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Attachment Theory: Seven Unresolved Issues and Questions for Future Research Philip A. Cowan and Carolyn Pape Cowan University of California, Berkeley
Although Bowlby (1968) assumed that attachment theory was relevant to relationships from birth to old age, early studies have focused on mothers and infants. We briefly describe extensions of attachment research across the life span and relationships. We then discuss 7 unresolved issues and questions: Is attachment best measured as categories or continua? Do individuals hold unitary or multiple models of attachment? Does early attachment to a caregiver serve as a template for attachments throughout life? Does attachment change developmentally over time? Is attachment culture specific or universal? How can a fatuily systems perspective increase understanding of cross-generational adaptation? Is attachment theory helpful to parents and therapists? Although suggesting the necessity for revisions of attachment theory, we acknowledge its powerful contributions to the study of human relationships.
Attachment theory, a now-classic set of ideas about how infants form socialemotional relationships with their caregivers, was developed in the mid-20th century by Bowlby (1969), a child analyst in London, England. In his early writings, Bowlby (1979) claimed that human attachments to primary caregivers playa "vital role... from the cradle to the grave," (p. 129), but the initial emphasis of his systematic empirical investigations was on infants' attachment to their mothers. We begin with a brief outline of the developmental unfolding of the theory and research from infancy through old age and from an exclusive study of parent-child connections to a large body of research on partners' romantic attachment to each other. The literature on attachment theory has been growing for five decades. Our reading of this literature suggests that despite its laudatory contributions to
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the understanding of social and emotional development, a number of critical unresolved issues about attachment theory remain. We have chosen seven of these issues for further discussion on the grounds that they suggest needed modifications in the theory and guidelines for further research.
ATTACHMENT THEORY AND RESEARCH ACROSS THE LIFE SPAN Given space limitations, we focus this article only on attachment to parents and romantic partners, leaving out studies of attachment to peers, siblings, and friends. We have not described all of the available measures of attachment at each age nor presented evidence for the validity of the constructs and measures; extensive information on these topics has already been summarized in comprehensive reviews of attachment research (e.g., Cassidy & Shaver, 1999; Mikulincer Florian, Cowan, & Cowan, 2002).
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Bowlby (1969) and Ainsworth and Wittig (1969) assumed that the behavioral system observed in the strange situation is governed by a working model of intimate relationships. The model is a mental representation or schema that depicts two central aspects of relationship with a caretaker-whether the infant can expect to receive comfort and support when stressed or frightened and whether he or she is worthy of love and support. Perceptions of these aspects of the relationship are interconnected; a child who is consistently ridiculed may develop an image of a parent as rejecting and a sense of self as unworthy of being loved. Two points about working models are important. First, attachment theory is concerned not only with the relationship as it can be observed from outside but especially as it can be inferred from the child's internal perspective on the relationship. Second, the model is constructed from the child's experiences and is subject to revision over time based on experiences with the parent and intimate others.
ADULT ATTACHMENT TO PARENTS CONSTRUCTS AND MEASURES OF ATTACHMENT IN INFANCY Somewhere between 9 and 12 months, infants develop a behavioral system to maintain proximity to their mothers; they prefer mother to other caretakers and react to strangers with fear or avoidance. What distinguishes attachment as a behavioral system rather than a specific response to a stimulus is the fact that under conditions of threat, real or perceived, an infant develops one of several relatively stable strategies with the same goal-to seek comfort from a person who can function as a secure base and help them establish a sense of felt security. That is, attachment theory is concerned not with affectional bonds in general but rather with ways of maintaining relationships with significant people in times of vulnerability or stress. Interest in Bowlby's ideas (1968) was stimulated by the creation of an innovative method of measuring working models of attachment (Ainsworth & Wittig, 1969). The Strange Situation Procedure is a 22-min structured laboratory protocol with eight prescribed periods in which a mother and a stranger enter and leave the room while the infant remains with some toys. The focus is on the infant's reactions to these separations and especially to the final reunion with the parent. Some infants move away (avoidant), and some alternate between bids for attention and angry rejection or tantrums (ambivalent or resistant); these children are categorized as insecurely attached. Other infants, about two thirds in middleclass samples, actively greet the parent or complain when mother leaves and returns; but after being comforted by her, they resume their play with the toys (Solomon & George, 1999). These children are categorized as securely attached. A fourth category added by Main and Solomon (1986) describes infants who exhibit signs of disorganized/disoriented behavior when their mothers return.
For the first 25 years or so in the development of attachment theory, attachment theorists in the mainstream of developmental psychology had no systematic methods to measure adults' working models of attachment to their parents. Then, George, Kaplan, and Main (1985) constructed a 60-90-min interview to assess adults' working models of attachment-the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI). Respondents give five adjectives to describe their relationship with each parent and specific anecdotes to support the choice of each adjective. The interview also asks why the interviewee thinks the parents behaved as they did and whether the relationship with them has changed over time. Finally, questions center on what the parents did when the child was hurt or ill and what happened when (if) there were long separations, all to determine whether parents functioned as a secure base for the child in times of stress. Coders examine not only the positive or negative aspects of the relationships described but also whether the narrative presents a coherent account of the relationships. The main goal of the coding is not to try to infer what really happened in the past but to describe the adult's current representations of his or her primary attachment relationships. From a pattern analysis of continuous scales, a single predominating attachment category is determined, a task that requires extensive training. The three major categories for adults' attachment styles, not coincidentally, resemble those developed for children's attachment styles-dismissing (avoidant), preoccupied (ambivalent), and secure. Two adult attachment categories were added to the coding system over the next decadeunresolved about loss or trauma and cannot classify-both describing more disorganized forms of attachment.
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ADULTS' ATTACHMENT TO A ROMANTIC PARTNER Questionnaire Measures of Couple Attachment Style At the same time that George et al. (1985) in developmental psychology were creating the AAI to assess parent-child relationships, social psychologists interested in romantic relationships were struck by obvious similarities between what Bowlby (1988) described asinfants' behavior in seekingproximity to an attachment figure when stressed or anxious and adults' behavior with romantic partners when suffering from a threat of loss or the actual loss of the adult relationship (Hazan & Shaver, 1987). The major conceptual difference between attachment to parents and to romantic partners is that whereas the parent acts as a secure base for the child, couple relationships are more reciprocal, at least in theory, with each partner serving as a potential source of comfort and security for the other. Hazan and Shaver (1987) initially created three short paragraphs, each based on Ainsworth and Wittig's (1969) description of the major categories of attachment in infancy. Hazan and Shaver asked respondents to reflect on their romantic relationships and select which of the three descriptions (avoidant, ambivalent, secure) they resembled most. Many investigators adopted the Hazan and Shaver measurement approach early on, but gradually, most either deconstructed the paragraphs into 17 separate questionnaire items or developed longer and more complex questionnaires (Experience in Close Relationships; Brennan, Clark, & Shaver, 1998). All of these produced continuous measures, factored in two dimensions-anxiety and avoidance-of what has come to be called "attachment style." Attachment style can also be measured in terms of categories if some arbitrary cutoff is used to distinguish positive from negative ends of the continuum or continuous scores that reflect the strength of endorsement of items on both dimensions. Interview Measures of Couple Attachment Security To avoid the problem of investigating adult attachment with an interview and couple attachment with a questionnaire, over the past dozen years, four groups of investigators have worked independently and without knowledge of the others to develop measures of couple attachment, using interviews closely modeled on the AAI. The Current Relationship Interview (Crowell & Owens, 1996) and the Marital Attachment Interview (Dickstein, Seifer, St. Andre, & Schiller, 2001) provide three or four categorical classifications of each partner's state of mind regarding their relationship as a couple. Two additional teams of investigators created an interview that follows the AAI closely in structure and content, focuses on past and current romantic relationships, but adopts a prototype approach to coding with continuous scores. The Romantic Relationship Interview (Furman, Simon, Shaffer, & Bouchey,
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2002) produces three codes based on how prototypically secure, dismissing, and preoccupied the transcript is on a 9-point scale. The research team of Alexandrov, Cowan, and Cowan (2005) also devised a Couple Attachment Interview (CAI) based on the AAI but with a prototype coding system using three continuous 9-point scales (with 1 indicating that the protocol does not resemble the prototype, to 9 indicating that the protocol contains the central criteria and many of the secondary criteria) to rate how closely the interview resembles secure, dismissing, and preoccupied working models of couple attachment. The hallmark of the secure prototype with reference to couple attachment is a coherent and credible narrative that paints a believable picture of two individuals involved in a relationship, one that is either loving and satisfying overall, with sufficient evidence to support this description, or if less than fully satisfying, the respondent talks about the problems in a reflective, balanced, contained manner. The theoretically based reason for coding the interview transcript with reference to all three prototypes came from the hypothesis that rather than a single state of mind, each individual has available all of the attachment behavioral systems. Individuals differ, however, in the likelihood that secure, dismissing, or preoccupied strategies will emerge in response to threat. With reference to a partner, one person may show signs of secure attachment but be moderately dismissing and a little preoccupied, whereas another person may show some other combination of the three strategies.
ATTACHMENT IN THE STUDY OF OLD AGE Long before developmental psychologists came to the study of attachment processes in older samples, a number of scholars from various disciplines began to take Bowlby's (1969) early claim seriously that attachment issues extend across the life span. Excellent examples can be found in Special Issue on Attachment and Aging in the journal Attachment and Human Development (Magai & Consedine, 2004) and in a review of research up to the year 2000 by Bradley and Cafferty (2001) who noted questions about the role of attachment that are unique to the study of aging. Over the decades, but increasingly in recent years, there have been extensive discussions of the role of attachment security in (a) the behavior of adult caregivers toward their older chronically ill parents, (b) the behavior of older parents as care receivers, (c) the unfolding of grief and mourning after the loss of a loved one, and (d) the contribution of internal working models to general well-being. The results suggest that individuals with secure working models of early attachment to their parents are more likely to perform caregiver functions and to perform them with less feeling of burden, less likely to experience prolonged and debilitating grief after the loss of a parent or partner, and more likely to report positively on their own well-being.
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One question that intrigues researchers is whether the proportion of people categorized as securely attached changes across the life span. Two studies, one longitudinal, have suggested that an increasing proportion of women (Klohnen & John, 1998) and participants of both sexes (Mickelson, Kessler, & Shaver, 1997) have secure working models of attachment from their mid-20s to their mid-50s. This optimistic view does not seem to continue into the later years. Studies using cross-sectional samples and questionnaire measures of attachment (e.g., Zhang & Labouvie-Vief, 2004) based on the items developed by Hazan and Shaver (1987), Bartholomew and Horowitz (1991), and Collins and Read, found that whereas a majority of the younger samples were classified as securely attached in terms of romantic relationships, only 30% to 40% of the older sample were in that category. The incidence of dismissing attachment rose over time, whereas preoccupied attachment fell off. None of these studies have included measures of mechanisms that might help explain the declines in security of attachment in old age, and none have demonstrated that the increase in insecure attachment is directly correlated with measures of maladaptation. Furthermore, no study that we are aware of has examined these questions using the AAI or other interview methods of assessing attachment.
UNRESOLVED ISSUES AND QUESTIONS As with any theory and body of research, increasingly wider applications of the initial work to new topics provide answers to some questions but leave new puzzles. Here, we focus on seven unresolved issues, most of them concerned with disconnections between the theory as it is currently used and the methods and findings that have emerged over the last five decades.
IS ATTACHMENT BEST MEASURED AS A SET OF CATEGORIES OR CONTINUA?
II;II!
The most central unresolved issue in attachment theory is whether attachment should be considered as a limited set of categories or a continuum based on one or more dimensions. Acceptance of categorical measurement ties the researcher to several important conclusions about attachment as a theoretical construct. First, there is the obvious consequence that there are only as many differences among people as there are categories to describe them-in this case, no more than five types of attachment-related behavioral strategies-in childhood and adulthood and in parent-child and couple relationships. Second, statistical challenges to the categorical classification system in infancy come most powerfully from Fraley and Spieker (2003), who analyzed
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protocols from the Strange Situation and the AAI to determine whether the observer ratings fit the characteristics required of a taxonomic system. Fraley and Spieker found, as did Roisman, Fraley, and Belsky (2007) in a study of AAI protocols, that dimensional constructs rather than categorical constructs fit the data better. From a statistical point of view, a dimensional system has advantages in that it provides a larger range of scores and a correspondingly greater probability of finding correlations with other continuous measures of adaptation. For example, two studies using both categorical and dimensional coding of adult attachment interviews (Cowan, Cohn, Cowan, & Pearson, 1996) and couple attachment interviews (Cowan, Cowan, & Mehta, in press) have found that continuous scores were more likely than categorical scores to be correlated with observed interaction. There is evidence that both categorical and continuous measures are meaningful ways of looking at attachment. In a study of 73 married couples with kindergarten-aged children (Alexandrov et aI., 2005), hierarchical multiple regressions showed that all three continuous scores (secure, dismissing, preoccupied) derived from the CAI made unique contributions to explaining variance in marital satisfaction and observed marital interaction over and above the predictive power of categorical security of romantic attachment scores. It seems likely that the categorical measures provide an overall assessment of an individual's general attachment strategy, whereas the continuous measures provide indexes of the relative strength of competing attachment behavioral systems.
ARE THERE MULTIPLE MODELS OF PARENT-CHILD OR COUPLE ATTACHMENT AT A GIVEN TIME? The notion of attachment as a unitary ,?onstructcan be challenged by data on both parent-child and couple attachments. We know that infants form attachments to both parents. Furthermore, the association between categories of attachment to each parent is statistically significant but low (Fox, Kimmerly, & Schafer, 1991). In addition to their biological parents, children develop attachments to caretakers outside the family. Howes (1999) provided a general overview of attachment issues for millions of children who receive care in multiple settings from multiple caregivers. Sagi et aI. (1995) described how Israeli children in kibbutzim form attachments to mothers, fathers, and the metapelets who care for them regularly in a group living situation. The fact that there can be multiple attachments with different states of mind with regard to the relationship with each person is ignored in the measurement of adult attachment by the AAI in which, except for extreme discrepancies, attachments to mother and father are combined into one overall category. We found only one study that coded attachment with respect to mother and father separately
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(Furman & Simon, 2006). Furman and Simon found a 68% concordance in this sample of college students, which means that almost one third of the time the individual would receive two different security scores when narratives about the two attachment figures were scored separately. Researchers who are beginning to examine attachment in multiple relationship contexts (parents, partners, peers) find much more consistent correlations with other measures of adaptation within specific relationships than across relationships (Asendorpf & Wilpers, 2000). That is, security of attachment appears to be a product of relationships with specific people, or specific types of people, and not a personality trait descriptive of the individual. Finally, as we noted previously, each person may have multiple attachment strategies with respect to a specific attachment figure (one's partner; Alexandrov et aI., 2005). In sum, then, despite the fact that studies have found strong correlations between single measures of attachment and various outcomes, the evidence for a single overall working model of attachment is weak. Evidence supporting a more differentiated multiple model approach is more persuasive. Even so, as in the question of categorical and continuous attachment measures, the issue is not whether to choose one or the other but how to integrate notions of generality and specificity in the attachment framework. More also needs to be learned about the interconnections among attachment models based on different relationships and how those different models influence each other in the course of development.
DOES EARLY ATTACHMENT TO A CAREGIVER OPERATE AS A TEMPLATE FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF ATTACHMENTS ACROSS THE LIFE SPAN? Bowlby (1988) was clear that attachments change over time, but he also wrote extensively about the possibility that the working model of attachment formed early in life acted as a template or mold that shaped later working models of parent-child and couple relationships. One source of support for the template hypothesis would be evidence that there is high predictability from attachment security measured in infancy to attachment security in adulthood. Three longitudinal studies extending from infancy to adolescence or adulthood present a mixed picture of such evidence. One investigation in the United States (Waters, Merrick, Treboux, Crowell, & Albersheim, 2000) found a strong (72%) association between infant strange situation assessments and security of attachment measured by the AAI when those infants were 20-year-old adults. A second U.S. study (Sroufe, Egeland, Carlson, & Collins, 2005) in a higher risk sample found low to moderate association between infant security of attachment and security measured with the AAI in adulthood, whereas a third study by Grossmann et al. (2002) in Germany found no association between infant and adult security of attachment.
Another source of support for the template hypothesis would be high levels of concordance between attachment to one's parents and one's partner. The findings suggest otherwise. When both adult attachment interviews and adult attachment questionnaires (focusing primarily on the couple) were coded in categories, the surprising conclusion was that the association between them was either nonexistent or low (Crowell, Fraley, & Shaver, 1999, describing earlier work). Cowan et al.' s (in press) data indicate that the low overall association may hide a directional connection. When their working models of adult attachment were secure on the AAI, the vast majority of men and women in the Cowan et al. (in press) study (80%) had a secure model of attachment in relation to the partner on the CAI. However, insecure attachments to parents were equally likely to be associated with secure as with insecure attachments to a partner. These optimistic findings suggest that a number of individuals with insecure attachment models with reference to their parents manage to construct a secure working model of attachment to their romantic partner. Part of our challenge will be to understand how and for whom these shifts occur. How do we explain the fact that the AAI and questionnaire measures of attachment security are correlated with theoretically predictable measures of adaptation but not correlated highly with each other? Differences in measurement methods (interview vs. questionnaire) may play some role in the lack of connection. Another obvious explanation of the lack of concordance is that the two methods are focused on different relationships-with parents (AAI) or romantic partners (questionnaires). A more dynamic possible explanation of the lack of correspondence between AAI and couple attachment measures is that individuals often actively seek intimate relationships that make up for what they lacked in the past, and some are lucky enough to find them. Without the template assumption, we need not conclude that the two models of attachment should be concordant, especially if the quality of interaction in these relationships is very different.
DOES ATTACHMENT CHANGE DEVELOPMENTALLY OVER TIME? Cognitive developmental theories, at least since the time of Piaget (1967), provide convincing evidence that representation systems develop over timebecoming more differentiated and integrated as one moves from childhood to adulthood. This would suggest that as an internal representation, a working model of attachment would change developmentally over time. Bowlby (1979) believed in developmental shifts in attachment from parent regulation through dyadic regulation to self-regulation, but the implications of this statement have rarely been examined by attachment theorists, in part because they tend to
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adopt a "package" of positions on the unresolved issues we described previously. If one assumes that attachment is a unitary category formed early and acting as a template that shapes future attachments, it would not seem necessary to ask whether the internal representation system or the attachment behavioral system changes as children mature. Because we have questioned each of these assumptions, we are more open to the possibility of a developmental trajectory of attachment. The problem may have been compounded by the different measurement techniques used at different developmental stages, which could hide potential changes in the organization of attachment security. Now that there are similar measures of attachment to parents from childhood (Target, Fonagy, & Shmueli-Goetz, 2003) to adulthood, it is time to examine these attachment protocols for evidence of structural developmental changes in attachment representations as children mature developmentally in other ways.
IS ATTACHMENT UNIVERSAL OR CULTURE-SPECIFIC? Some of the beginning ideas of attachment theory were developed during Ainsworth's (1967) study of mothers and infants in Uganda. Nevertheless, it took several decades before concerted efforts were made to investigate attachment cross-culturally. Although a majority of attachment studies are of Western cultures, a few have taken place in Kenya, West Africa, Botswana, Zambia, China, and Japan. Because of limited space, we summarize some of the major conclusions from these studies, guided by an excellent review by van Ijzendoom and Sagi (1999). Van Ijzendoorn and Sagi's (1999) review begins with the important comment that almost all cross-cultural studies of attachment are etic (applying Western constructs and methods to observations of non-Western cultures) rather than emic (applying constructs and methods developed within a culture). Most of the cross-cultural comparisons have focused on infant-mother attachment. We are not aware of studies in non-Western cultures using the MI, but a few have examined questionnaire measures of couple attachment. An interesting controversy between Rothbaum, Weisz, Pott, Miyake, and Morelli (2000, 2001) and Posada and Jacobs (2001) illustrates the complex problems in this research arena. The disagreement has to do with whether the connection found between maternal sensitivity and attachment in Western cultures is found in other cultures. Rothbaum et al. (2000) argued that because Japanese and American cultures have such different views of maternal sensitivity and child security, there must be fundamental differences in attachment in the two cultures. Posada and Jacobs responded that parenting sensitivity and children's secure base behavior can be found in both countries and that measures based on careful ethological work in Japan also reveal correlations between maternal sensitivity and child security. Nevertheless, as Posada and Jacobs were
careful to state, expressions of both sensitivity and security have strong cultural components. In part, the issue is one of level of analysis. At the most general level, there are instances of both constructs in all cultures. At the specific level, behaviors that represent the constructs may differ. In their studies of Anglo and Puerto Rican cultures, Harwood, Miller, and Irizarry (1995) also made the point that variations in the meaning of attachment behavior across cultures may not mean that the children in one culture are more or less securely attached. Considerable discussion has emerged about differences among cultures in the proportion of infants judged to be securely attached. Compared with samples in the United States and Western Europe where about 67% are securely attached, security of attachment ranges from 57% in Ainsworth's (1967) Uganda study, through 65% to 69% in other African countries and China, to 80% in Israeli kibbutzim with a family-based sleeping arrangement and 56% in kibbutzim with a communal sleeping arrangement (from Table 31.2 in van Ijzendoorn & Sagi, 1999, p. 729). What seems much more variable is the proportion of infants with avoidant attachment (absentin someAfrican andJapanese samples)or withresistant attachment (much higher than Western rates in some African, Israeli, and Japanese samples). In our view, the issue of proportion of secure attachments in a population represents what may be a cultural influence on the quality of parent-child relationships. Wide variation in this proportion does not refute the premise that attachment processes are relevant to every culture studied so far. What is missing in the cross-cultural literature on attachment is a clear conceptual or empirical picture of what might produce different distributions of attachment in different cultures. Research on cultural influences on attachment could profitably expand in a number of directions. It is remarkable that very little focus has been devoted to variations of culture, including socioeconomic status (SES), within North American or other cultures. The fact that attachment is much more stable in middle class than in low-SES families (Weinfield, Sroufe, & Egeland, 2000) certainly suggests that this would be a fruitful area of exploration. Although there is substantial research in different countries on adult attachment as measured by the AAI and couple attachment as measured by questionnaire, we are aware of very little research on couple attachment beyond broadly described Western cultures. This is an area in which more research is urgently needed. In the early years of research on attachment, some investigators examined sex differences in attachment patterns but failed to find them. Nevertheless, because culture interacts with biological variables to produce noticeable differences in most aspects of life, we are surprised that sex differences in attachment patterns are not investigated systematically in studies in Western or non-Western countries. It is time to pay more attention to the way attachment develops in relationships between fathers and mothers and sons and daughters (see following). We raise one final issue about the cultural context of attachment theory: Bowlby's work (1953) emerged at a specific time (the postwar years), in middle
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to upper middle class surroundings, with a view of mothers as primary parents who ought to stay home during their children's early developmental years. Ainsworth and Wittig's (1969) strange situation procedure seemed to emphasize the negative reactions to mothers leaving sight of their young children. Despite the fact that Ainsworth (1967) began her research in Uganda, her observations were of tribes in which mothers had sole childrearing responsibility. The assumption seemed to be that the theory that emerged was universal, but this is certainly debatable.
WHAT CAN A FAMILY SYSTEMS PERSPECTIVE AND OTHER CONTEXTUAL FRAMEWORKS ADD TO THE THEORY'S EXPLANATION OF HOW ADAPTATION IS TRANSMITTED ACROSS GENERATIONS? Bowlby's assumption (1988) and that of many subsequent attachment theorists is that the intergenerationallink between mothers' or fathers' working models of attachment to their parents and their children's attachment to them occurs through the quality of the parent's interaction with the child. There is some support for this hypothesis (van IJzendoorn, 1992) in that adult attachment security is correlated with observed warmth and an authoritative parenting style (warmth, responsiveness, limit setting, and age-appropriate maturity demands). How does one explain the fact that parents' working models of attachment or state of mind regarding attachment are correlated with their parenting styles? The interpretation typically given to this intergenerational pattern is that a working model of attachment, established early in life and continuing over time, functions as a template that guides parents' expectations and behavior when they play with and discipline their offspring. As we have shown, the evidence for this hypothesis is equivocal at best. Attachment in the Context of the Family as a System We believe that attachment theory can benefit from drawing on research and theory outside the boundaries of parent-child dyads. Specifically, Cowan (1997) and others (Byng-Hall, 1999; Marvin & Stewart, 1990) have proposed a family systems view of attachment. This view goes beyond the inclusion of fathers to a consideration of how the working models of each family member affect and are affected by patterns we observe in family dyads, triads, and the family as a whole. If the security of a child's attachments to mother and to father is correlated at a low level (Fox et aI., 1991), it seems obvious to us that researchers must include both parents in studies of attachment relationship effects on children's development. It follows, then, that there are at least two working models of
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parent-child attachment that may influence parent-child relationships in intact, separated, and divorced families and those mislabeled as single-parent families when there are two unmarried parents in the household (McLanahan, 2002). Although there is weak evidence of assortative mating in that adults with secure attachments to their parents more often marry partners with secure attachments, the correlation between partners' attachment styles is statistically significant but low (van IJzendoorn, 1995). A couple relationship perspective may help to explain both the correspondence and lack of correspondence between each parent's working model of parentchild attachment and their parenting style as we observe it. In a study of 27 couples who were parents of young children, Cohn, Silver, Cowan, and Cowan (1992) found that pairs in which both partners had secure working models of adult attachment on the AAI showed more warmth and less conflict during a coparenting task than pairs in which both partners had insecure working models. The more unexpected finding occurred in pairs in which the husband was categorized as having a secure attachment model, whereas his wife was categorized as having an insecure model based on their AAI responses about their parents. In these secure-insecure couples, the parents were as positive in their interaction as coparents as the secure-secure couples were-and the insecure wives' parenting when they worked with the child alone was as positive as that of wives in the secure-secure couples. Cohn et al. interpreted the results as supporting the idea that men's model of attachment protected their wives against the risks associated with insecure attachment. In that small study, because there were only two couples in which the reverse was true-husbands described as having insecure adult attachment married to wives with a secure model-it was not possible to compare parenting styles in that couple arrangement. Data from a second, larger study of 76 families by Cowan, Bradburn, and Cowan (2005) replicated the positive effects for secure husbands married to insecure wives and found that wives' secure model of attachment (AAI) did not buffer husbands' insecurity in the same way; the interaction between the husbands with insecure models married to wives with secure models revealed even higher levels of conflict than couples in which both partners had insecure working models of attachment on the AAI. The Integration of Models of Attachment and Family Risk Cowan, Cowan, and Mehta (in press) recently examined data from the families in the second, larger study using path models to describe links between family risks and child outcomes. These analyses revealed that continuous scores from the AAI narratives were correlated with the continuous prototype scores from the CAI narratives. In turn, couple attachment security on the CAI was correlated with observed couple interaction-in a problem-solving discussion of a marital or
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parenting problem and during a coparenting task when their child was faced with difficult tasks. The couple interaction was also strongly related to both father's and mother's authoritative parenting styles as individuals when each one helped the child with difficult tasks. All of these variables together explained 33% of the variance in the children's internalizing behavior and 47% of the variance in their externalizing behavior as reported by their first-grade teachers and 20% of the variance in academic achievement scores on individually administered tests. Parent-child attachment, couple attachment, and observed family interaction all contributed unique variance to predictions of the children's school adaptation. Similar patterns of linkage from working models of parent-child and couple attachment, to observed family processes, to child outcomes were found in a study of mothers and infants by Dickstein, Seifer, and Albus (in press). These results suggest that expansion of the attachment paradigm to include both insider (working models) and outsider (observations) perspectives on the whole family may help to explain how attachment security in both parents becomes associated with their child's development and adaptation. Investigators who focus on measures of attachment and parenting do not typically examine sex differences in the transmission of attachment patterns. Cowan et al.'s (2005) results suggest that mothers' insecure models of adult attachment are more likely to be associated with internalizing behavior in their daughters, whereas fathers' insecure models are more likely to be associated with externalizing behavior in their sons' and daughters' adaptation to school. We suggest three additional questions to be answered in a family systems context of attachment. First, how does attachment play out in nonbiological families, especially those formed as a consequence of maltreatment in the infant's birth family? Interesting work by Steele et al. (2007) begins to address this important topic. Second, beyond the dyad, is there a family-level conceptualization of attachment in which the family as a system provides a securebase for its members as suggested by Byng-Hall (1999)? Third, which family factors shape different life-span trajectories of attachment from childhood to adulthood-and what protects individuals from finding that others cannot be expected to respond or from feeling that they are not lovable? CAN ATTACHMENT THEORY BE HELPFUL TO PARENTS AND THERAPISTS? Guidance for Parents Ideas from attachment theory have been incorporated
into popular guides for
parents (e.g., Brazelton, 1992; Pruett, 2000). Although none of the authors of these guides subject their recommendations to empirical test, it seems hard to
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argue with the idea that encouraging parents to be warm, sensitive, and responsive to their young children would result in benefits for children's development, with one cautionary note. Baumrind's (1979) theory of authoritative parenting indicates that warmth alone is not enough; children also benefit emotionally, socially, and cognitively from parents' providing age-appropriate structuring of tasks and setting limits. Without these aspects of parenting style, the emphasis of attachment theorists on parental sensitivity could lead to a style that Baumrind called "permissive," which is linked to less optimal developmental outcomes. An enduring controversy, generated in part by attachment theorists' emphasis on the importance of early mother-child bonds, is whether mothers who work outside the home are placing their children at risk for insecure attachment and its associated consequences. Because more than half of contemporary mothers of 1year-olds now work outside the home, and most children have some out-of-home care before they enter kindergarten, this is a pressing social issue. Examining the most current research (see Belsky et al., 2007), we conclude that (a) participation in day care alone does not elevate the risk of children's insecure attachment; (b) compared with children of stay-at-home mothers, children in day care may be at an advantage in cognitive abilities, although young children who spend long hours (more than 20 per week) in day care are at slightly higher risk for aggressive behavior; and (c) the quality of both the parent-child relationships and the day care setting explains more of the variation in children's adaptation than the fact or number of hours of day care. In our view, there are no data to support the prevalent concern that when both parents work outside the home and children spend time in day care, there is a risk of disturbed attachment or other negative outcomes for young children. Furthermore, the low risk of negative consequences to children must be balanced against other risks associated with low family income and the necessity of both parents working. Guidance for Therapists Attachment therapists who treat young children often work with families in which there has been trauma, abuse, severe deprivation, or family disruption through divorce, adoption, or foster parenting. Although reactive attachment disorder has been identified in the American Psychiatric Association's (1994) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed.), attachment difficulties range from this severe category through disorganized attachment and through the organized but insecure attachment strategies described in normal development. With children in the severely disturbed or moderate risk categories, therapists tend to treat mother and child together (Dozier, 2003; Erickson, Korfmacher, & Egeland, 1992; Hoffman, Marvin, Cooper, & Powell, 2006; Lieberman, 2002) using verbal and video feedback on moments of interaction to help the parent become a better observer and a more responsive, effective
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attachment figure. There is beginning evidence, although not from randomized clinical trials, that these interventions have positive effects. Treatment of adoles-
cents in an attachment framework often involves helping both adolescent and parent dispel the myth that adolescence is a time of separation and showing the generations how to negotiate a better balance between autonomy and connection (Moretti & Holland, 2003). There have been two important lines of work on attachment and couples therapy. The first emerged at the Tavistock Clinic in London where Bowlby spent most of his professional life. A marital studies unit, now called the Tavistock Centre for Couples Therapy, helps the couple to establish a partnership that will provide a secure base for the individual partners (Clulow, 2001). Achieving this goal typically involves working with partners to clarify how their working models of intimate relationships, influenced by two different families of origin, lead to conflicting strategies of expressing or withholding emotion. By contrast, North American couples therapies emphasizing attachment, such as emotion-focused therapy (Johnson, 2004), pay special attention to the quickly shifting ebb and flow of transactions between partners during moments in which one or both are experiencing an "attachment injury"-a lack of understanding or an abandonment in time of need. In these approaches, attachmentoriented therapists attempt to follow Bowlby's (1988) recommendations to provide a secure base for exploration of the issues and to try strategies that have the potential to lead to the creation of revised working models of intimate relationships rather than treat the problem as one of inadequate communication skills, as cognitive behavioral couples therapists might (Baucom, Epstein, Rankin, & Burnett, 1996). For high-conflict couples, therapist's interventions are designed to deescalate each partner's emotional distress and prevent the escalation of negative affect in partners whose instinct is to retaliate. For couples in a state of silent withdrawal, the therapist's task is to encourage the
expressionof withheldfeelings at a safe and productivelevel. When couples are mismatched in attachment style (Fisher & Crandell, 2001), the therapist can help partners to recognize and examine how each of their responses to pursue or withdraw may be based on their expectations and experiences in other key relationships. Emotion-focused therapy (Johnson, 2004) has amassed evidence that couples in an intervention fare better than those in a control group. We believe that researcher clinicians who attempt to validate attachment theory as a value-added approach to therapy need to identify how therapeutic interventions affect the attachment processes that the theory assumes are instrumental in producing positive outcomes. Such systematic research is needed to provide guidelines for designing more effective interventions and is the only way to test claims that attachment security or insecurity plays a causal role in individual, couple, and family adaptation.
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CONCLUSIONS
With the development of attachment theory, Bowlby and the investigators who followed him have contributed in substantive and methodological ways to the study of intimate relationships. We outlined extensions of this early study of attachment across the life span from birth to old age, the latter still in a formative stage. We noted that as the theory developed, methods designed to measure attachment began to take center stage but were not always in harmony with the theory. By pointing out how the theory and methods connect or fail to, we hope to st,mulate discussion of how the theory might be modified. We outlined seven unresolved issues in attachment theory, acknowledging that the unresolved issues we chose to discuss are not the only important ones in the field. Along the way, we pointed to questions about sex differences in the unfolding of attachment patterns as an important area for future exploration. In the couple relationship field, the focus has been almost entirely on heterosexual relationships. Studies of attachment in same-sex couples would add to our knowledge and help us understand how gender and attachment shape intimate relationships. We hope that attempts to resolve the tensions associated with the unresolved issues we have discussed will lead to a more differentiated and integrated version of attachment theory, one that encompasses a more complex notion of working models of multiple attachments that benefit from relationship experience. It is not just the theory that needs modifying. Procedures for measuring attachment will benefit from modifications that incorporate the new ideas and match the dayto-day complexities that each of us face as we manage our intimate relationships with friends, lovers, parents, and children throughout our lives.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT This article has benefited immensely from the extensive comments made by six anonymous reviewers and by the editor of the Special Issue, and we thank them for the stimulating interchange.
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