THE ORIGINS OF ATTACHMENT THEORY: JOHN BOWLBY AND MARY AINSWORTH

reciprocal expectancies.

Given that old patterns of action and thought guide selective attention and information processing in new situations, some distortion of incoming information is normal and unavoidable.

The adequacy of internal working models can be seriously undermined, however, when defensive exclusion of information from awareness interferes with their updating in response to developmental and environmental change.

To explain the workings of defensive processes, Bowlby cites evidence showing that incoming information normally undergoes many stages of processing before reaching awareness (see Dixon, 1971; Erdelyi, 1974) At every stage, some information is retained for further processing and the remainder discarded. That this may happen even after information has already undergone very advanced levels of encoding is shown by dichotic listening studies, In these studies, individuals who are presented with different messages to each ear through headphones are able to selectively attend to one of them. That the unattended message is nevertheless receiving high level processing becomes obvious when the person becomes alerted to a word of personal significance (e.g., the person’s name) that has been inserted into the unattended message.

Bowlby proposes that defensive exclusion of information from awareness derives from the same processes as selective exclusion, although the motivation for the two types of exclusion differs. Three situations are believed to render children particularly prone to engaging in defensive exclusion: situations that parents do not wish their children to know about even though the children have witnessed them, situations in which the children find the parents’ behavior too unbearable to think about, and situations in which children have done or thought about doing something of which they are deeply ashamed.

Although defensive exclusion protects the individual from experiencing unbearable mental pain, confusion, or conflict, it is hound to interfere with the accommodation of internal working models to external reality. Indeed, a number of clinical studies reviewed in Separation (e.g., Cain & Fast, 1972) suggest that defensive exclusion leads to a split in internal working models. One set of working models- accessible to awareness and discussion and based on what a child has been told-represents the parent as good and the parent’s rejecting behavior as caused by the “badness”