Bases of Adult Attachment

The book addresses the major theoretical question of how adult attachment develops. By facilitating the cross-fertilization of research findings from distinct perspectives on adult attachment. This work presents an innovative theoretical model of adult attachment that elucidates the varied processes underlying its formation and development. In so doing, it highlights the utility of applying a multilevel perspective analysis, and the implications and directions for present and future research in linking brain, mind, and behavior. This book brings together distinguished researchers and scholars investigating attachment bonds at various stages of development, such as initial attraction, emergence of secure base, safe haven, and separation distress behaviors, which are the hallmarks of attachment relationships, and functioning of the attachment bond in long-term mates. These scholars investigate attachment processes using varied research designs (experimental to longitudinal) and focusing on different levels of analyses (cognitive, affective, neural). The chapters address these questions, such as: What are the processes by which a person goes from a nonattachment figure to an attachment figure? What are the mechanisms by which members of a couple regulate each other s physiological, affective, and behavioral responses? What are the consequences of such co-regulation and synchrony? And, what factors disrupt it? Are there normative phases of adult attachment formation and development? If so, does the process follow a sequential, stage-like series of development, or does it reflect, more or less, synchronous and overlapping processes? Are such attachment bonds in adulthood qualitatively different from other close relationships, or does it fall at the end of a continuum of affiliation? And, how do attachment bonds dissolve as a result of loss or breakup?