Introduction to the special issue: Attachment and aging

Attachment & Human Development Vol 6 No 4 December (2004) 349 – 351

Introduction to the special issue: Attachment and aging CAROL MAGAI and NATHAN S. CONSEDINE

Although the bulk of early formulations and research with respect to attachment were focused on infancy and childhood, the literature has grown steadily to encompass the study of attachment in adulthood (Cassidy & Shaver, 1999), largely within the context of young adult romantic relationships (Hazan & Shaver, 1987) and, increasingly, in the arena of clinical work (See Volume 6, No. 3, this Journal). However, despite Bowlby’s original emphasis on attachment as a lifespan process, far less attention has been paid to attachment relationships and behaviors in later life. Bowlby maintained that attachment behaviors – distress in the event of involuntary separation and loss and contact-seeking when vulnerable – could be activated at any stage in life, although these behaviors are most likely to be activated in early development and in later life, the times of greatest dependency and need. He also noted that the attachment system included both care recipients and care givers, again, across the lifespan. With this Special Issue we were given a forum in which to invite some of the pioneers in later life attachment research to explore the relevance of attachment to the lives of older adults in some depth. The current issue highlights the themes of 1) attachment as a lifespan developmental process, and 2) the need for theoretical integration. In this vein it provides a sampling of how attachment research may be relevant to the lives of the population’s fastest growing segment – older adults. In addition, however, the explicit consideration of attachment as a process with later life implications illustrates the potential of such approaches to inform attachment theory more generally. Further, it is clear that there exists considerable potential for syntheses between attachment literatures and research addressing emotions and social networks in the adult years. The authors assembled here contributed to the thematic challenge in various ways. Antonucci and colleagues considered lifespan attachment relationships within the context of Antonucci’s Convoy Model of Social Relations, suggesting that attachment relationships are one type of close social relationship that can be viewed within the broader context of other relationships, especially perhaps, in later life. They evaluated their model in two different cultures (American and Japanese), using large and regionally-representative samples from 8 – 93 years. In addition to providing important descriptive data on the size and composition of social networks and close social relationships from individuals across the lifespan, the authors uncovered interesting patterns in the persons who were named at each of the three convoy circles. For example, although fathers figured prominently in early development – for children and adolescents – being named as the second closest relationship following mothers – their closeness, but not that of mothers, is superceded by spouses by young adulthood. In general, the findings indicated that there are similarities in the number and types of close social relations in the two countries, though some subtle Attachment & Human Development ISSN 1461-6734 print/1469-2988 online # 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/1461673042000303109

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differences were also found. This research serves to remind us that changes in close relationships reflect individual life cycle changes as well as the environmental circumstances experienced by people at different ages, thus adding a lifespan and contextual flavor to our understanding of close relations. The work by Cicirelli explored the concept of attachment to God as an attachment figure in the lives of older adults. He presented data from a sample of 109 older adults ranging in age from 70 to 97, testing the predictive use of compensatory versus correspondence interpretations of this relationship in later life. Security of attachment to God was scored from open-ended interviews and subsequently analyzed in relation to degree of religiosity, religious affiliation, loss of other attachment figures, fear of death, and several demographic variables. Interestingly, although most study participants were highly religious, praying to God and feeling that God was a source of comfort to them, only a portion of these would be considered to have a strong attachment to God. Strength of attachment to God was related to greater religiosity, greater fear of death (at least to a limited component of the fears that were tested), loss of other attachment figures, religious affiliation, being Black, being female, being of lower SES, and surprisingly, being younger. This latter finding was seen as being inconsistent with a compensation interpretation (i.e., that insecure-ambivalently attached persons may compensate for lack of secure attachments by developing an attachment to God), and two competing interpretations were entertained. Other interesting and provocative patterns were also disclosed, though resolution of their meaning awaits further study. Magai and colleagues used a moderated mediator structural equation model to assess the relations among representations of child emotion socialization, attachment, and positive and negative affect in adulthood in samples of younger and older adults. They hypothesized that patterns of adult attachment would largely mediate the relations between child emotion socialization and adult emotion experience although, based in Tomkins’ affect theory, they also expected direct effects as well as a moderating effect for age. As expected, reports of rewarding socialization were positively associated with positive affect and negatively with negative affect in both samples, while reports of punitive socialization were positively associated with adult negative affect in both samples and with positive affect in both groups, though more strongly in the older adults. Emotion socialization showed the predicted relations with adult attachment, although age effects were again evident. Finally, adding attachment styles as mediators of the relation between socialization and adult emotion indicated that attachment mediated many of the observed relations. As expected, however, there were also direct effects as well as some age-moderated effects. The authors discussed their results in terms of their implications for understanding how attachment and emotion relate across the lifespan. Zhang and Labouvie-Vief investigated aspects of attachment stability and change over a six year period in a sample of 370 men and women between the ages of 15 and 87 years, as well as relating attachment changes to concurrent covariation between security and coping and wellbeing. Using a continuous attachment measure, the authors found significant correlations between T1, T2, and T3 assessments of attachment. Despite some stability, however, attachment was also characterized by a good deal of fluidity, with attachment representations assessed at T1 predicting less than 30% of the variance in later assessments, leaving 70% or more unexplained. Interestingly, and in accord with developmental formulations, both attachment security and dismissing attachment increased with age, whereas preoccupied

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attachment declined, a pattern discussed in the context of assumptive interpersonal losses and declining functional capacity. It was also found that fluctuations in attachment security covaried with coping styles at the intra-individual level and that they seemed to covary in tandem. For example, whenever individuals’ coping strategies were more defensive and less integrative than their own average baseline, they also rated themselves as more insecure, controlling for T1 insecurity. The findings of this study were intriguing and offered grounds for speculation about developmental changes in attachment and their mediators, issues that can be pursued in future research. Steele and colleagues examined attachment relations between caregiving daughters and their dementia-afflicted mothers, drawing inspiration from methodologies that have been well-validated among infants and children. They used a Strange Situation paradigm to evaluate the activation of attachment behaviors during a reunion phase and the Adult Attachment Interview to evaluate the daughters’ states of mind with respect to attachment. In addition to demonstrating the utility of these methods in older mother-daughter dyads and the validity of reunions as an elicitor of attachment behaviors, this research found a close link between the rating of the daughters’ coherence of mind concerning attachment and their mothers’ joyful reunion behaviors, even when severity of dementia was controlled. This finding, which replicates what has previously been demonstrated in studies of mothers and young children, documents the continued relevance of attachment paradigms even where historical caregiver and care recipient roles have been reversed. Finally, a thoughtful and probing Commentary is provided by Shaver and Mikulincer. This integrative Commentary notes how this set of papers stretches the envelope of attachment and relationship research in new and exciting ways, as well as delineates a set of challenges to research in the domain of attachment and aging that will be useful to future researchers. We would like to extend our special thanks to Howard Steele for giving us the opportunity to put together this special thematic issue, and also thank the contributors, reviewers, and commentators for this superb collection of papers. We dedicate the issue to Lillian Troll, one of the first psychologists to draw attention to the relevance of attachment theory to lifespan development, and a pioneer in the study of later life attachment relationships (Troll & Smith, 1976).

REFERENCES Cassidy, J. & Shaver, P. (Eds) (1991). Handbook of attachment relationships. NY: Guilford. Carstensen, L. L. (1991). Socioemotional selectivity theory: Social activity in lifespan context. Annual Review of Gerontology and Geriatrics, 11, 195 – 217. Grossmann, K., & Grossmann, K.E. (1991). Attachment quality as an organizer of emotional and behavioral responses in a longitudinal perspective. In C. M. Parkes, J. Stevenson-Hinde, & P. Marris (Eds), Attachment across the life cycle. NY: Tavistock/Routledge. Hazan, C. & Shaver, P. (1987). Romantic love conceptualized as an attachment process. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52, 511 – 524. Troll, L. E. & Smith, J. (1976). Attachment through the life-span: Some questions about dyadic bonds among adults. Human Development, 19, 156 – 170.

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