Infant’s Ability to Bond With Mother May Be Innate, Psychologist Says : Behavior: Controversial studies show some babies can develop secure maternal attachments better than others.
Researchers may soon be able to tell if newborn infants will have difficulty bonding emotionally with their mothers and to counsel the mothers how to overcome these difficulties, researchers said here Friday.
Insecure maternal bonding by the end of the first year of life has previously been associated with poor adjustment and asocial behavior during early school years. Current thinking holds that the mother is primarily responsible for producing the bonding, said psychologist Carroll E. Izard of the University of Delaware.
But his studies show that some infants may be innately more able than others to develop secure maternal attachments and that this propensity for bonding can be measured objectively, he told a meeting of the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science.
“Behavioral science has placed too much responsibility on the mother” for the child’s development, Izard said. With his findings, “The mother is off the hook.”
Some scientists reached Friday did not agree with Izard’s conclusions, however. Psychologist L. Alan Sroufe of the University of Minnesota Medical Center, for example, argued that Izard’s conclusions “are way overdrawn. . . . It’s part of the swing back to biological determinism, where everything is genetically predetermined.”
In contrast, psychologist Jerome Kagan of Harvard Medical School found Izard’s experimental results compelling but draws a different conclusion from them. He agreed that Izard’s results show that a child’s behavior in certain situations can be predicted early in life, but argued that the commonly used tests for determining secure or insecure maternal attachments actually reveal other aspects of character.
The debate seems likely to continue for some time.
There is general agreement among child psychologists that the security of a child’s attachment to its mother is predictive of behavior later in life. Studies pioneered by Sroufe and others show that children with insecure attachments at age 1 are more likely to show problems in preschool, will have more difficulties playing with other children, will tend to be more withdrawn and will display more aggressive behavior.
Such children have been followed clinically only up to about age 10, however, so researchers are unable to reach any conclusions about what will happen to them later in life. Some researchers, however, have argued that poor relationships with the mother can lead to pathological behavior later in life, including criminal activity.
Most mainstream psychologists hold that the quality of attachment between mother and child depends primarily on the mother and how she reacts to the child in various situations--whether she responds calmly to a cranky baby and calms it, for example, or whether she becomes irritated and anxious.
Izard’s work, in contrast, suggests that babies are born with certain characteristics that can influence how the mother reacts and thereby change the nature of maternal attachment. He thinks he has developed ways to quantify these genetic effects.
Izard and his colleagues have so far studied 81 white, middle-class mother-child pairs from the age of 2 1/2 months past age 13 months. At age 2 1/2 months, the researchers sit the child on the mother’s lap and monitor heart rate under certain conditions. They also monitor the infant’s response to facial expressions that the mothers have been trained to make, such as anger, sadness or a completely neutral expression. These studies are repeated at various intermediate ages.
At age 13 months, they determine the child’s maternal attachment through a standard test known as the Ainsworth strange-situation procedure. The child and mother are placed in a room with toys. The mother may leave the child alone in the room, or a stranger may enter before the mother leaves. In either case, the child’s response is noted when the mother returns.
Secure infants show positive response to the mother during the reunions. Insecure infants show little or no response to the mother and may actually avoid her upon her return, indicating that they are unable to rely on her help.
Izard found that certain results at 2 1/2 months could be correlated with an insecure response at 13 months. The children who formed insecure attachments were those whose heart rates were more variable under the conditions of the test (what researchers call a high vagal tone) and who showed the greatest negative response to the mother’s facial expressions. Typically, he said, “These are infants who are fussy, who cry a lot and who cause more stress for the mother.”
Ultimately, he said, it should be possible to screen newborns for these characteristics and teach mothers how to compensate for them with extra attention or help.
But Sroufe said in a telephone interview, “I don’t believe this stuff about vagal tone for a minute. . . . You might see something in the baby’s reactions that would indicate what is going on in the relationship (between mother and child). But the attachment is something in the relationship, not in the baby.”
Kagan, though, thinks Izard is on to something, but disagrees with the interpretation. He does not think the Ainsworth test reveals attachment to mothers, although he concedes he is in a minority. He believes it reflects internal characteristics of the child.
“I would have preferred him (Izard) to say that vagal tone reflects the temperamental quality of the child, not the relationship to the mother,” Kagan said.
Despite the controversy over his findings, Izard’s ultimate conclusion is less likely to be scoffed at: “Mothers who are more empathetic, more social and less stressed are more likely to have secure attachments with their children.”
