Posts archived in Attachment
No card from your loved one ?
Feeling rejected this Valentine’s Day?
Maybe it’s you….. maybe you’re just too clingy….. check out your style with the LOVE QUIZ
(Mind you, you can’t take too much notice of these things – there’s always a statistician trying to spoil things isn’t there?)
Or maybe it isn’t you…. maybe it’s them. But don’t be too hard on your loved one if they’ve forgotten you. It’s not their fault they’re an affectionless psychopath.
… I blame the parents….
I got sent details of a lovely new website a while back. It has test questions, resources, filmclips, a shrine to Sigmund Freud… what more could you want?
Less pleasingly, it carries on the preoccupation with cats that has so bedevilled psychology of late. I appreciate the marketing genius of designating a textbook ‘The Cat Book’ - it is, after all, the first word anyone learns to spell, so brand recognition is pretty much guaranteed, but I am, it must be said, generally troubled by catowners. Such folk are only encouraged by the internet. I saw one post something online the other day along the lines of: ‘Love your cat, they only live to love’…… tell that to your local songbird population.
I think it’s important to point out to folk that YOUR CAT DOES NOT LOVE YOU. Indeed, it’s possible to establish online that your cat hates you. Go and have a look. You may question the validity of this questionnaire as a research tool (and if you’ve finished unit one, you should be rather good at this), but let’s face it, is it any easier to establish if a baby loves you?
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(pic: A cat blunders into the Ames Room)
John Bowlby proposed, in his theory of attachment, that humans are ‘hardwired’ to respond to social releasers from infants – they can’t help but respond to an infant’s smiles or cries of distress and this responsiveness is in our genes. New research has provided evidence of the brain circuitry involved in this response. Dr. Madoka Noriuchi and his colleagues in Tokyo (2008, abstract) used a brain scanning technique (fMRI) to look at how mothers’ brains respond to infants who are happy or upset/crying. Certain areas were active when the mothers observed their own infant’s smiles and cries as opposed to other infants (in particular it was areas in the cerebral cortex and limbic system). Smiling and crying are attachment behaviours – they elicit caregiving from the infant’s mother figure and ensure safety for the infant. This research shows us the neurophysiological basis for the attachment response (maternal love) and supports the view that such a response is innate – because there is a specialised area in the brain that responds.
