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The Role of Contingency Detection in Early Affect–Regulative Interactions and in the Development of Different Types of Infant Attachment
Author(s) -
Gergely György
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
social development
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.078
H-Index - 91
eISSN - 1467-9507
pISSN - 0961-205X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9507.2004.00277.x
Subject(s) - psychology , affect (linguistics) , socialization , developmental psychology , infant development , citation , psychoanalysis , library science , communication , computer science
As DeOliveira et al.’s timely and rather comprehensive review of the literature on attachment disorganization makes it very clear, for current models of early socioemotional development as well as for theories of developmental psychopathology, probably the most intriguing and theoretically challenging discovery provided by recent developments in attachment theory is the objective identification and descriptive characterization of Disorganized infant attachment (e.g., Main & Solomon, 1986). There is a quickly growing body of research evidence representing a number of different methodological approaches (such as longitudinal and correlational studies, physiological and cortisol measures, genetic studies, and new experimental paradigms) about the nature of Disorganized attachment that provide challenging and highly suggestive new information guiding current attempts to develop theoretical models of the psychosocial environmental—and possibly also biological—factors that may contribute to the early etiology of Disorganized attachment (e.g., George & Solomon, 1999; Koós & Gergely, 2001; Liotti, 1992; Lyons-Ruth & Jacobvitz, 1999; Main & Hesse, 1990) as well as to its links to later psychopathological problems involving dissociative disorders (Carlson, 1998) and possibly borderline personality disorder (Fonagy, Gergely, Jurist & Target, 2002; Fonagy, Target, Gergely, Allen & Bateman, 2003). DeOliveira et al.’s theoretical approach to the etiology of Disorganized attachment starts with a very helpful review of the infant attachment literature on disorganization showing that the different current theories all converge on the view that Disorganized infant attachment represents ‘a fundamental dysregulation of emotion’ and that ‘the behavior of disorganized infants suggests that they are experiencing intense negative affect but that they are unable to regulate this affect within the attachment relationship’ (p. 5). This leads the authors to the conjecture that to understand the nature and causes of the core problem of affect-dysregulation in Disorganized attachment one