3-070 - Making Developmental Theory: The Case of Attachment

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

In recent years attachment theory has been subject to increasing cross-cultural, evolutionary, ecological, and historical scrutiny. From these perspectives it appears that attachment theory in its current form is too narrow in its research questions, methods, evidence, and conceptualization. Privileging and naturalizing the mother–child bond in preference to more diffuse group bonds, existing attachment theory applies best to later twentieth-century North America and counsels reproducing widespread features of the middle-class version of its cultural psychology. In many socially oriented cultures, in contrast, responsibility for childcare is distributed and the mother's role in childcare diminished.
This session brings together researchers from several disciplines and deploys a range of methods from ethnography, to quantitative survey methods and spot observations, to literature reviews and historiography to argue that attachment theory is in need of profound rethinking. We ask: What is secure attachment in cross-cultural perspective? What roles, both positive and negative, does insecurity play in early development? Why do questions about attachment need to be considered in relation to questions about cultural styles of separation? What do differences in early bonding and separation reflect about societies more broadly considered? How do different cultural values, belief systems, and practices shape developmental trajectories as well as adult forms of personhood and social organization? What are valid measures of secure attachment cross-culturally? What can a historical perspective on attachment theory as part of American intellectual history teach us about making developmental theory?

Sub Unit

• Methods, History, Theory

Chairs

• Jeannette Mageo, Washington State University

• Hiltrud Otto, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Individual Presentations

• Cultural variations of attachment formation - Presenting Author: Hiltrud Otto, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

• The socialization of trust & security: diverse pathways across cultures - Presenting Author: Thomas S Weisner, University of California, Los Angeles

• Separation and insecurity as necessary parts the attachment process - Presenting Author: Jeannette Mageo, Washington State University

• What's ethological about the ethological theory of attachment behavior? - Presenting Author: Marga Vicedo, University of Toronto