to the caregiver. But importantly, when the mother
came back, the child might reach up his or her arms,

(06:08):
sort of signal that they want to be picked up
and comforted, and they were able to be soothed by
physical contact with the mother. So Ainsworth called that pattern
secure attachment because the signal that the child was able
to regulate his or her emotions relatively effectively in this
strange situation and was able to use the parent as
a secure base to explore that environment and to eventually

(06:32):
be soothed and recover from that stressful situation. But she
noticed that not all children behave in the secure form.
So this is where this idea of individual differences attachment
patterns comes from. So some proportion of these children or
what she called anxious resistant or sometimes called anxious ambivalent,
So about fifteen percent to ten percent of the children

(06:53):
exhibit this pattern where they're extremely distressed by separation, and
when they're reunited with the caregiver, they want to be
picked up and held, but they also kind of resist
that contact. So they might reach their arms up to
be held, but then when they're picked up, they might
be arching their back and sort of flopping around, signaling
that they are kind of pissed off about what has happened.

(07:13):
Sometimes they might even bat at the parent as if
they're kind of doing this kind of smacking behavior to
sort of punish the parent for leaving. The key idea
with anxious resistant attachment is that the presence of the
caregiver provides a source of security and comfort, but in
an incomplete sense. In other words, the child is sufficiently

(07:34):
angry and upset about the situation that he or she
is not able to completely restore that emotional equilibrium. The
other pattern that Aimsworth in her students demarketed is what's
now called avoidant attachment. So this characterized about twenty percent
of the infants in the string situation. So avoidant children
sometimes are distressed by the situation. Sometimes they're not visibly

(07:58):
distressed by the separation. But importantly, what allows a child
to be classified as avoidant is during the reunion episode,
the child behaves as if he or she does not
need comfort or contact or support. So sometimes these children
become very engaged in the toys, where clearly in the

(08:19):
separation episode they are a little distressed, we couldn't focus,
but now that the mother's back, they're going to focus
on this toy, as if I don't care that you
just came back in this room, I don't necessarily need
you to be here, or they simply don't navigate towards
the parents, even though the parent might be sort of saying, hey,
I'm back, everything's great. It's just kind of like bob any,
let's move on. So that's sort of the origin of

(08:42):
the idea of attachment patterns. Social psychologists call these attachment styles.
That term doesn't exist in the developmental literature, but that's
sort of where the idea of individual differences and attachment
organization emerged and how it took off. Thanks for doing
such a great job describing that I want to just
play you said in my class as having to do it,

(09:03):
tild it myself. Maybe I'll play it myself too. I
just got to have coffee here in that rooment. Yeah,
you can just record it ahead of time and it
saves your work. Now, what in the world is this?
No one knows what to do with the disorganized one though,
because the isart also found the insecure disorganized pattern. Right.
One of her students, Mary Maine, and her colleagues discovered
this pattern that was relatively difficult to classify, and the

(09:26):
developmental literature there's three major attachment patterns, but it was
always kind of challenging to get one hundred percent of
kids to fall meekly into its categories. So for a while,
there is a category called cannot classify that was typically
used to characterize invents who maybe were in the border
between let's say, avoidant and anxious behavior. Eventually this came derivativeness,

(09:49):
came to be known as disorganized or disoriented attachment. And
what was characteristic of these children was that sometimes they
exhibited what might be like an approach avoid its conflict
of sorts. So some of the prototypical cases that stand
out in my mind is when the children are visibly
upset by this operation, and when the mother comes in
the door, they start crawling towards her. And when you're

(10:11):
coding these things. You're watching this video, you're going, oh, yeah,
this is going to be great. This is a secure child.
I can sleep, I can sleep well tonight. And then
the child just keeps going right down the hallway, right
past the mother. So this would be an example where
part you see some attachment behavior, but it's not organized
in a way that allows it to fulfill the function

(10:31):
that will be articulated for attachment behavior. It doesn't restore
proximity between the attachment so suddenly mother returns and the
child it's like maybe suddenly a robotic stillness emerges. So yeah,
this pattern has been discussed and debated a lot in
the development of literature. One of the probably the most

(10:51):
prominent theories of what it means is that it's indicative
of an interpersonal history when the child has not been
able to find that the parent is a reliable source
of security. Sometimes there are cases of abuse, sometimes there's
cases of extreme neglect. The idea is that at times
the attachment figure, potentially ironically could be the source of fear,

(11:14):
that active is attachment for itself, and that puts the
child in a difficult situation where he or she needs
the attachment figure to feel secure. At the same time,
the attachment figure I see a lot of discussions about
how it has to do what they use. They say
the word sensitivity. Does that mean sensitivity to the needs
of the child, that the child is in distress? Yes,

(11:36):
So sensitivity in the attachment literature doesn't mean like a
heightened tendency to experience distress, but a behavior on the
part of the parent that reveals that the parent is
in tune with the child's needs. But here she may
be feeling and responding accordingly. So sometimes that may mean
keeping your distance, and sometimes it might mean helping the

(11:56):
child's solve the problem, pro writing comfort that's needed. It's
a very contextually sensitive construct. Cool. So then a bunch
of researchers came along and they were like, how can
we measure this variation? And did they start with looking
at measuring the variation children before they got to measuring
it in adults. Yeah. So historically attachment theory emerged as

(12:19):
a theory of child behavior. But it's curious because Bulby
himself was he originally was inspired to develop this theory
partly based on his observations of adolescence. So he was
working in a home with foster children, some of whom
had been moved around multiple times over the course of

(12:39):
their childhood or never their parents died, and some of
them weren't juvenile delinquents. And one of his observations was
that these children had, these older children, I should say,
had a difficult time forming close emotional bonds with others.
So part of what inspired him to think about these
issues was actually the study of older children than infants.

(13:01):
But for the most part of the empirical momentum that
developed in North America, thinks in part Mary Ainsworth and
her students, has to do with the assessment of individual
differences and attachment and infancy and trying to understand what
the consequences are of secure and insecure attachment for children
as they develop. It was only much later, like in

(13:23):
the mid nineteen eighties, that people began to formally study
individual differences and attachment among adults. So that's kind of
interesting in its own right because it happened simultaneously in
two very different research traditions to psychology. So in developmental psychology,
people began studying, Hey, what is it about the mothers

(13:44):
and the way they think about attachment issues that predict
whether their children are going to be secure or insecure
in the string situation. So Mary Maine and jup Cassidy
and some of their colleagues got together and they would
interviewed the mothers about their own attachment and experiences when
they were growing up, but from the retrospective lenses as
an adult now. And what they found when they tried

(14:07):
to match elements of those transcripts from those interviews with
the children their children's strange situation classification was that mothers
who were able to describe their own attachment experiences in
a relatively clear, coherent way were much more likely to
have children who were classified as secure in the strange
situation than mothers who were not able to provide a

(14:27):
coherent narrative of their own experiences. So that was one
tradition that emerged in North America on how to study
attachment and adults, and it focuses on the adult attachment interview,
or what it's sometimes called the AAI, which is a
way of getting people to tell the stories of their
own developmental experiences and then coding their ability to do

(14:50):
so in a clear and compelling way. An important part
of the AI, by the way, is not that the
person is saying, oh, yeah, my experiences of my parents
were great. I hurt my knee, my mother was there
to calm and comfort me. The important part is the
coherence with which people tell those stories. So it's quite
possible for somebody to say, my mother and I didn't

(15:12):
get along. She was never there for me when I
needed her. But the person can describe that without getting
caught up kind of in an anxious way with respect
to the experiences, and can provide a compelling and convincing
narrative about what those experiences were like. So it's an
interesting paradox of sorts that you can be considered secure

(15:32):
with respect to the AI despite having let's just say,
a bad attachment history, simply because you can kind of
describe in own way that's compelling and coherent. Now, at
the same time, around the mid nineteen eighties, social psychologists
got wind of attachment theory and they started thinking, oh,
how can we measure individual differences and attachment. So two

(15:54):
of the leaders in this tradition were Phil Shaver, who
was my graduate advisor, and Sending has On It was
one of his students when they were both at the
University of Denver. So what they did was they said, Okay,
let's think about what these different strained situation types would
look like. Let's say in the context of adult romantic relationships.

(16:15):
So we might expect, for example, that somebody who is
relatively secure is going to say things like, ah, I'm
relatively comfortable opening up to others and being close to
others and having them depend on me, and I'm able
to depend on them, whereas people who are more avoidant
may say things like, well, I'm not comfortable opening up
to others and I'm not necessarily sure that I need

(16:37):
others to feel good about myself. So anyhow, the idea
is that right now we have two different ways of
thinking about individual differences and attachment and adulthood, and they're
based on very different measurement traditions and has on. In Shaver,
the social psychologists adopted classic surveying methods. They basically ask
people how do you think feel and behave and close

(17:00):
relationships and ask people to self report on that. Under
the assumption, which I think is a reasonable one, that
people have a good sense of whether they feel secure
or insecure in their relationships, they may not understand the
deeper processes that make them secure or insecure, that they
can tell you whether they're feeling anxious or feeling not,

(17:21):
or whether they're hungry or not. You know, renovational states
are typically salent to the conscious mind, whereas the developmental
tradition is sort of a how do you describe your
early caregiving experiences and do you do hope dirent way.
So it's interesting because they're very different research traditions, very
different measurement tools, and they're based on slightly different assumptions

(17:41):
about what it means to be secure and how to
assess it. Yeah, so Phil Shafer's research was really influential.
I could just see though, just a clear difference between
the way that these adult attachment styles are measured in
a way, the infinite touchment styles, the infinite attached on it.
It's all about the object, it's about the coding, it's
about the systematic you know, watching videotapes. It's not like

(18:04):
you can do self reports with infants, but with these adults,
with these adults, you know, these adults, it's crazy adults.
It's like self report measures seem to predominate. Now do
they triangulate different? Do they triangulate like self report with
like partner report. Do there are those correlated with each other? Yeah,
those are I would say modestly correlated with one another.

(18:25):
It's not a common research strategy to measure both. But
there are a lot of researchers like Jeff Simpson University
of Minnesota who will study attachment in a dietic context,
So they will have reports from the partner and from
the self, and sometimes they'll measure the partner's report of
the other person's attachment. So those things tend to correlate

(18:46):
relatively moderately, about the same magnitude that you would expect
if you have other people's reports that big fought personality traits,
for example. So they triangulate to some degree, but not perfectly,
probably because everybody has slightly different access to their own
internal insecurities and whatnot. Cool, what do you think that
these individual differences in adult attachment style is really getting at? Now,

(19:10):
there's been a construct there's been various theories that I've
been thrown around. I know, I'm aware of this Bartholomew typology.
It seems to be about it's all about like other
versus self representations. How does that relate to internal working models?
You know, theory, and then how does all that relate
to your own motivational account? You have an alternative view,

(19:32):
so could you go through all three of those and
maybe so? Oh my gosh, yeah, sure. So the idea
of internal working models is a fundamental one and attachment theory.
This is part of where Bulby brought cognitive science into
this emerging ethological control systems theory view of how the
mind works. But his idea was that as children go

(19:54):
through these interactions with their primary caregivers, essentially they're developing
representational models allow them to forecast what is likely to
happen in certain situations, that they behave this way or
if they behave that way. And the foundation of these
working models is the idea that individuals develop a representation
of themselves. So this is comparable to something like self

(20:17):
esteem or self worth. They can view themselves as a
good person who is deserving of love, deserving of support,
is competent, et cetera, or somebody who is not a
good person, somebody who others would not necessarily want to
love or find unlovable. And at the same time, children
are also developing representational models of other people. And I

(20:41):
mean that both specifically like the primary attachment figure, for example,
it could be generalized to other people in more broadly speaking,
So other people might be trustworthy, they might be benevolent,
they might be kind of people you want to spend
time with and invest in. Or they could be they
might be the kinds of people who are likely to

(21:03):
reject you, are the kinds of people who are not
worth your time, not worth your affection, not worth investing in.
So the idea that you develop these representations of yourself
and others is the key idea behind the concept of
internal working models of attachment. That sort of is the
foundation of thinking about individual differences and attachment, And it's

(21:25):
the key idea that Kim Bartholomew imported when she was
thinking about how to conceptualize individual differences among adults. So
her basic taxonomy assumes, Hey, what happens if people have
a positive model of the self and a positive model
of others. Well, that's the prototype of what we would
call a secure attachment style. These people are confident that

(21:48):
they are good people, that they have high self worth
or they have high self esteem, and they believe that
others are trustworthy independable too. In some ways, that's the
I guess you could call it the generic threat that
cuts across many models of what it means to be
an optimal person or to be self actualized appropriately, right,
But you can also have other permutations in this two

(22:10):
dimensional space. So you have some people who think positively
of themselves, but they don't think so highly of others.
So this is what Barthology referred to as a dismissing
pattern of attachment. These are individuals who have a high
degree of independence autonomy, and they're reluctant to count on
others and even dismiss the need to develop close intimate

(22:33):
relationships with others. She also described what's called fearful attachment,
and this is more akin to what Hassen and shape
Or had in mind when they were talking about avoid
and attachment. But fearful attachment is characterized by having that
negative model of the self and a negative model of others.
So you're not comfortable opening up to others and depending
on them, partly because you feel insecure about yourself and

(22:56):
that makes you vulnerable. So you withdraw as from relationships
in a way as a defensive maneuver to protect the
self a vulnerable self. Whereas The final category, preoccupying attachment
is characterized by having a positive view of others and
a negative model of self. So this is characteristic of
individuals who question their own self worth but are very

(23:19):
dependent on feedback from others. They want the approval and
acceptance of others and need that kind of intimacy and closeness.
So that's the gist of the internal working moment's concept
and how it plays into Bartholomew's theory of individual differences.
We have a slight spin on it. It's not designed
to be an alternative to them. The way it was

(23:41):
originally framed was very much focused on this idea that
you have a model of the self and it's kind
of positive or negative, and you have a model of
others which is kind of positive or negative. It doesn't
necessarily capture the motivational flavor that we sometimes think about
when we're thinking about attachment styles. So all attempted to
do is just sort of annotate it a little bit

(24:02):
and say, look, part of what this model of self
dimension is all about is what we now call attachment anxiety.
So it's sort of a concern with being abandon or
being rejected. Do you believe that other people will fundamentally
be there for you or not. So it kind of
mixes the self and other a little bit more than

(24:23):
moret all the new's original model does, in other words,
to feel anxious about the whereabouts and availability attachment figure
involves not only necessarily questioning your own self with but
questioning their availability and responsiveness. So it throws a little
bit of a motivational lens onto it sort of disregards
the self other distinction a little bit. In turn, the

(24:46):
avoidance dimension is something that we conceptualize as having a
little bit less to do with that sense of safety
or that sense of anxiety. It's less effective and more
about how you regulate your motions and response to that
ticular sense that things are not right. So you might
turn towards others. So using others as a secure base

(25:07):
or safe haven would be a secure strategy. And at
the opposite end of that dimension, which we sometimes call avoidance,
would be pulling it away from others and withdrawal from
close relationships. So this quote unquote alternative model talks about
anxiety and avoidance rather than a model of self model
of others. But it's not so much an alternative model

(25:27):
since that these are alternative scientific views that could pet
against each other and show that one's right and one's wrong.
It's just layering some motivational and affect of flavoring on
top of the cognitive representation that Kim Bartholomew articulated. You
just lost half my audience with that last line. But
I think that but the other half are like salivating,

(25:48):
amazingly nerdy this is and I'm one of them. That's
really cool. I think it's cool and it's super cool. Yeah,
I mean you're like, literally the torch has from Bowlby
to you know, de Barthelmu has been passed on to you. Like,
you're really like this pre eminent attachment How does it
feel to be like one of, if not the most

(26:09):
pre eminent attachment researchers of our generation. I think those
are fighting words. I think there are many people would disagree.
I think of myself as somebody who respects the tradition
and finds that you do audioble up. So maybe I'm
a bit of a steward when it comes to the
attachment theory and its history and its legacy. But I

(26:29):
think there are a lot of people out there who
contribute to the field who are kind of carrying the
torch and doing an excellent job at it. That's fair,
that's fair. It's fair. You're still up there. You don't
have to agree with me, okay, Yeah, as long as
my question committee agrees, will be okay, as long as
you're what you're funding, as long as my promotion committed. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Well,

(26:50):
I'll write a lot of recommendation if you want me
to here, So tell me about your discovery that you
actually think it's two dimensions that better represents the space
than four. Yeah. So this turns out to be a
really tricky issue in the theory. So if you think
about a two dimensional space where you can sort of
can you kind of see me in that stuff? Oh yeah,

(27:11):
where your listeners can't. If you just take a two
dimensional space where those dimensions are crossed, you can easily
create four types. So that's the basic two by two
logic that reoptive moves in social psychology. So the trick
here is that there is to understand that there are
not four distinct things. So when we talk about attachment

(27:31):
styles and we talk about let's say the four type
model of attachment, we don't literally mean that there are
four distinct things that are mutually exclusive. What we really
mean is that there's two fundamental distinctions. And because of
the way math works, maybe the way nature works, that
allows for a wide array of possibilities of individual differences

(27:52):
that we sometimes say four because two by two is four.
So the two dimensional model I think it's been a
very useful one for research purposes. Now this part might
lead some people to tune out, but when you're doing
regression models and things like that, you don't want too
much multicolinearity. So if you have four things in a
model that really are just two things, then you're going

(28:15):
to be breaking something from a data analysis point of
view or a measurement perspective. I love the two dimensional approach.
It just it appeals to the part of me that
loves algorithms and loves Cartesian spaces and coordinate systems. However,
having said that, whenever I am teaching on attachment or
trying to explain it to a non technical audience, dimensions

(28:37):
are the bomb. Nobody loves them. I don't mean the
good kind of momb, I mean the bad kind of mom.
So sometimes it's easier to talk about the styles as
being to discrete categories and some sort of ether that
exists out there in the emotional void. And that's fine.
I can live with that. But ultimately I think these
are two different ways of thinking about the same space,

(29:00):
and some methods are appropriate I would say, more appropriate
than others for research purposes, and maybe some ways of
partitioning at space or more appropriate than others for science
communication purposes. So you have you mentioned that two are
so in Bartholo new system they're called model of self
a model of other, and in this kind of motivational

(29:21):
system they're called attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance. Those are
different labels for similar kinds of individual difference variables. So
where would dismissing type of avoidance fall like? What would
that be a combination of and what would the other
kind of avoidance be? Because avoidance can break down into

(29:42):
two types of avoidance, right, m hm, that's right. So
people who tend to endorse our avoidance items are saying
things like I'm not comfortable with opening up to others
and depending on them. So where dismissing avoidance versus fearful
avoidance breaks down on that access is with respect and
how anxious you are about attachment relationships. So a dismissing

(30:05):
person is not worried that others are going to break
up with them or won't be there for them when
they're needed, because I don't need others in the first place.
So it's a motivational strategy that sort of makes relationships
secondary and the interest of preserving one's own independence or autonomy.
So it's low anxiety, high avoidance, Whereas the combination of

(30:30):
high avoidance with high anxiety is fearful attachment. So it's
the idea that I'm trying to turn away from relationships,
not get too close to others, not because I don't
need others, but because I'm scared I'm going to be hurt. Ultimately,
I am vulnerable, I feel insecure. I'm not sure if

(30:50):
others will really be there for me when I need them.
So as a defensive maneuver, I push close relationships away.
I don't allow myself to get to it attached to
others if I can avoid it. So that's the fearful stereotype.
If you will are the prototype and that two dimensional system,
it's high attachment anxiety combined with low attachment avoidance. I'm sorry, Well,

(31:12):
high avoidance combined with high attachment anxiety, gotcha. So going
back to the dismissing aspect, I find that one, that
particular one fascinating because there's a stigma against being single.
I feel like in our society, like it's too easy
to like pathologize that. We have a label we call
it insecure attachment. But I mean, could it be there

(31:35):
people who are just very secure in themselves and very
independent people and they just don't need that area of
their life and it's not do you know what I mean?
It's almost like it's not they're anxious. They're like, yeah,
you know what I could do without it? Like you know,
there are people who go in clergy. I don't know.
There are people who make various life choices where they
decide that they don't need to be attached to anyone, right. Right.

(31:58):
So the trick here is, how do we just ditinguished
between let's say, dismissing avoidance and secure attachment, given that
both of them involves some degree of independence and autonomy, right,
And I think the key difference between this form of
autonomy and let's call it secure independence is that secure
people not only feel competent and autonomous, but they know

(32:20):
others have their back should they stumble one fall. Sometimes
we can't get through life challenges alone, so having that
backup system can be an enormous source of strength, right,
Whereas the dismissing strategy is essentially an attempt to remove
that social backup system. So I am going at it alone,
and I don't need others, and I don't need to

(32:42):
worry about others being there for me assistingly along the way,
what have you. So both of those are characterized by autonomy,
and both of them can lead to competence. You can
be very successful in your life. So you know, I
guess it's a choice whether you want to have that
safety net, that secure base, or that safe haven behind

(33:03):
you or not. I don't think it's necessarily that you're
pathological if you elect to live the dismissing lifestyle, right.
And it's clearly the case that some clinical psychologists will
try to pathologize you if you make those choices right, right,
because they're abnormal. Right. But for the most part, when
we study things like psychological distress or psychopathology, whennot most

(33:28):
of that variation is predicted by the anxiety dimension rather
than the avoidance dimension. So essentially secure and dismissing people
tend to look okay with respect to many things that
we measure. It is typically the high anxiety that is
the fearful and preoccupy people who don't. So it's not
necessarily the case that being dismissing is some sort of

(33:49):
death sentence or with respect to your emotional well being.
Now that's still a controversial claim. There are people out
there who would argue otherwise. I'm looking at this paper
right now by Sciota, Keltner and on that looked at
correlations between various positive emotions and these attachment styles, and
I'm just looking at this table of correlations right now,
and I just find this fascinating. The dismissing. You don't

(34:11):
see this if you don't parse it out into the four.
If you just do the two anxiety and avoidance, you
find that avoidance is negatively correlated with a lot of
positive motions, but there are no positive correlations. But if
you look at you break it up into the four
and you look at dismissing, you actually find dismissing as
positively correlated with contentment in life as well as pride

(34:31):
as well as amusement. I think I thought that was
cute amusing. You must this whole process of easy. Yeah. Yeah,
Well they're like they're like, oh, look at all these
like attached people. Like I'm much more amused, like just
living my own life. And it is negative correlated love
and compassion, but it is positively correlated with contentment, pride,
and amusement. And you don't see that when you fold

(34:54):
them into just the two dimensions anxiety and avoidance. So again,
I am just totally fascinated by there's something special about
this dismissing aspect, you know what I mean, It's fascinating.
I've been kind of preoccupied to use the attachment language
with dismissing attachments since I was in grad school. And
one of the things we learned in some of our

(35:16):
early studies is, are you familiar with Dan Wagner's white
bear phenomenon? The idea absolutely? Okay. So the idea is
that if you ask people to not think of a
white bear, they have a much more challenging time doing
so than if you hadn't asked them to suppress the
idea in the first place, and that at least in
the attachment literature, the idea of trying to keep something

(35:38):
out of your mind, partly because of the psychodynamic origins
of the theory, is considered a defensive maneuver. So if
I don't want to think about how that conversation with
my partner made me feel, the idea is I try
to put it out of my mind. And if you
take the Wagner ideas seriously, what they suggest is that
people should have a very different cult time doing this.

(36:01):
The idea of trying to put that conversation out of
your mind should make it more salely, atten should make
you more upset. And what we found in some of
these early studies is that people who are relatively dismissing
didn't experience this kind of rebound. So we would ask
them to think of a time when they felt upset
with their partners. Essentially, imagine that your partners at leaving

(36:22):
you for someone else, and then spend the next bive
minutes not thinking about it at all. Not only were
they able to do so, they actually showed diminished skin
concntents levels relative to control conditions when we measured the electrophysiology.
So there's something interesting about dismissing attachment where they might
actually be capable of protecting themselves against some of the

(36:48):
slings and errors about age's fortune, if we will. But
at the same time, there's some other studies that suggests
that this can only go so deep. So Mario makulencerf
As colleagues in Israel were able to reproduce some of
these findings, but they showed that if you depleted people's
cognitive resources, so these cognitive low tasks where you're counting

(37:10):
numbers backwards by threes and things like that, if you
undermined a dismissing person's ability to control their emotions or
their cognitive state, they were less capable of controlling this
attachment response. So they looked just like everybody else when
they didn't have the cognitive resources available to them. But

(37:31):
when they did have the cognitive resources available, they were
able to sort of behave in a relatively resilient way.
So it's an interesting psychological pattern, I think, because it
involves elements of security, involves elements of autonomy, but it
doesn't involve that sense of connectedness that we typically focus
on and attachment theory absolutely, and you see this clearly.

(37:52):
You see if you just compare to secure correlations with
the dismissing correlations. You see, It's like secure is dismissing
plus you know, plus what is it at? What else
does it buy you? Love and compassion? Because so you
find it, the correlation is stronger. So if I had
to choose, I'm saying I would choose secure. I'm not
saying I would choose dismissing over secure. That's not my

(38:16):
argument because with secure you get joy whereas you don't
get joy. With dismissing. You get a higher correlation with
contentment than dismissing. Even though dismissing was correlated with contentment.
You get a higher correlation with pride. But in addition
to what you didn't get at all with dismissing, you get,
or at least what was negative with dismissing is a
lot of love point four e correlation and point two

(38:38):
two correlation with compassion. So yeah, I just think that
argues in favor of this maybe even this just this
two this two. Now I'm back to the two, the
two model, because you can say, like, you know, secure
is just a combination of the two, Like if you're
very very high in both sorry low on both low
and anxiety and low and avoidance, then you just are secure. Right. Yeah.

(39:03):
By the way, I like the way you describe this.
I just have this image of we're all kind of
pre birth and we're sitting in this big control room
and there's we have this little iPad in front of us, right,
and we have these options. Do you want your life
to be filled with joy, with love, with contentment, with compassion?
You get to check off which boxes And I'm imagining

(39:23):
you young Scott going through this, going I'll take some joy,
I'll take some compassion. Yeah. And then but then you
can measure pre needle attachment styles, because the ones who
are going to be avoidant dismissive are the ones who
be like, yeah, I'm okay with just contentment. Yeah, get
me a contentment I can live without. Might be individual differences,
I'm saying. It might be individual difference in that choice. Right.

(39:47):
It gets really recursive, doesn't it. Yes, all the way
down with the turtles anyway. Whoo, okay, so that's great,
let's move on. Are there things that have been shown
to change people's attachment style or change infants and the
effects it has? Wow, Scott, So that's something I don't
know A whole lot about. Okay, sure, because I don't

(40:07):
have a clinical bone in my body, I'm too dismissing
why I can move on to another topic. Yeah, that
sounds good. So it looks like there's a corresponse between
parental and infant attachment patterns right now, the question is
we don't really we haven't used the word the dirty
word genes yet in this discussion. It does seem like
Bulby's smart different kind of genes. I'm talking about Bolby,

(40:32):
you know, talked about he had this theory that it
was really independent of pre existing personality traits. This really
had to do with sensitivity of parental and the research
has kind of bear that out borne that out that
attachment style seems to be go above beyond just pre
existing personality patterns. But could it be that there's such
a strong correspondence between children's genes and adult genes that

(40:56):
you're seeing like parental attachment stuff ailes kind of developing
the same thing in their children because of what they're modeling.
Does that make sense? Does that even make sense? Can
you state in a slightly different way, perhaps I just
want to make sure I win well. Children are so
astute in learning about how the world should be from
their parents. You know, if their parents through genetics, you know,

(41:19):
predisposition tend to be a certain attachment style. We know
there's a there's gene concordance between parents. How much of
that correlation as a result of similar genes between adult
and children as opposed to environmental differences? So this is
a bit of a Pandora's box and attachment theory. Heck, yeah,

(41:39):
heck yeah, I know. So we can't have a simple
conversation about this. Are you prepared to have a really complicated,
noisy conversation? Yeah, oh of course. Okay, So I think
a fair reading of Goolby, who was writing about these
issues way before behavior genetics took off, he believed that

(42:02):
whatever is taking place in those parent child interactions to
lead some children to, let's say, question the availability and
responsiveness of their parents, reflected real transactions between parents and
their children. That is, it reflected real developmental effects, if
you will. And part of the reason he made that

(42:23):
argument was he was kind of departing from his object
relation colleagues who believe that most of psychopathology and childhood
was due to the fantasy life children rather than real events.
So He would get frustrated when his advisors said, why
are you asking about the kid's mom who's dad when
you should be asking him about what he fantasizes about
what he's thinking about families and stuff. So his attempt

(42:46):
us he was trying to understand how it is that
real experiences shape the way people children think and behave
in the world. But he believed that all those dynamics,
those interpersonal relations and transaction were layered on top of
pre existing temperamental dispositions. So children do differ from one

(43:07):
another at day zero. You know, some are more fussy
than others, some are more fearful than others. Right, And
when we talked about the parental sensitivity earlier, part of
what I was trying to do is explain that what
a sensitive parent is doing is being responsive to the
child's needs in part on the basis of that child's

(43:28):
temperament dispositions, whatever's going on in the family and the
life context. That's not the same recipe that's necessarily followed
for every child. So the way Bowlby thought about this,
and I would say this fairly similar to the way
I think about it too, is that you do have
this preexisting let's call it dispositional variation that makes some

(43:51):
children different from others, and that may create constraints on
how it is that as parent child interactions play out.
But ultimately, whether the child comes to view the parent
is available and responsive is a function of the history
of those interactions, which in turn could be a function

(44:12):
to some extent, of genetic differences between parents or between
children that are shared between parents and children themselves. So
this is getting a little lack of doodle, So let
me just wet just simplify it. There's two distinct ways
to think about this problem. This is the reason why
there's debates. If there are genes that are shared between
parents and children that give rise to let's say, secure attachment,

(44:37):
then it could very well be the case that secure
parents beget secure kids not because of the way they
interact with each other, but simply because they have a
common genetic disposition. The alternative approach would not say that
that common genetic disposition or that share genetic dispositions don't exist.

(44:58):
But on top of that, and maybe because of those
genetic dispositions, the way parents trut their children is encoded
by those children and is responsible for the way in
which children come to construe themselves in their social world,
so that the correlation between parents and children is not
only a function of shared genes, but those interactional experiences

(45:21):
have taken place. So the difference between those two frameworks,
if we will, is that one assumes that parent child
interactions matter, or if we're talking about adults, that actual
conversations we have with our romantic partners, actual conflicts and betrayals,
those things matter in terms of how we think about

(45:42):
and trust others, and the other model assumes that those
things don't matter, that it really is, at the end
of day, just parents at the same genes as their children,
and that's how we explain those kinds of parenting effects,
if you will. I don't think we're quite at the
point yet where we can say definitively how we should
be thinking about this based on empirical data, partly because

(46:05):
there are a whole lot of behavior genetic studies out
there on attachment. It's kind of a mixed bag. If
you try to do the strange situation and a twin design,
imagine putting one twin into the strange situation to be
separated from mom. Well, the other twin who's waiting in
the other waiting room is also separated from mom. See

(46:26):
it's a pragmatically challenging thing to do because it's hard
to separate twins in a way that conforms to the
procedure entailed by the strange situation. Well, can we find
you know, twins that are attached, you know, like they
haven't been separated. Yeah, yeah, that's the word those. So
I think you're right, Scott. The solution to this problem

(46:46):
is to get a large level joint twin. Let's get
a grant. Let's get a grant to that. I'll submit,
but you get to do all the work. Well, but
people have done it, so they've tried it, and what
you find is that there's not much evidence of harotability
and attachment patterns and children. Instead, what you get are
huge environmental effects and some modest shared environmental effects, which

(47:10):
in the behavior genetic literature is the way of talking
about whatever's common between the twins that might be shaping
the attachment patterns. There are four or five studies now
that have done behavior genetic analysis on self report measures
of attachment and adults, and those also are a little
kind of they're kind of a mixed bag in terms
of the findings, but I think the fairest way to

(47:32):
summarize it is that there is some evidence of harotability
for tax related anxiety, maybe close to forty percent, and
kind of hit or miss for avoidance. So there probably
are some genetic influences that help shape whether people become
relatively anxious which respect to attachment issues. But it's probably
the case, at least according to attachment theory, that whatever

(47:54):
those differences are, they're correlated with environmental influences that matter.
So separating those correlated influences is the really tricky empirical problem.
It's tricky, and I guess the question about when you
say they matter. They certainly matter in infancy we see
it's correlated with emotional regulation issues and other problems. But

(48:17):
the discussion I think it's really tricky is the question
of continuity. You know, I've looked at these men analyzes
looking at the relationship between childhood attachment and adult attachment,
and they're quite small. So I have a lot of
questions relating to that, the fact that the continuity is
not as high as people might in the general population think.
And one is how much. Does Bowlby's theory even rest

(48:40):
on there being continuity. Yeah, I've always viewed that as
being sort of the I don't let me see how
to describe it. It's kind of like the wild card
and attachment theory because we all make this assumption that
there's some degree of continuity between childhood and adulthood with
the respons like to insecurity your patterns of attachment. But

(49:03):
the theory never specifies a just how much continuity should
be observed. In other words, there's not a quantitative prediction here.
And the second part is Bolby's theory involves a paradox,
if you will, between what I like to call socialization
effects and selection effects. So the idea of socialization is

(49:25):
part of what motivates the developmental approach to attachment theory.
The idea is that the way in which your primary
care givers relate to you and treat you helps to
shape who you become, whether you become relatively secure in
your attachment style or relatively insecure. The selection idea comes
out of sort of the individual differences or the personality

(49:46):
way of thinking about things, and the idea is that
people who are relatively insecure select themselves into situations that
reinforce their insecurity. Or conversely, if you're reallatively secure person,
you select yourself or shape your environments in ways that
are consistent with the working models that you hold. There's

(50:07):
this great study by Nancy Collins I think it was
their dissertation and it was published in the late nineties
showing that in the adult attachment realm, if you ask
people to okay, imagine Scott that you're going to a
cocktail party okay, and you have your significant other with
you while you go to mix a new drink. You
look across the room and you see that she's talking

(50:28):
to this strikingly attractive man. Okay. She seems to be
enjoying herself. Okay, she's experiencing joy and pleasure and these
things we were talking about earlier, maybe amusement. Amusement. Now,
how do you think about that? And how would you
behave how would you attribute his actions and her behaviors?

(50:50):
And you know, this is a standard situation. If you
ask you to ask people to say, Okay, how do
you think about this? Secure people tend to say, oh,
I'm really glad that she's having a good time. This
must be an old high school friend, I'm glad that
they finally had a chance to reconnect. Maybe I'll go
over there and introduce myself. Whereas people who are relatively insecure,
it will be like, what what kind of culplaning situation

(51:11):
is this? Right? This guy's trying to make his move.
She's into it, right, she's already giving. So the idea
is that the working models or attachment styles that people
have can shape the way people construe the social world
in which they have. It influences the attributions they make
about the behavior of others and whether people are violating

(51:33):
their trust or whether people are relatively safe and secure
individuals to trust him. So you have what's called selection effects,
where working models shape the social world, and you have
these socialization effects, where the social world shapes the working
models people have. So the consequence of these two things
working in tandem is that it's unclear from a theoretical

(51:55):
perspective whether there should be a lot of continuity from
infancy to adulthood. The selection idea implies, yes, there should
be continuity, right, because if I am relatively secure and
I'm continuing to interact with others who reward that security
or who reinforce the views that I have. There's little
reason for me to change my mind about things. But

(52:17):
the socialization idea suggests that we should be revising our
working models in ways that reflect changes in our ongoing worlds.
And we're not in the same social environment at age
one that we're at age fifteen. For example, we have friends,
we have romantic partners, we have parents who may be
lost jobs or divorced. Lots of things change, and so

(52:39):
the idea is that working models have to be sensitive
to those kinds of things as well. So to the
extent to which you accept that proposition of attachment theory,
you might not expect much continuity at all, because for
the theory to be correct, what you need is for
the working models to reflect it zonegoing experiences. You don't
need the assumption that there's ongoing experiences themselves. Else should

(53:00):
be fully continuous across time. Now, having said that, let's
say a test Rey testability point two ZHO between F
and C and adulthood is quite in line, which is
about everything else we study in psychology. So in other words,
I think from an absolute point of view, you could say, well,
that's kind of low because that correlation is closer to

(53:22):
the zero than it is to one, So mathematically it
seems small. Well, actually, point one point one two is
what I'm seeing right now and probably the best meta
analysis on this topic. Which one is the best? The
completion recent completion of an age eighteen year AI assessment
of the se c CYD that included over eight hundred
and fifty participants are ecal point one two. Okay, so

(53:44):
that's one study. It's not an analysis per se, but
it's an important one because it's a relatively large sample
of individuals. The reason meta analysis of these samples found
are ecal point one four and that's a pink couirt food,
yes incorporate. Okay, So it is relatively small, but it's
in it's small in the same way that everything else

(54:08):
in psychology is small. So if you look at meta
analyzes of personality and temperament from let's say early childhood
to adulthood, you also get test retest correlations that are
between let's say zero at point two wish. If you
look at cognitive ability, you find, yeah, the correlations are
a little bit higher there, but kind of like what

(54:29):
you see in some of these other areas. The overall
stability tends to be elevated among adults relative to childhood.
So I think it's a little tricky because what you
see is a thread of continuity, and the way you
interpret that, I think depends on what message you ultimately
want to take away from attachment theory, Right, So one

(54:51):
way of interpreting that is, huh, that's interesting if I
want to understand part of why Scott is the way
he is, the value in reaching back into his past
and seeing what his early interactions were like, not just
in childhood, but throughout adolescents and later adulthood as well,
because attachment theory suggests that there is going to be

(55:13):
some sort of thread that might allow us to provide
some sort of better understanding or make some attributions about
the meaning of why Scott thinks that what he does,
or what he feels that what he does, or the
choices he may make. Now, if you're a betting person,
you're still going to take the bed based on the
small odds, because correlation at point one, let's say, is

(55:33):
still going to earn you money over the long run,
compared to correlation at zero, which would lead you to
break either. But if you wanted to use attachment theory
to prophesize what people will be like on the basis
of early experiences, You're going to have a lot of misses.
And I would think that's an important thing to understand.

(55:54):
If the correlation is between point two and point one,
when everything is said and done, you're going to have
a lot of peace people who had positive early experiences
who are now relatively well adjusted from an attachment theory perspective,
as well as people who were neglected or didn't feel
like their parents really understood them, who now are not
well adapted socially or interpersonally. You're going to have a

(56:16):
lot of people also in those off diagonals, people who
had let's say, less than optimal childhood experiences but don't
seem any more software now, as well as people had
great experiences but just can't seem to find their way
of life, to find that need to find meaningful in
their personal relationships. So those off diagonal cases will exist,

(56:36):
and I think that's a natural consequence of imperfect continuity
over time. That makes a lot of sense. I am
thinking about this from the original spirit. The original Boldi
spirit was very much grounded in evolutionary considerations and if
you think about it from an evolutionary point of view,
these are just we're talking about like activation of strategies

(56:59):
based on environmental contingencies. So it's you know, the gene
environment interaction is very very strong there, and if we
throughout our lifespan are constantly recalibrating our gene, you know,
we have this genomic plasticity based on environmental input. It
seems just to me to make a lot more sense
just to approach adult attachment kind of divorce from what

(57:21):
you were as a kid, but look at your current relationship.
You can imagine a case where someone had a very
secure attachment in childhood and then maybe they get an
abusive relationship and as a result of that, then they
start to become they go more on the insecure, anxious,
and even avoidant if they're really severely abused, that might

(57:41):
be a coping mechanism from an evolutionary strategy perspective, Right,
does that make sense? Yeah? Absolutely? And so here's I
think a couple of ways to think about the problem.
And let me just say I completely agree with everything
you said here. I think if one's goal is to understand, now,
why are some adults relatively secure and some are insecure.

(58:04):
You want, from an attachment theoretical perspective, if you want
to think about the history of their interpersonal relationships, where
history begins, let's say, at birth, when you're filling out
the iPad list of whether you want joy in your
life or not, or pre birth, all the way to
one sentence ago. Okay, So that's a big way of

(58:25):
thinking about interpersonal history, and from that point of view,
you would want to wait more heavily what has happened
recently in that person's experience is relative to things that
happened in the distant past. Okay, the entire history is relevant,
but you know, this is the way most calibration and
algorithms and machine learning processes work. It's sort of the

(58:47):
recent inputs, the recent perturbations, that have the most effect
on the system, rather than the starting values per se.
And I think that's true in the context of attachment
as well. Now, having said that's not always the case
that we're trying to, either for scientific reasons or humanitarian reasons,
understand why the person is the way they are right now.

(59:09):
In terms of maximizing prediction, we're trying to do something
that's more biographical we're trying to understand that person's history
at large. So if I'm trying to understand why I'm
relatively secure, I'm only going to get so far. Even
if my prediction is correct. By saying whether I was
in a good mood five minutes ago, right, that would

(59:29):
be the most boring biography of Chris Frail or Scott
Coleman that you could ever read. Right. So, part of
what attachment theory entails is you can think of development
as an architectural process where you lay a foundation and
then you begin to build a scaffolding and you begin
to build a framework. And the way development works is

(59:50):
you start at that ground level and that kind of
constrains what you can do from that point forward, but
it doesn't determine how high the building will ultimately be.
That's a function of what you continue to do as
you climb up the scaffolding and continue to construct the structure.
So those early experiences are relevant for understanding the big picture,

(01:00:12):
but the early experiences are laying the foundation for what
comes next. So those early experiences, as you said, may
play a role in shaping how secure the young child is,
and then that young child might bring those experiences to
pure relationships, and that might bias the individual to have
more positive and harmonious relationships with others than it would

(01:00:33):
if the relatively insecure. But that doesn't mean that the
kid can end up with a teacher who makes the
kid feel like a complete loser, completely incompetent questions, certain choices,
and aptitudes, and you know, these things can spiral out
of control sometimes, and so you can't expect perfect continuity.
If you want the big picture from the Goldian perspective,

(01:00:55):
you want to be telling the story from the beginning
under the assumption that things can evolve in ways that
are not always easy to predict. We can't always tell
what the future will be by knowing something about the past.
We know something more than nothing, but we can't predict
it perfectly. But if you want to tell that big

(01:01:17):
story and tell it well that it's make it emotionally
compelling and descriptively rich, you need the whole history of
those interactions rather than what just happened the previous relationship
to the person. Thank you. That really helped add a
lot of nuance to this. I found this interesting study
that found attachment security is not especially stable even if
it's not especially stable across the first two decades of life.

(01:01:40):
When discontinuity exists, it can be explained at least partly
by attachment relevant changes in the caregiving environment. There's a
study that found, for example, in the SECCYD study, participants
who remain secure between early childhood and age eighteen, compared
with those who change from secure to insecure, experience lower
levels and a greater decline. And in maternal sensitivity, we're

(01:02:01):
less likely to be living with their fathers, and their
mothers reported to large or increase in negative life events
in the intervening years. So I think that's consistent with
the perspective I was just telling you about just how
like throughout our life span, that doesn't just matter how
sensitive our mothers were or fathers, but also how sensitive
is our current partner, how sensitive have all of our

(01:02:23):
partners been in our adult relationship life. And also I
think another wrinkle to this from a genetic point of
view is that it looks like heritability of all psychological
traits tends to increase as we age. So I don't
know how much some of these effects you find that
genetic effects in adolescents than you do in infants, for instance,
And I don't know how much that as a result

(01:02:43):
of kind of a hardening of what was already there
or crystallizing. So that just adds there's so many nuances
to all this. I'm not saying I know the answers. Yeah,
we're trying to get a grant to do the behavior
genetic research calling that topic. One of the issues we
want to dress is something we haven't talked about yet
that might be relevant or interesting. Is the distinction between

(01:03:06):
being secure or insecure in general versus being secure or
insecure in the context of a specific relationship. So some people,
for example, are relatively secure in general. When we administer
these self report inventories, for example, we typically just ask
people to think about close relationships generally in their life,
and some people will be secure, some people will be insecure.

(01:03:28):
But even people who are secure might be insecure with
specific individuals. So they might have, let's say, a very
hostile relationship with their father, feel very distant from them
and angry, but have a very healthy relationship with the
romantic partner. Now there's a thread throughout this. To use
the word thread again, So people who tend to be

(01:03:49):
secure in one domain also tend to be secure in
other domains as well, So there's some degree of general
attachment that sort of colors every relationship that we're in.
There's also uniqueness. So I think that's a really interesting
question when you start thinking about behavior genetic perspective. Namely,
if you have, let's say, relatively secure relationship with your spouse,

(01:04:12):
but maybe a relatively insecure relationship with your parents, it
seems that the only way to really explain that, and
it's still fallible, is that has something to do with
the history of relationship you've had with that spouse, something
about it must be better than the relationship you have
with your parents. But this strong genetic perspective would suggest
that I don't think you could make sense of that

(01:04:34):
distinction in the first place from a strong genetic perspective
unless you are willing to make the assumption that there
are specific genes for attachment with your parents, and specific
genes for attachment and friendships, and specific genes with attachment
to God, and specific genes for attachmental men. Are there
differences in mothers and fathers and the impact of sensitivity.
So what you find is if you do the strange

(01:04:56):
situation for example, with mothers and fathers, you get a
relatively weak association there. Children who are secure with mom
also tend to be secure with dad. Okay, but in
a correlation metric that's about a correlation of point one
point two, so it's certainly not terministics. Well, I guess what.
Let me just get right to the evolutionary question I'm

(01:05:17):
asking you, are do you see stronger of differentiations in
the strange situation with the mother than the father, because
you could see that genes could be sculpted in ways
for whatever kind of over evolutionary time, whatever gender caregiver
was more there for you. And I don't know if
I mean I'm just making this up, but maybe you
know over everych time, where the males were out hunting,

(01:05:39):
you know, I don't know where the females staying home.
More so, what could genes have been sculpted to be
more reactive to a female voice for instance? You know,
that's an interesting idea. And I don't know if what
you proposed about the way individual differences break out in
a strength situation works in the way you predicted it.
In otherwords, I'm not disagree, you're disaffirming it. I have

(01:06:01):
no idea. I'm ignorant on that point, but I think
the general argument and attachment theory is that that would
be unlikely. There was this interesting paper by Lisa Diamond
and the two thousands where she was trying to she
was trying to make the case that there's an important
distinction to be made between sexual desire and attachment, which

(01:06:24):
is an interesting idea in the attachment field because we
tend to think of a romantic law as being an
attachment process, and from that point of view, love this
sort of a combination of sexual desire and attachment and
caregiving as well. Sort of it's the apple phenomenon of
the configuration of those three motivational systems. But it's interesting

(01:06:46):
because most people have a sexual preference for same gendered
or other gendered individuals. Having a preference is stronger in
our society than being agnostic with respect to gender person
you desire. So the argument Lisa Diamond makes is that
that's not true with attachment, and because those two systems

(01:07:10):
sometimes get conflated in our psychological experience, will become when
we're becoming attached to some way, we become preoccupied with
them or curious about their whereabouts, we wonder how they
feel about us, And that sense of infatuation is very
similar to what you experience with sexual desire as well.
So sometimes people per argument is that it's not always
easy to keep those things distinct, and parents might get

(01:07:33):
upset with their children. WHOA, you know what's going on
with you? You're spending all this time with us a person?
Are you gay? Things like that, and children don't understand
what the question is all about. Ultimately, but her basic
argument is that whatever the motivational systems are that underlie
sex may be gender oriented. In other words, there might
be a propensity for some people to seek out the

(01:07:55):
same sex individuals versus opsite sex individuals, but that is
not true of the attachment system. It is specifically gender neutral,
and in fact, one of the fun I don't know
if fun is the right word for this, but one
of the curious things about attachment is it partly because
of its ethological heritage. Part of what inspirable was Conrad

(01:08:15):
Lorenz's studies of them in printing and geese for example,
are you familiar with these? Oh? Yes? So the idea
is that the young geese are born, and the ideas
that they're kind of programmed to in print or attach
it on the first moving object they see. Now, under
normal circumstances, that should be the mother, right, But you

(01:08:36):
can create these interesting experimental situations where it's a football instead,
or it's Conrad Lorenz himself and suddenly the geese are
following Conrad Lren's around that he's their parent or their
attachment figure. So the idea is that the attachment system
isn't necessarily looking for a mother, It isn't necessarily looking

(01:08:57):
for something with a feminine weighte soll no protect them.
According to Bowlby, it's looking for somebody who's stronger or wiser.
But I think you met that metaphorically. I don't think
he considered the mind to be looking for wisdom at
age one, yeah, or something like that. We still can't
solve that problem at age forty five, so yeah, oh yeah.
So it's looking for something that's there essentially, and more

(01:09:22):
often than not that is going to be a biological parent,
and it shouldn't matter whether it's a male or female.
So from that aversion of perspective that you articulated, I
don't know if the system's smart enough. If you will
to make that distinction. It might not be I think
it's open to more testing. But no, this idea though
that you are I think this is you're really onto

(01:09:42):
something here, you know, looking at security in different domeans.
But we're not talking about demeans outside. We're not talking
about other demeans, Like what about your work or your
like take a broader perspective on security. How do these
you know, like can you feel unlovable but still have
a high self esteem for your math ability? For instance?
You know, like, how can we take your scale? What

(01:10:03):
if we started adding in other life domeans? Then how
would it all correlate with each other? So my guess,
based on some of the things we've done is that
you would find some modest positive co variation here. That is,
people who are relatively secure in their close relationships are
also going to be relatively secure in the ways in

(01:10:24):
which they think about other domains in their life, including
let's say they're satisfaction with their jobs, the extent to
which they view themselves as competent and talented and leisure
domains that they enjoy and appreciate, or those who are
insecure may question their ability to accomplish some tasks that
are completely non relational, not interpersonal at all. Now, most

(01:10:44):
of the research on attachment hasn't looked necessarily whether people
who are secure in general, let's say, are also secure
with respect to their jobs. But what you do find
is that how securely attached you are is related to
all kinds of crazy things in life. So it is
related to things like job satisfaction, It is related to
how well you cooperate with others, it's related to the

(01:11:06):
alliance you built with your therapist. So the bottom li
ise that it sort of bleeds over into all kinds
that can make absolutely I mean, you could see how
someone who can go through the same exact insecure attachment
processeds to their work, like if their writing isn't going
well initially saying oh I'm a failure or I'm on
the equivalent of unlovable and work is I have no talent. Yeah,

(01:11:29):
thanks for describing my morning, but I didn't mean to
bring that up, do you know what I mean? Like,
the same principles can apply to non physical human entities. Well,
that turns out to be one of my favorite miniature topics,
if you will. And attachment theory, which is attachment to

(01:11:50):
non human entities. So that Lee Kirkpatrick is an evolutionary
psychologist who studied attachment a lot earlier in his career,
and one of the art ements he made in early
on was that people, especially in Christian religions, have conceptualized
God as an attachment figure, and that you can be
securely attached to God, for example, or insecurely attached to God.

(01:12:15):
And you have this famous ram song about losing your religion,
which is kind of this realization that the relationship doesn't
mean what you thought it meant, in this sense of
feeling betrayed by an attachment object and trying to find
your way without that secure base. So I think the
basic principles, as you said, cannot be applied to many

(01:12:36):
different areas. And you know, on the one hand, that's
great because I could spend all day thing about how
attachment is mental guise of things such as how tidy
my closet is or is not. But on the other hand,
it also raises the specter of if it explains too much,
does it really explain anything. So this is a common

(01:12:57):
problem we have to deal with in psychology sometimes when
we strive to come up with relatively inclusive models. It's
unclear whether we've reinvented the wheel or whether we're just
sort of over exerting ourselves in some ways. First of all,
great point, but I just am thinking, I want to
do a study to see the correlation between how your
relationship you have with your mother and how securely attached

(01:13:18):
you are to God. So Lee kor Patrick has done
those stuffies, Oh what's the correlation the magnitude of correlationships
because this is back when everybody was doing types of attachment.
But generally people who are secure with their parents are
sort of retrospectively reflecting on it now also tend to

(01:13:38):
be secure in the relationship with God. So he was
the reason he cared about this idea in part was
there were different ways of thinking about how the developmental
processes could work. So on the one hand, it could
be the case that people turn to God when they
have a deficit in their human interpersonal relationships. So it
could be the case that if you're in if you're

(01:13:59):
insecure in your relationship with your parents, maybe try to
have those needs met and reship with God, so you
might end up with insecure parental relationships. Predicting some like
secure relationships with God. But it's really more of an
assimilation phenomenon. In other words, people who are I guess
you could say, empowered by the secure relationships with they

(01:14:20):
have with their parents also imview that security and the
relationship with the God or vice versa. If you're insecure
in the relationship with your parents, that God the Father
is necessarily a reliable one. That is so fascinating. Unfortunately,
I had to run to a date right now. It's
going to be a secure date, I hope. So I

(01:14:42):
want to thank you from the bottom of my heart
for being so generous with your time and talking through
all these issues with me. It was a true honor
to be able to talk to you today. This was
super fun. Thank you for inviting me to do this.
Get thank you. Thank you so much for listening to
The Psychology Podcast with doctor Scott Barry Call. I hope
you found this episode just as thought provoking as I did.

(01:15:04):
If something you heard today stimulated you in some way,
I encourage you to join in the discussion at the
Psychology podcast dot com. That's the Psychology Podcast dot com.

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