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peers to teachers to romantic partners. Infants who are neglected, abandoned, or otherwise deprived of a loving relationship with one or more caregivers suffer severe emotional, social, and cognitive problems throughout life. The Bucharest Intervention Project, described at the start of this chapter, poignantly speaks to the importance of early attachment relationships. The horrific conditions of the Romanian orphanages cascaded to severe develop- mental delays in the orphaned infants and toddlers across motor, cognitive, social, and emotional development domains (Almas et al., 2012). On nearly every metric, institutionalized infants fared worse than community controls, including being physically smaller and failing to grow along a normal tra- jectory. Furthermore, brain imaging studies showed structural changes in the brains of children who spent more time in the orphanage compared to children adopted into families at younger ages, and their teachers reported that late-adopted children had more behavior and social problems relative to the early-adopted children. These dire research findings spurred the first foster-care system in Romania as an alternative to government-run orphan- ages. Orphaned infants placed in the high-quality foster care system surpassed those who remained institutionalized, which led the Romanian government to pass a law forbidding the institutionalization of children younger than age 2. A question that arises, of course, is whether differences in infant attachment matter in nonextreme situations. Does variation in attachment statuses among non-orphaned, home-reared infants have a cascading influence on their devel- opment as well? The answer is yes. Infants who were securely attached at 12 months of age were more curious, played more effectively with peers, and had better relationships with their teachers in nursery and preschool than did chil- dren who had been insecurely attached as infants. By 10 years of age, children who were securely attached as infants were more socially skilled, had more friends, had greater self-confidence, and more openly expressed their feelings than did children who had been insecurely attached (Sroufe et al., 2005). What developmental processes might account for such long-term connec- tions? Early attachment relationships are thought to play out over time because of internal working models that people construct about the responsiveness of oth- ers and worthiness of the self. For example, infants who experience insensitive caregiving and develop insecure attachments may develop internal working models in which they view others to be untrustworthy and the self as unlov- able. These models affect later expectations about others and the quality of social relationships (Dykas & Cassidy, 2011; Fivush & Waters, 2015). You might wonder how an infant can develop an internal working model, if they do at all. There’s some evidence that infants as young as 4–16 months develop internal models of caregivers’ responsiveness. In one study, infant attachment was assessed in the Strange Situation, and infants’ attention to dif- ferent attachment-based scenarios was examined. For example, infants were shown a scene of two animated characters, a large ellipse (mother) and a small ellipse (child). During habituation trials, the “mother” and the “child” were together at the foot of a hill. Then the “mother” climbed up the hill and rested halfway on a small plateau. The “child” below started crying (presented in an audio recording of an actual crying infant). During test trials, infants were shown two scenes, one in which the mother responded by descending to help her child, and one in which the mother was unresponsive and kept climbing the hill ( FIGURE 7.28 ). Securely attached infants looked longer to the nonre- sponsive condition than responsive condition whereas insecure infants did not differentiate between the two conditions (Johnson, Dweck, & Chen, 2007). Looking-time patterns suggest that securely attached infants had constructed an internal working model about how caregivers respond to their young and were surprised by the conflicting reactions of the nonresponsive caregiver.

internal working models  A mental representation of one’s attachment relationship with the primary care-

giver, which becomes a model for future social relationships and the quality of these relationships PROPERTY OF OXFORD

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