Perhaps the most provocative and controversial implication of adult attachment theory is that a person´s attachment style as an adult is shaped by his or her interactions with parental attachment figures. Although the idea that early attachment experiences might have an influence on attachment style in romantic relationships is relatively uncontroversial, hypotheses about the source and...

There is now an increasing amount of research that suggests that adult romantic relationships function in the same ways as infant-caregiver relationships, with some noteworthy exceptions, of course. Naturalistic research on adults separating from their partners at an airport demonstrated that behaviors indicative of attachment-related protest and caregiving were evident, and that the regulation of...

The earliest research on adult attachment involved studying the association between individual differences in adult attachment and the way people think about their relationships and their memories for what their relationships with their parents are like. Hazan and Shaver (1987) developed a simple questionnaire to measure these individual differences. (These individual differences are often referre...

The idea that romantic relationships may be attachment relationships has had a profound influence on modern research on close relationships. There are at least three critical implications of this idea. First, if adult romantic relationships are attachment relationships, then we should observe the same kinds of individual differences in adult relationships that Ainsworth observed in infant-...

Although Bowlby was primarily focused on understanding the nature of the infant-caregiver relationship, he believed that attachment characterized human experience from "the cradle to the grave." It was not until the mid-1980´s, however, that researchers began to take seriously the possibility that attachment processes may play out in adulthood. Hazan and Shaver (1987) were two of the first resear...

Although Bowlby believed that the basic dynamics described above captured the normative dynamics of the attachment behavioral system, he recognized that there are individual differences in the way children appraise the accessibility of the attachment figure and how they regulate their attachment behavior in response to a threat. However, it wasn´t until his colleague, Mary Ainsworth, began to sys...

The theory of attachment was originally developed by John Bowlby (1907 - 1990), a British psychoanalyst who was attempting to understand the intense distress experienced by infants who had been separated from their parents. Bowlby observed that separated infants would go to extraordinary lengths (e.g., crying, clinging, frantically searching) to either prevent separation from their parents or to r...

Research on adult attachment is guided by the assumption that the same motivational system that gives rise to the close emotional bond between parents and their children is responsible for the bond that develops between adults in emotionally intimate relationships. The objective of this essay is to provide people who are new to the field--or people who may simply be interested in learning more abo...

Francesco Albanese, Paola Rucci, Annalisa Frangione, Donatella Marazziti Dipartimento di Psichiatria, Università di Pisa Introduzione La teoria dell’attaccamento sottolinea il ruolo centrale delle relazioni nell’intero arco di vita dell’essere umano. Lo stile di attaccamento di un individuo dipende dal modo in cui viene trattato dal caregiver (Bowl...

Donatella Marazziti, Francesco Albanese, Mario Catena, Bernardo Dell’Osso, Alessandro Del Debbio, Armando Piccinni, Paola Rucci, Liliana Dell’Osso Dipartimento di Psichiatria, Neurobiologia, Farmacologia e Biotecnologie, Università di Pisa Abstract Secondo la teoria dell’attaccamento le prime esperienze relazionali significative giocano un ruolo de...