Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [246]
Here again we see the vague old terms “nature” and “nurture” taking on more precise meaning; we see mind being constructed not by the addition of nurture to nature but by the interaction between them, each affecting and being affected by the other. Mysteries begin to fade away; wonders take their place.
Personality Development
Unlike personality researchers, whose primary interest is measurement, developmentalists are concerned with natural history. They watch personality grow from birth on, and seek to identify the forces that shape it. And in contrast to psychoanalysts, who base their theories of personality development chiefly on what they hear from adult patients, develop-mentalists base theirs on firsthand evidence.
Part of that evidence adds much detail and meaning to psychoanalytic ideas about mother-infant attachment. This has been a leading topic of developmental research ever since 1952, when the World Health Organization published Maternal Care and Mental Health by the English psychoanalyst John Bowlby, who studied children raised in institutions, found them deficient in emotional and personality development, and attributed that to their lack of maternal attachment.
Bowlby theorized that the infant is genetically programmed to behave in certain ways (crying, smiling, making sounds, cooing) that evoke care and hence survival, and that the mother’s nurturance engenders attachment in the infant at a “sensitive period” of his or her development. This powerful special bond, which gives the infant a sense of security, is crucial to normal personality development; without it, said Bowlby, the child is likely to develop “an affectionless character” and to be permanently vulnerable to psychopathology.66
Bowlby’s views aroused great interest—and discomfort—in America, where the rising divorce rate and, a little later, the women’s movement caused a growing number of mothers to work, leaving their children with caretakers. Many child psychologists and developmentalists doubted that the sensitive period is as specific and crucial, or the mother as all-important and irreplaceable, as Bowlby said. But most of them agreed that, under normal circumstances, attachment to the mother (or mother substitute) does occur and is a major force in personality development.
Intriguing evidence of the harm done by the lack of attachment was shown in a 1965 study of infant smiling conducted in Israel. It compared babies raised under three conditions: in their own families, in kibbutzim (collective settlements) where they are reared in large houses by professional caretakers but often fed by their mothers for the first year, and in institutions. It is rare for one-month-old infants to smile at a strange human face, but with each passing week they do so more and more often, the behavior reaching a peak at about four months and then declining slowly. In the study, all three groups smiled often at strange female faces by the fourth month, but at eighteen months while the family-reared infants were only slightly less responsive than at four months, the kibbutz-reared infants were only about half as much so, and the institution-reared infants less likely to smile than they had been at one month.67
But smiling is a byproduct of attachment, not a measure of it. Researchers needed such a measure, and in the late 1960s Mary Ainsworth, a former colleague of Bowlby’s who had come to America, devised a relatively easy one. Known as “the Strange Situation,” it has been the mainstay of attachment research ever since. In the Strange Situation, the infant and mother are put in an unfamiliar playroom while the researcher watches them through a one-way mirror. Eight different scripts are followed, one at each visit. In one, the mother leaves the room briefly; in another, a stranger comes in while she is there; in a third, when she is not; and