Insecure Attachment Style — Avoidant & Anxious I

Attachment Theory

Attachment theory postulates that every child is born with an innate attachment behavioral system.

“a biologically evolved neural program that organizes behavior in ways that increase the chances of an individual’s survival and reproduction, despite inevitable environmental dangers and demands.”

Although almost all children that are born with a normally functioning attachment system can eventually become attached to significant others, individual differences in attachment quality depend heavily on the responsiveness of particular relationship partners, also referred to as attachment figures i.e. primary caregivers.

1. If a child interacts with an available, sensitive, and responsive caregiver, they are likely to experience felt security and a psychological sense of protection and care. When experiencing felt security helps the child to develop positive views of themselves and their own capacities i.e. to successfully elicit care and to relieve stress/regulate emotions through social proximity). In turn, this type of positive representation of the self and the others are associated with the emergence of a secure attachment style.
2. Conversely, if a child encounters a caregiver who is consistently physically or emotionally unavailable or disapproving, or if the caregiver’s behavior is unpredictable and inconsistent in times of need, a feeling of security is not attained. This lack of felt security could lead to the establishment of an insecure, either Avoidant (AV) or Anxious (AX) attachment styles:

• In the case of AV, the secondary attachment strategy represents an escape reaction and is associated with a deactivation of the attachment system to prevent frustration and additional distress caused by attachment figure unavailability.
• In the case of AX, the secondary attachment strategy consists of a resistance response in terms of attachment system hyper action aiming at intensifying proximity-seeking attempts to demand or force the attachment figure’s attention.

If we look closely, it’s not hard to summarize that the AV attachment style is associated with emotion downregulation and suppression while AX attachment style is associated with emotion upregulation and intensification.

Typically, this infant-caregiver interaction will influence one’s attachment system functioning during childhood in the short term. Attachment theory proposes that these patterns can actually become gradually encoded as increasingly stable cognitive schemes or mental representations of the self and others — which also refers to Attachment Working Models (AWMs). In turn, these AWMs allow an individual to predict future interactions with others and to adjust proximity- seeking attempts without always having o rethink all previous interactions.

The Social Neuroscience of Attachment

However, in this article, I would focus primarily on the attachment theory from a social neuroscience perspective.

Let me begin with a brief introduction of Social Neuroscience, which is also called social cognitive-affective neuroscience, which is a relatively new research field devoted to advancing the understanding of how biological systems and in particular the human brain, implement social process and behavior.

The Human Attachment System

As discussed above, attachment theory postulates that the presence of an attachment behavioral system in terms of the biologically evolved neural program that organizes behavior in terms of need, particularly through proximity seeking.

Accordingly, we can think of a typical attachment scenario:

“one person is threatened or distressed and seeks comfort and support from the other.”

The attachment system can, therefore, be viewed as being made up of 2 distinct motivational components

1. Prevention — aiming at ‘inhibiting’ behaviors associated with an increased probability of danger or injury in relation to threats or stressors.
2. Promotion— maintaining an approach-oriented motivation to foster closeness to others and the attainment of felt security.

This view also accords with the phylogenetic perspective of social engagement and attachment proposed by Porges. Such processing of information is thought to be intrinsically linked with behavioral tendencies to either approach or avoid a stimulus rapidly and automatically in core social-affective stimulus appraisal brain networks.

Related Brain Regions and Neurotransmitters/Neuropeptides

It is arguable that social approach component encodes (mutual) social interactions as innately rewarding and thus counteracting fear tendencies in a neural reward-related primarily dopaminergic network which involves the brain regions like ventral tegmental area (VTA), the substantia nigra (SN), the ventral striatum (VS) and the ventromedial orbitofrontal cortex (vmOFC). As for the related neurotransmitters and neuropeptides, they range from oxytocin, vasopressin, endogenous opioids to serotonin, which are shown to be strongly associated and anatomical overlap with the dopaminergic reward circuits.

Furthermore, this social approach component is not specifically activated during attachment interactions but by many other kinds of social interactions with beloved ones i.e. children, parents, partners, friends and any significant another person with a cooperative relationship since they are all associated with the experience of positive emotions and increased activity in the reward circuits.

Here are some other typical behavioral systems:

• Affiliation: defined as an interaction ‘in which both people are in a good mood, do not feel threatened and have the goals of enjoying their time together or advancing common interests’.
• Sex Drive and Romantic Love: it is the seeking of sexual gratification with the ultimate goal to ensure the propagation of the species and threat is not a principal motivational component. However, the difference between these two is that the sex drive motivates the seeking of sexual gratification non-specifically for any conspecific while romantic love promotes a focus of the mating effort on preferred conspecific.

In sum, caregiving and compassion are thought to represent:

“A broad range of behaviors designed to reduce sufferings and/ or foster growth and development in a significant other such as a child or relationship partner”

I will dig deep into the underlying primary neurotransmitters and neuropeptides of each of those approach-oriented behavioral systems in my next article. Stay tuned! Thanks.:)