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Parental Divorce and Romantic Attachment – answer each question 1 full-page

5. What are the major themes and/or concepts discussed by the author(s)?

6. Are any concepts new or unfamiliar to you? If so, briefly describe one.

7. How can you apply the theory/theme/concept to an issue in family science, early education, counseling, or human development research, teaching, or practice (beyond what the author(s) has/have described)?

8. Develop one question to pose to the class based on your reading and reflection.

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Marriage & Family Review

ISSN: 0149-4929 (Print) 1540-9635 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/wmfr20

Parental Divorce and Romantic Attachment in
Young Adulthood: Important Role of Problematic
Beliefs

Rosemary Bernstein , Dacher Keltner & Heidemarie Laurent

To cite this article: Rosemary Bernstein , Dacher Keltner & Heidemarie Laurent (2012) Parental
Divorce and Romantic Attachment in Young Adulthood: Important Role of Problematic Beliefs,
Marriage & Family Review, 48:8, 711-731, DOI: 10.1080/01494929.2012.700910

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711

Parental Divorce and Romantic Attachment
in Young Adulthood: Important Role of

Problematic Beliefs

ROSEMARY BERNSTEIN
Department of Psychology, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon, USA

DACHER KELTNER
Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, California, USA

HEIDEMARIE LAURENT
Department of Psychology, University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming, USA

In the current study 45 university students with either divorced or
continuously married parents were surveyed about their romantic
attachment, positive emotionality, depressive symptomology, self-
esteem, and, when applicable, their retrospective beliefs about their
parents’ marital dissolution. Findings revealed that parental
divorce did not predict attachment insecurity, depression, or low
self-esteem. In fact, adult children of divorced parents (ACDP)
reported increased compassion, awe, enthusiasm, and perspective
taking. Among ACDP, a composite factor representing increased
fear of abandonment, peer rejection, and maternal blame was
positively associated with adult attachment anxiety, even while
controlling for parental conflict and divorce-related socioenviron-
mental disruption. Results are discussed in terms of their support of
a complex understanding of the long-term effects of parental
divorce, and in their inconsistency with a purely pathogenic model
of parental divorce.

KEYWORDS parental divorce, positive outcomes, romantic
attachment

Address correspondence to Rosemary Bernstein, Department of Psychology, University
of Oregon, 1227 University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403, USA. E-mail: reb@uoregon.edu

Marriage & Family Review, 48:711–731, 2012
Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 0149-4929 print/1540-9635 online
DOI: 10.1080/01494929.2012.700910

712 R. Bernstein et al.

INTRODUCTION

A large body of research suggests children of divorced parents are at greater
risk for a variety of behavioral, psychological, and educational problems
when compared with children of continuously married parents. In general,
adult children of divorced parents (ACDP) earn less income and complete
fewer years of schooling (e.g., Hetherington & Stanley-Hagan, 1999), report
more conflict with and looser ties to their parents (e.g., Ruschena, Prior,
Sanson, & Smart, 2005), endorse more psychological distress (e.g., Amato &
Cheadle, 2005; McIntyre, Heron, McIntyre, Burton, & Engler, 2003), and are
more often classified as having dismissing or preoccupied (i.e. insecure) states
of mind with regard to attachment as measured by the Adult Attachment
Interview (George, Kaplan & Main, 1984)—classifications highly predictive of
their own infant’s insecure attachment (e.g., Lewis, Feiring, & Rosenthal, 2000).

Within their own romantic relationships, ACDP tend to become sexu-
ally active and marry at an earlier age (Christensen & Brooks, 2001; Heifetz,
Connolly, Pepler, & Craig, 2010), endorse a lack of trust in intimate relation-
ships and marriage (King, 2002), have lower expectations for a successful
marriage (Amato, 1988; Franklin, Janoff-Bulman, & Roberts, 1990), and are
approximately two times as likely to divorce their own spouses at some
point over the course of their marriages (Amato & DeBoer, 2001; Teachman,
2002; Wolfinger, 2000), a phenomenon known as the intergenerational trans-
mission of divorce.

Though these general trends are well replicated, the strengths of these
effects tell us that negative outcomes of divorce are far from inevitable. Meta-
analyses demonstrate that most differences between those with divorced and
continuously married parents are quite modest, with a mean effect size of
0.14 standard deviations (Amato and Keith, 1991). Most ADCP do not develop
lasting problems; in the 25-year-long Unexpected Legacy of Divorce project,
70% of ACDP scored within the “average” or “very well to outstanding”
ranges of adjustment (Wallerstein, Lewis, & Blakeslee, 2000). In fact, there
may be some positive outcomes linked to parental divorce. Gately and
Schwebel (1992) reviewed many of the early studies in the field and high-
lighted several areas in which adolescents of divorced parents showed an
advantage, including maturity, self-esteem, empathy, and androgyny.

More recently, Sever and colleagues (2007) found that over time, almost
50% of ACDP reported more positive than negative outcomes, whereas less
than 25% thought negative outcomes outweighed the positive. Positive
reported outcomes included empowerment, empathy, and relationship
savvy. Given the heterogeneity of response to parental divorce, researchers
must look beyond weak main effects to consider features of both the indi-
vidual (e.g., their perceptions and attributions) and of the parental divorce
(e.g., its associated socioenvironmental impacts) that may potentiate, dilute,
or even reverse negative outcomes (see Wallerstein & Kelly, 1980).

Important Role of Problematic Beliefs 713

Socioenvironmental Divorce Stressors: Disruption and Conflict

Parental divorce often involves multiple environmental disruptions, includ-
ing increased conflict between parents, exposure to parental distress, changes
in residence and schools, and loss of time with family members, that impact
children’s post-divorce adjustment (e.g., Greeff & van der Merwe, 2004;
Laumann-Billings & Emery, 2000; Sandler, Wolchik, Braver, & Fogas, 1986;
Wolchik, Wilcox, Tein, & Sandler, 2000). Parental conflict seems to have
particularly pernicious effects on later romantic functioning, prospectively
predicting ACDP’s intimate relationship behaviors and satisfaction (Conger,
Cui, Bryant, & Elder, 2000) and adult attachment security (e.g., Feeney, 2006;
Henry & Holmes, 1998; Mikulincer & Florian, 1999).

However, some sequelae of parental divorce cannot be better explained
by parental conflict. For example, Amato and DeBoer (2001) reported that
parental divorce, rather than conflict or discord, is associated with divorce in
the next generation. Indeed, recent research has argued that parental divorce
and parental conflict influence young adults’ romantic relationships via sepa-
rate pathways: while parental divorce appears to relate to ACDP’s poor
romantic relationship quality by promoting more favorable attitudes toward
divorce and lower relationship commitment, parental conflict seems to relate
to ACDP’s poor relationship quality via its associations with increased
romantic partner conflict (Cui & Fincham, 2010).

Psychological Stressors: Problematic Beliefs

Perceptions of major life events are also hugely important in influencing long-
term adjustment. Kurdek and Berg (1987) have reasoned that children who
cannot “make personal sense” of their parents’ divorce are less able to take
control over their emotions and behavior in its aftermath, placing them at
higher risk for maladjustment. However, not all painful or negative beliefs
appear to be problematic, and though it is typical for ACDP across socioeco-
nomic strata to report painful memories and ideas about their parents’ divorce
(e.g., Kalter, 1987; Wallerstein, 1991), most of them are not associated with
sustained maladjustment. For example, although 75% of one ACDP sample
believed on the whole that their childhoods were less happy or otherwise
curtailed by their parents’ divorce, they endorsed equal levels of anxiety and
depression as children of continuously married parents (Laumann-Billings &
Emery, 2000).

Distinct from these painful yet normative beliefs, researchers have iden-
tified more “problematic” beliefs that are related to maladjustment in off-
spring of divorced parents. These include thinking they caused their parents’
divorce (i.e., self-blame), maintaining unrealistic expectations that their par-
ents will reunite (i.e., hope of reunification), placing a preponderance of
blame on one parent over the other (i.e., maternal or paternal blame),

714 R. Bernstein et al.

harboring excessive fears of peer rejection and/or ridicule, and experiencing
a chronic fear of abandonment (e.g., DeLucia-Waack, 2001; Kurdek & Berg,
1987). Of these problematic beliefs, existing work has highlighted fear of
abandonment, defined as excessive worries about the stability of relation-
ships with one’s parents and continuity of living arrangements, as being
especially predictive of adjustment problems in both upper class White and
inner-city minority samples (Wolchik et al., 1993; Wolchik, Tein, Sandler, &
Doyle, 2002).

PROBLEMATIC BELIEFS AND INTERNAL WORKING MODELS OF ATTACHMENT

Attachment theory provides an explanatory framework for how early rela-
tionships with caregivers and the quality of the child-rearing environment set
the stage for future relationship behavior and cognitions (e.g., Crowell,
Treboux, & Brockmeyer, 2009; Ijzendoorn & Bakermans-Kranenburg, 1996;
Roisman, 2007; Rothbard & Shaver, 1994; Treboux, Crowell, & Waters, 2004).
Attachment theorists suggest these early experiences and observations
coalesce into a working model of attachment (e.g., Sperling, Berman, &
Fagen, 1992) that includes both the automatic, largely unconscious appraisal
processes activating the attachment system and the conscious beliefs and
expectations a person holds about the self and others.

Within the domain of romantic attachment, adults who have positive
working models of their own desirability and worthiness as a romantic part-
ner, as well as of others’ trustworthiness and support, are considered
“securely” attached. Those who instead doubt their own value relative to
their partner are considered to be “anxiously” attached. These individuals
tend to become over-dependent on their partners—persistently seeking reas-
surance and remaining vigilant for signs of betrayal or abandonment. Lastly,
those who doubt the value of intimate relationships and avoid getting close
to others are considered to be either “dismissive-avoidant” when they have
positive sense of self-worth (i.e., negative model of other and positive model
of self) or “fearful-avoidant” when they experience a simultaneous distrust of
others and strong fear of rejection (i.e., negative models of self and other;
Bartholomew, 1990; Bartholomew & Horowitz, 1991). These working models,
in turn, organize one’s emotional responsivity to interpersonal events and
have far-reaching implications for well-being (e.g., Fraley & Shaver, 2000;
Hankin, Kassel, & Abela, 2005; Simpson, 1990).

As an organizing heuristic, these four different romantic adult attach-
ment styles are often conceptualized as comprising two orthogonal dimen-
sions: anxiety and avoidance (e.g., Brennan, Clark, & Shaver, 1998).
Attachment anxiety, which describes a chronic tendency to seek approval
and fear abandonment in intimate relationships, is theoretically presumed to
be cultivated in part by early relationships with an inconsistently responsive
caregiver and in part by the child’s early exposure to anxiety within the

Important Role of Problematic Beliefs 715

interparental relationship. Attachment avoidance, which refers to a tendency
to avoid closeness and intimacy with others, is presumed to be due to both
past caregiver withdrawal and to childhood observations of an interparental
union characterized by an avoidance of emotional intimacy.

Parental Divorce and the Development of Adult Attachment

Cognitive theorists have proposed that vulnerability to psychological malad-
justment stems from dysfunctional information-processing structures born
of disrupted early caregiving relationships (Beck & Clark, 1997). Childhood
events such as a parental divorce are believed to promote the development
of “latent mental structures” (i.e., the negative cognitive schemas and exag-
gerated threat appraisals that could easily be described as elements of an
internal working model) that go on to guide future social-information pro-
cessing (Crick & Dodge, 1994; Repetti, Taylor, & Seeman, 2002). Indeed,
research has demonstrated that ACDP were more hypervigilant to loss stim-
uli (which activate the attachment system) than were individuals from intact
families or those who had experienced a parental death (Luecken &
Appelhans, 2005).

Attachment theory (Bowlby, 1969/1982; Bretherton, 1995) posits that
interpersonal loss is a key mechanism in the development of attachment
insecurity and that fear of being abandoned by one’s primary caregivers
leads to problems in subsequent relationships. Several studies have in fact
demonstrated direct associations between parental divorce and adult roman-
tic attachment insecurity (Henry & Holmes, 1998; Lopez, Melendez, & Rice,
2000; Shaver & Mikulincer, 2004). Other studies, however, have failed to
replicate this association (e.g., Brennan & Shaver, 1993; Hayashi & Strickland,
1998; Hill, Young, & Nord, 1994; Tayler, Parker, & Roy, 1995). These mixed
results are often attributed to the confounding socioenvironmental influ-
ences of parental conflict and remarriage (e.g., Brennan & Shaver, 1993),
though they are undoubtedly also partly explained by significant heteroge-
neity across children’s internal experience of parental divorce. For example,
whereas one child may have become triangulated into her parents’ battles,
another may have been neglected as his parents became increasingly
absorbed in conflict, and yet another may have assumed the role of caretaker
as her parent withdrew in despair. What any one of these children is likely
to have learned about the self and others from their parents’ divorce is likely
quite distinct for each of these scenarios. In this way, the specific details
related to childhood experience and perception are equally if not more
important than are more generally defined risk factors. In other words,
although parental marital status alone may not predict insecure attachment,
a child with many problematic beliefs about a parental divorce, including
high levels of fear of abandonment, may be at greater risk (Rothbard &
Shaver, 1994; Easterbrooks & Goldberg, 1990).

716 R. Bernstein et al.

Current Study

The foregoing research suggests that individual differences in both (1) the
social-environmental characteristics of the parental divorce itself (i.e., paren-
tal conflict and other divorce stressors) and (2) children’s internal percep-
tions of and reactions to the divorce (i.e., problematic beliefs) are important
in understanding the wide variability in ACDP outcomes. However, few stud-
ies have examined these constructs simultaneously. In the current study we
used these two classes of predictors to gain a more nuanced understanding
of the relation between parental divorce and insecure romantic attachment
in young adulthood. To ascertain the domain specificity of effects of parental
divorce on adult functioning, we included measures not only of romantic
attachment insecurity, but also of non–attachment-specific maladjustment,
including those to assess self-esteem, positive emotionality, symptoms of
depression, and interpersonal sensitivity and social relatedness.

Based on the above research, we hypothesized that (1) parental divorce
would not predict adult maladjustment, and might even predict better adjust-
ment in some domains, and (2) for ACDP, problematic beliefs held in child-
hood about their parents’ divorce would be more predictive of romantic
relationship insecurity (i.e., anxiety and avoidance) than of more general
indices of maladjustment (i.e., depression and self esteem). We further
hypothesized that these associations would exist even while controlling for
other socioenvironmental risk factors. Given the centrality of fear of aban-
donment in working models of attachment, we expected this problematic
belief about parental divorce would be most highly related to attachment
insecurity.

METHODS

Procedure

Participants were assessed individually in a campus laboratory. All were
informed that the present study was interested in the relationships between
an individual’s disposition, emotions, and life histories, and each participant
gave his or her informed written consent. Participants first completed self-
report questionnaires related to personality, emotionality, attachment, depres-
sion, and self-esteem. Only those who had divorced parents then completed
a measure to assess the divorce-related problematic beliefs they had as chil-
dren. After completing these questionnaires, participants completed a com-
puterized lexical decision-making task (not discussed here), wherein they
were asked to identify strings of letters as words or nonwords after sublimi-
nal priming (<20 ms) with a threat or neutral word (see Mikulincer, Birnbaum, Woddis, & Nachmias, 2000). Participants’ reaction times and physiological measurements (electrodermal response, heart rate, respiration) during the

Important Role of Problematic Beliefs 717

task were recorded. The first author or a research assistant was present at
each session but remained in an adjacent hallway to allow participants maxi-
mum privacy. The study protocol was approved by the host university’s
Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects.

Participants

The current study included 45 college students (60% ACDP) from a large
public university in California. Participants (37 women; mean age = 20.6,
standard deviation [SD] = 2.3) were recruited through the university’s research
participant pool and awarded course credit for participation. Twenty-nine
participants (64.4%) identified as White, 10 as Asian American (22.2%), 4 as
Chicano (8.9%), and 2 as African American (4.4%). Two participants (4.4%)
self-identified as lower class, 5 (11.1%) as lower middle class, 15 (33.3%) as
middle class, 22 (48.9%) as upper middle class, and none as upper class.

Measures

Participants completed the following questionnaires:

• Rosenberg’s Self Esteem Scale (Rosenberg, 1965): Participants rate their
agreement with each of 10 items tapping general self-esteem on a four-
point Likert scale.

• Big Five Personality Inventory ( John, Donahue & Kentle, 1991): Participants
rate their agreement with each of 44 statements on a five-point Likert scale.
Items represent prototypical traits defining extraversion (8 items), agree-
ableness (9 items), conscientiousness (9 items), neuroticism (8 items), and
openness to experience (10 items).

• Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI; Davis, 1980, 1983): Participants indi-
cate their agreement with each of 28 items assessing dispositional empathy
on a five-point Likert scale. Subscales measure (1) perspective-taking, (2)
fantasy, (3) empathic concern, and (4) personal distress.

• Dispositional Positive Emotion Scale (DPES-r; Shiota, Keltner & John,
2006): This 28-item questionnaire assesses enthusiasm (e.g., “I get great
pleasure from pursuing my goals”), contentment (e.g., “I feel satisfied
more often than most people”), pride (e.g., “It feels good to know that
people look up to me”), love (e.g., “I enjoy forming emotionally intimate
relationships”), compassion (e.g., “Nurturing others gives me a warm
feeling inside”), amusement (e.g., “I laugh about something almost every
day”), and awe (e.g., “The world’s beauty is awe-inspiring to me”).
Participants rate their agreement with each item on a seven-point Likert
scale.

• Experiences in Close Relationships-Revised Scale (ECR-R; Fraley, Waller, &
Brennan, 2000): This 36-item instrument includes two subscales to

718 R. Bernstein et al.

measure attachment anxiety (e.g., “I worry that romantic partners won’t
care about me as much as I care about them”) and avoidance (e.g., “I
prefer not to be too close to romantic partners”) in romantic relationships.
Participants rate their agreement with each item on a seven-point Likert
scale.

• Beck Depression Inventory (BDI-II; Beck et al., 1961): This 21-item inven-
tory measures current depressive symptoms in both clinical and nonclini-
cal populations. Participants select the rating that best describes their
experience over the past 2 weeks, from 0 (no symptomology; e.g., “I don’t
feel particularly guilty”) to 3 (highest symptomology; e.g., “I feel guilty all
the time”).

• Children’s Beliefs about Parental Separation Scale (CBAPS; Kurdek & Berg,
1987): This 36-item scale assesses children’s problematic beliefs about the
nature of their parents’ divorce and their role in the divorce. Subscales (6
items each) include peer ridicule and avoidance (PR), paternal blame (PB),
maternal blame (MB), fear of abandonment (FoA), hope of reunification
(HoR), and self-blame (SB).

We modified the CBAPS in two ways. First, because the scale was written for
children to answer soon after their parents’ divorce, we altered the wording
to make it retrospective, for example, by inserting the phrase “right after the
divorce …” before an item and by adding an “I don’t remember” response
option for all items. Second, we added 10 items designed to capture other
empirically supported moderators of children’s post-divorce adjustment,
including parental conflict before and after the divorce, environmental insta-
bility related to the divorce (e.g., having to move, discontinuity of extracur-
ricular activities), loss of contact with nonresidential parent, social connectivity
(including continued access to extended family), and how well the partici-
pant had been informed by their parent/s about the divorce.

RESULTS

Descriptives

Of the 45 participants, 18 (40%) had continuously married parents and 27
(60%) had divorced parents. Individuals from divorced families who could not
endorse numerical responses for least 75% of the CBAPS questions were clas-
sified into a “divorce, no recall” (DNR) group. Of the 27 participants with
divorced parents, 8 were classified as DNR (mean age at parental divorce = 1.57
years, SD = 1.27). Nineteen participants whose parents had divorced did
remember the experience (average age at parental divorce = 9.95 years,
SD = 5.86) and reported confidence in their recollection of past feelings and
beliefs (mean = 5.26, SD = 1.54 on a 7-point Likert scale). DNR participants

Important Role of Problematic Beliefs 719

were not omitted from between-group (i.e., participants with vs. without
divorced parents) analyses because even though they were too young to recall
the event itself, they grew up living through its continued repercussions.

Sample means are presented in Table 1. Psychological adjustment and
romantic attachment variables were correlated in expected directions: attach-
ment anxiety and avoidance (r = 0.47, p < .001); attachment anxiety and con- tentment (r = –.37, p < .05), BDI (r = .51, p < .001), and self-esteem (r = –.47, p < .001); attachment avoidance and BDI (r = .46, p < .001), self-esteem (r = –.35, p < .001), and personal distress (r = .35, p < .05). To ensure that attachment effects would not be confounded with personality, correlations between Big Five dimensions and both attachment anxiety and avoidance were tested and found nonsignificant.

Preliminary Analyses and Data Reduction

Preliminary two-sample t-tests revealed that men and women did not differ
on any outcome measures except DPES awe, which men in our sample

TABLE 1 Means and Distributions of Participants According to Parental Marital Status

No divorce
(n = 18) Divorce (n = 27)

Cohen’s dMean SD Mean SD

Age 20.50 2.31 20.42 1.96 –.04
Big Five
Openness 36.94 5.55 36.42 7.49 –.08
Conscientiousness 32.56 6.10 34.19 5.66 .28
Extraversion 28.78 5.98 27.04 7.41 –.26
Agreeableness 32.94 4.95 35.19 5.77 .42
Neuroticism 24.17 6.46 24.65 6.79 .07
DPES
Enthusiasm 21.89 2.91 23.78 2.74 .67
Contentment 19.39 3.85 20.15 4.94 .27
Pride 23.94 3.49 25.37 2.44 .48
Love 22.78 3.70 23.74 3.29 .27
Compassion 21.17 4.00 24.37 2.80 .93
Amusement 23.61 4.35 22.48 4.41 –.26
Awe 18.50 4.26 21.23 3.73 .68
IRI
Perspective taking 23.89 4.96 27.22 4.49 .70
Fantasy 24.39 4.46 25.63 5.68 .24
Empathic concern 25.17 4.11 25.78 4.60 .14
Personal distress 19.11 6.31 19.70 4.21 .11
ECR-R
Attachment anxiety 55.83 21.31 62.89 21.45 .33
Attachment avoidance 51.00 16.54 49.15 18.13 –.11
BDI depression 7.11 5.70 10.04 10.35 .35
Rosenberg self-esteem 22.56 4.73 21.44 4.77 –.24

720 R. Bernstein et al.

(mean = 19.48, SD = 3.87) endorsed to a greater extent than women
(mean = 23.13 SD = 4.22, p < .05). This increased our confidence that any subsequently found effects were not driven by gender differences. A second set of t-tests revealed no differences between those in the DR (n = 19) and DNR (n = 8) groups on any of these variables, so the two subsamples were collapsed into one “divorce” group (n = 27).

Bivariate correlations revealed that several of the original CBAPS sub-
scales were highly intercorrelated. In the interest of having distinct predictors
for subsequent analyses, these six variables were reduced to a smaller number
of underlying factors. A principle components analysis with varimax rotation
produced three composite factors: SB and HoR loaded onto the first compos-
ite factor (A); FoA, MB, and PR onto a second (B); and PB onto a third (C).

A second principle components analysis reduced the 10 nonoriginal
items added to the CBAPS into four meaningful variables that together
explained 76.72% of the item variance. Having to move residences, discon-
tinuing extracurricular activities after the divorce, and high levels of predi-
vorce parental conflict loaded on the first factor, which we call “peridivorce
disruption” (PDD). Post-divorce decreased involvement with and lack of
regular contact with the noncustodial parent loaded on the second factor,
“estrangement” (E). Loss of contact with extended family, not having anyone
during the divorce with whom one felt comfortable talking about their feel-
ings, and not being well informed by one’s parent about the divorce loaded
on the third factor, “isolation” (I). A continued post-divorce lack of coopera-
tion between parents, and child triangulation into parental conflict loaded on
the final factor, “parental conflict” (PC).

To reduce the number of between-group comparisons necessary to test
our first hypothesis, our 15 outcome variables were sorted into two “families”
of related variables. Families were formed according to patterns of intercor-
relation and then examined for conceptual validity. The first family (“dis-
tress”) comprised seven distress-related outcome variables, including
depression, self-esteem, attachment avoidance and anxiety, DPES content-
ment (reversed), DPES amusement (reversed), and IRI personal distress
(Fisher’s r-to-Z-to-r average = .369). The second family (“positivity”) com-
prised eight intrapersonal socioemotional resource outcome variables and
included the remaining DPES subscales (enthusiasm, pride, love, compas-
sion, awe), and IRI subscales (perspective taking, fantasy, and empathic con-
cern; Fisher’s r-to-Z-to-r average = .333).

Hypothesis Testing

HYPOTHESIS 1

Fifteen dependent variables were analyzed in a pair of one-way multivariate
ANOVAs comparing individuals with and without divorced parents. Our first

Important Role of Problematic Beliefs 721

multivariate ANOVA with parent marital status (divorced, married) as an inde-
pendent variable was computed with depression, self-esteem, attachment
avoidance and anxiety, DPES contentment, DPES amusement, and IRI per-
sonal distress as dependent variables to determine whether group differences
in overall distress existed for ACDP compared with their peers with continu-
ously married parents. Results indicated a nonsignificant multivariate effect of
parental marital status, Pillai’s Trace = 0.17, F(7, 37) = 1.07, p = .42, ns.

A second MANOVA was computed with the remaining DPES subscales
(enthusiasm, pride, love, compassion, awe), and IRI subscales (perspective
taking, fantasy, and empathic concern) as dependent variables to determine
variables to determine whether group differences in dispositional positivity
and prosociality existed for ACDP compared with their peers with continu-
ously married parents. Results indicated a significant multivariate effect of
parental marital status, Pillai’s Trace = .997; F(15, 29) = 2.15, p < . 01, partial η2 = .53.

Univariate effects were examined to better understand the overall effect.
They revealed that ACDP reported greater enthusiasm, F(1, 43) = 4.90,
p = .032, partial η2 = .10; compassion, F(1, 43) = 10.00, p = .003, partial η2 = .19;
awe, F(1, 43) = 5.13, p = .029, partial η2 = .11; and perspective-taking, F(1,
43) = 5.48, p = .024, partial η2 = .11. All other scores showed no significant
effect (smallest p > .37). Canonical coefficient loadings are presented in Table
2. Compassion received the largest raw canonical coefficient (weight = –.46)
and the largest correlation with the canonical variable (–.80).

HYPOTHESIS 2

To test our second hypothesis that problematic beliefs would better predict
romantic attachment insecurity than more global indices of maladjustment
(i.e., depression and self-esteem), four linear regressions were tested. Each

TABLE 2 MANOVA results (n = 45)

Raw canonical

coefficient
Standardized

canonical coefficient
Correlation with

canonical variable

DPES
Enthusiasm –.16 –.46 –.49
Pride .04 .12 –.36
Love .10 .34 –.21
Compassion –.22 –.80 –.66
Awe –.05 –.19 –.50
IRI
Perspective taking –.13 –.64 –.51
Fantasy –.03 –.12 –.18
Empathic concern .18 .79 –.11

722 R. Bernstein et al.

regression included a total of seven predictor variables, including the three
composite factors (A, B, and C) derived from the original six CBAPS scales,
along with the four additional divorce-stressor variables (PPD, E, I, and PC).

1. Collectively, these seven predictors explained 86% of the variance in
attachment anxiety. Both B, β = .60, t = 2.89, p < .05, and PDD, β = .46, t = 2.49, p < .05, emerged as significant and positive predictors of attach- ment anxiety, whereas C and I were marginally significant (p = .06 and p = .05, respectively).

2. Collectively, the seven predictor variables explained 66% of the variance
in attachment avoidance. No variable emerged as a significant predictor of
attachment avoidance, and the null hypothesis that all model coefficients
equaled zero could not be rejected: F(7,7) = 1.95, ns.

3. Collectively, these seven predictors explained 54% of the variance in BDI
scores. No variables emerged as significant predictors of BDI, and the null
hypothesis that all model coefficients equaled zero could not be rejected:
F(7,7) = 1.16, ns.

4. Collectively, the seven predictor variables explained 74% of the variance
in self-esteem. The composite variable I emerged as a significant predictor
of self-esteem, β = .75, t = 3.19, p < .05, whereas C was marginally signifi- cant (p = .07).

DISCUSSION

As we had hypothesized, our results demonstrated that parental marital
status was not associated with compromised well-being in young adulthood
as indicated by higher depression, lower self-esteem, and romantic attachment
insecurity. These findings are consistent with the large body of work finding
no differences in the general well-being of individuals from divorced and
intact families (e.g., Brennan & Shaver, 1993; Hazan & Shaver, 1987). In fact,
the only difference that emerged in this comparison revealed ACDP possessed
more social-emotional resources (i.e., compassion, enthusiasm, awe, and
perspective taking) than did young adults with continuously married parents,
a finding that is congruent with other research documenting positive
outcomes associated with parental divorce (e.g., Ahrons, 2005; Hetherington,
2003). We found support for our hypotheses that problematic beliefs relate
to parental divorce—and that fear of abandonment in particular would
increase ACDP’s risk for insecure romantic attachment and not for other
negative outcomes. Below, we consider the implications of both overall
benefits and belief-specific costs of parental divorce.

Compassion, used interchangeably in the literature with “sympathy,”
has been considered the emotional component of Bowlby’s (1969) “care-
giving” system and is defined as feelings of concern for another’s

Important Role of Problematic Beliefs 723

well-being (Shiota et al., 2006). Behaviorally, compassion stimulates
approach and nurturing behavior toward others in need (e.g., Eisenberg
et al., 1989; Estrada, 1995; Hildebrandt & Fitzgerald, 1983). For some chil-
dren of divorce, helping others may be part of an effective coping strategy,
as was recently suggested by a qualitative study of resilience in ACDP
(Thomas & Woodside, 2011). ACDP also reported higher levels of perspec-
tive taking, which can help to stimulate and focus compassionate feelings
toward others in need. In fact, some researchers have posed that “increased
perspective-taking, necessitated among children of divorce by witnessing
differences in opinions between their parents, is at the root of moral judg-
ment development” (Kogos & Snarey, 1995, p.177).

Enthusiasm, which refers to intense feelings of enjoyment, interest, or
approval is, like compassion, negatively associated with symptoms of depres-
sion (Gruber & Johnson, 2009). Though it is not completely clear why ACDP
experience more enthusiasm specifically, it may be that this major life stressor
encourages a sense of personal drive and motivation. This also fits with
Thomas and Woodside’s 2011 qualitative analysis, which found that well-
adjusted and efficacious ACDP tended to be highly motivated by success and
growth and were enthusiastic about their activities and career goals. Finally,
awe—defined as the emotion experienced during rapid attempts at cognitive
accommodation (Keltner & Haidt, 2003)—is most readily experienced when
individuals are confronted with a novel or highly complex stimulus that cur-
rent knowledge structures cannot fully assimilate. It may be that the painful
experience of parental divorce predisposes ACDP to experience more
wonder, humility, gratitude, inspiration, and appreciation toward that which
is great and right in the universe.

Next, our hypothesis that problematic beliefs about divorce would be
more predictive of domain-specific problems in romantic relationship
security than they would more general indices of maladjustment, even
while controlling for other empirically indicated socioenvironmental pre-
dictors of negative outcomes, was partially supported. Regression analyses
revealed that the CBAPS composite variable (B) representing FoA, MB, and
PR was especially important in predicting attachment anxiety, as was PDD,
which represented high levels of pre-divorce parental conflict and having
to move residences and discontinue extracurricular activities after the
separation.

Given the empirical and theoretical relationship between fear of aban-
donment and attachment insecurity, we expected that it would relate to attach-
ment anxiety. Though we did not explicitly predict that MB and PR would
predict attachment anxiety, it is not hard to imagine why such a composite
constellation of variables would. Like fear of abandonment, sensitivity to inter-
personal rejection is a core feature of an anxious working model. Because
children and adolescents often seek support outside of family relationships
during their parents’ separation (e.g., Adams, 1982; Wallerstein & Kelly, 1980),

724 R. Bernstein et al.

PR represents not only the absence of important protective relationships but
also a particularly damaging and active form of interpersonal rejection.

Though the relationship between att achment anxiety and MB (as
opposed to self- or paternal blame) may be less immediately obvious, it is
plausible that as adults, our female participants (who comprised the majority
of the sample) have taken on this template of the “bad” adult female partner
in romantic relationships. Indeed, research has demonstrated that the self-
concepts of children of divorced parents are significantly correlated with
their mothers (who is usually their custodial parent) but show no such iden-
tification with their fathers (Parish & Dostal, 1980). It may be that for those
who blame their parents, this alignment results in an internal model of the
self as incompetent and unworthy.

Alternatively, this association may be better explained as due to a
strained relationship between children and their custodial parent, as approx-
imately 84% of children in the United States reside with their mothers after
parental divorce (Amato, 2001). Some have posited that children’s identifica-
tion with their remaining parent represents an attempt to reestablish parent–
child stability and as a defense against feelings of anxiety and uncertainty
(e.g., Guttmann, 1993). When children blame their mothers for the family
problems leading up to the divorce, it may be that this protective alignment
is compromised or absent, leaving the child susceptible to the emotions of
helplessness associated with an anxious internal working model.

Though our a priori hypotheses considered adult attachment insecurity
more generally, that we isolated divorce related problematic cognitions and
environmental stresses predictive of attachment anxiety but not avoidance is
not entirely unprecedented. Previous research with ACDP has found that
female children of divorced parents were high in attachment anxiety but not
avoidance and were more likely than their peers to worry about abandon-
ment and to crave reassurance (Henry & Holmes, 1998). It may be that chil-
dren’s problematic interpretations of their parents’ divorce are more likely to
strengthen fears of loss than it would aversions to intimacy—fears that then
carry over into the way they approach future romantic relationships.

No problematic belief or environmental stress variable emerged as a
significant predictor of depression, and isolation (representing loss of con-
tact with extended family, not having anyone during the divorce with whom
they felt comfortable confiding, and not being well informed by their parent
about the divorce) emerged as the only significant predictor of self-esteem.
It is not surprising why a factor capturing social and emotional isolation
would relate to self-esteem (or the extent to which an individual possesses
generalized feelings of worthiness and goodness; Rosenberg, 1965, 1979), as
someone who feels forgotten, alone, and dismissed is likely someone who
doubts his or her self worth.

Taken together, it appears that although some areas of adult
functioning—namely, those of attachment anxiety and low self esteem—are

Important Role of Problematic Beliefs 725

more clearly related to specific early divorce-related problematic beliefs and
social stressors, other domains, including attachment avoidance and depres-
sion, appear less affected by such distal parental divorce factors. Thus, these
risk factors seem not to be globally detrimental but instead relate more
specifically to the child’s future anxiety toward intimate relationships and
their latent concept, or internal model, of self-worth.

Limitations and Future Directions

It is important to acknowledge the limitations of the present findings. First,
our sample was small and predominantly female. Future studies should
examine the relationships described here using a larger sample (which
would provide the power necessary to examine moderators such as age at
the time of divorce) and one with a more even gender distribution. Although
preliminary analyses revealed only that self-reported awe was significantly
different between men and women, a larger sample would allow a more
powerful probe of gender-specific divorce effects. Second, the present
sample represents college students at a competitive and well-respected uni-
versity who are likely to be quite resilient people. Evidence for divorce-
related costs and benefits may differ in a community or clinical sample.
Though future studies with more diverse samples would be important, this
study remains valuable in its demonstration that even within a generally
resilient population, children can and do have problematic beliefs about
their parents’ separation and that retrospective measures of these beliefs,
coupled with recalled levels of divorce-related disruption, relate to insecure
attachment in young adulthood.

Measurement limitations suggest further directions for future study.
Because our findings rely heavily on retrospective and self-reported recon-
structions of past events, it might be argued that participants’ memories of
early relationship experiences are filtered through cognitive-affective lenses
altered by subsequent attachment experiences and current working models.
Even though participants indicated they believed they had remembered their
past beliefs accurately, further longitudinal research would be invaluable in
advancing our understanding of the lasting developmental effects of parental
divorce. Finally, because we did not measure other types of negative life
events, we cannot claim that positive characteristics found in children of
divorced parents are unique to the experience of divorce compared with
other major life stressors. In the future we suggest that researchers consider
assessing for a wider range of stressful life events (e.g., poverty, parental
conflict, trauma, parental loss, etc.) and both intrapersonal and environmen-
tal resilience factors in participants with and without divorced parents. This
will help to discern whether the signs of social-emotional growth we found
are unique to the parental divorce experience or whether these effects are
generalizable to other early life stressors.

726 R. Bernstein et al.

Conclusions and Implications

Early divorce research was based on the fundamental belief that a two-par-
ent family structure was necessary for healthy child development and that
parental divorce was a trauma with ‘‘severe and enduring deleterious effects
on children’s adjustment’’ (Hetherington & Stanley-Hagan, 1999, p. 130). In
subsequent decades researchers began to recognize and assess heterogene-
ity among children’s responses to parental divorce, and the field has slowly
shifted from a pathogenic paradigm to one emphasizing positive character-
istics and strengths (e.g., Greeff & Van Der Merwe, 2004). Consistent with
this newer generation paradigm, our findings suggest that not only is paren-
tal divorce not detrimental to children’s future well-being as young adults,
but it may ultimately stimulate higher levels of positive and prosocial
emotions.

At the same time, parental divorce is not without potential costs. Among
young adults with divorced parents, fear of abandonment after the divorce
stood out as an important correlate of later romantic attachment insecurity.
As such, the present research points toward a policy goal that does not aim
to decrease the rate of divorce, but helps make divorces less anxiety-provok-
ing and more comprehensible to children. Psychoeducational materials
directed at divorcing parents, for example, may help impart the value of
having ongoing, diplomatic, and developmentally appropriate conversations
with their children about the reasons for and implications of the divorce.
These conversations may help to attenuate children’s fear of abandonment
and other problematic beliefs fostering distress in future relationships. Given
our nation’s high rate of marital dissolution, this should be an important
social and political goal.

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878

attachment theory (Bowlby, 1969/1982, 1973,
1980) is, at its core, a theory of prosocial behavior.
It explains how, in early childhood, interactions
with mindful, caring, and supportive parental
figures (“attachment figures”) create and solidify
children’s positive mental representations of oth-
ers (as competent, dependable, and well inten-
tioned), their pervasive sense of safety and securi-
ty, and their ability to recognize, acknowledge, and
regulate emotions. The theory has been supported
by decades of developmental research, summarized
in this volume, which implies the existence of an
intergenerational transmission of security (or inse-
curity) that potentially creates a continuing cross-
generational stream of prosocial behavior—or its
absence. The extension of the theory to some of
the topics encountered in the broader psycho-
logical literature on prosocial behavior—empathy,
compassion, generosity, forgiveness, and altruism
(Mikulincer & Shaver, 2010, 2012) —is quite nat-
ural, and in recent years it has been accomplished
in studies of the prosocial behavior of children,
adolescents, and adults.

Our purpose in this chapter is to highlight
attachment-related research on prosocial behavior
in different phases of the lifespan. We begin with a
brief explanation of how the theory’s basic concepts
relate to prosocial attitudes, motives, emotions, and
behavior. This explanation is summarized in a con-
ceptual model of the association between parental
sensitive responsiveness on one hand, and a child’s
empathy and prosocial behavior on the other, me-
diated by the child’s attachment security, internal
working models (IWMs), and effective emotion
regulation. We follow the theoretical introduc-
tion with two major sections on prosocial emotions
and behavior in childhood and in adulthood. We
conclude the chapter with suggestions for future
research involving children and adults.

Basic Concepts of attachment
theory in relation to Prosociality

As explained more fully in other chapters of this
volume, attachment theory is organized in terms of

Chapter 38

A Lifespan Perspective on Attachment
and Care for Others

Empathy, Altruism, and Prosocial Behavior

Phillip r. Shaver
Mario Mikulincer

Jacquelyn T. Gross
Jessica A. Stern

Jude Cassidy

Handbook of Attachment, Third Edition : Theory, Research, and Clinical Applications, edited by Jude Cassidy, and Phillip R. Shaver, Guilford
Publications, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/utd/detail.action?docID=4338858.
Created from utd on 2022-02-01 21:11:57.

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38. A Lifespan Perspective on Attachment and Care for Others 879

several basic concepts: the attachment behavioral
system, the caregiving behavioral system, the felt
sense of security, working models of self and oth-
ers, and emotion regulation (see, in this volume,
Cassidy, Chapter 1; Bretherton & Munholland,
Chapter 4; B. C. Feeney & Woodhouse, Chapter
36; and Mikulincer & Shaver, Chapter 24). The
attachment behavioral system was postulated by
Bowlby (1969/1982) to explain the observable
tendency of primate infants to maintain proxim-
ity to their mother, especially in novel or unpre-
dictable environments, and to cling to her when
threats arise (often, in the natural environment, as
she moves into and through trees to avoid preda-
tors). In the human case, although we are born
with a grasping reflex that allowed our primate an-
cestors to cling to a mother’s fur, the attachment
system emerges slowly during the first months of
life, but it gradually matures sufficiently to orient
a baby to its familiar caregivers, to move the baby
closer to them in response to threats and fears, and
to regulate the baby’s sense of safety in response
to a caregiver’s protection, support, and soothing.

Bowlby (1969/1982) also postulated the exis-
tence of a caregiving behavioral system to explain
humans’ seemingly natural capacity for empathy,
compassion, and care—features evident in the be-
havior of parents who respond sensitively to their
children’s signs of vulnerability and need. These
features are not limited to parental behavior but
also are evident in the observable tendency of
children and adults to become concerned when
they encounter other people who are suffering or
in need and, often, to be motivated to relieve this
suffering or respond to others’ needs. Within a
person’s developmental history, parameters of the
universally present attachment behavioral system
are modified in response to caregivers’ behavior,
and the same experiences affect the caregiving
behavioral system, causing a complex web of con-
nections between the person’s attachment and
caregiving cognitions, emotions, and behavior.

According to Bowlby (1969/1982), the care-
giving system is designed to provide protection
and support to others who are either chronically
dependent or temporarily in need. It is inherently
altruistic in nature, being aimed at the allevia-
tion of others’ distress, although the system itself
presumably evolved because it increased inclusive
fitness by making it more likely that children and
tribe members with whom the individual shared
genes would survive and reproduce (Batson, 2010;
de Waal, 2008; Hamilton, 1964; MacLean, 1985).
Within attachment theory, the caregiving system

provides an entrée to the study of compassion and
altruism; moreover, understanding this system
provides a foundation for devising ways to increase
people’s compassion and effective altruism.

The caregiving system is focused on the wel-
fare of others and therefore directs attention to
others’ distress rather than to one’s own needs.
In its prototypical form—that is, in the parent–
child relationship—the goal of the child’s attach-
ment system (proximity that fosters protection,
reduces distress, increases safety, and establishes a
secure base) is also the goal of the parent’s care-
giving system. Extending this conceptualization
to the broader realm of compassion and altruism,
we view the caregiving system as activated by the
presence of a distressed person, even a stranger in
need, its aim being to alter the needy person’s con-
dition until signs of increased safety, well-being,
and security appear. This system’s functioning can
be undermined by anxiety and self-concern on the
part of the potential care provider, which is why
attachment insecurity often undermines or inter-
feres with effective care. In contrast, a sense of at-
tachment security allows a person to attend less
to his or her own concerns and shift attention to
providing care.

Theoretically, being secure implies that one
has witnessed, experienced, and benefited from
generous attachment figures’ sensitive and effec-
tive care, which provides a model to follow when
one encounters a vulnerable or needy other. Se-
cure individuals also feel more comfortable than
insecure ones with intimacy and interdependence,
so they can more readily accept other people’s
needs for closeness, sympathy, and support. The
positive mental representations (working models)
of others that are associated with attachment se-
curity (see Bretherton & Munholland, Chapter 4,
this volume) make it easier to construe others as
deserving of sympathy and support, hence compel-
ling one to care for them. Moreover, secure indi-
viduals’ positive model of self (Bartholomew &
Horowitz, 1991; Bowlby, 1969/1982) allows them
to feel more confident about their ability to handle
another person’s needs while effectively regulating
their own emotions (e.g., Batson, 2010).

In contrast, an insecure person is likely to
have vulnerable, defended self-esteem, if not an
outright negative model of self. He or she is likely
to be wary of others’ potential for neglect, harsh
criticism, rejection, or abuse. Stated this baldly, it
is clear why security might be conducive to em-
pathy and prosocial behavior, whereas insecurity
might be conducive to self-concern, self-protec-

880 VI. SYSTeMS, CuLTure, AND CONTexT

tion, defensive rejection of others’ needs, and mis-
timed or misguided efforts to understand and help
others.

As explained in other chapters in this vol-
ume (e.g., Solomon & George, Chapter 18),
Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, and Wall (1978) es-
tablished methods for identifying and categoriz-
ing different patterns of attachment (secure, anx-
ious/ambivalent or resistant, and avoidant) that
emerge during the first two years of life as a result
of caregivers’ behavior. In their book, Ainsworth
and colleagues (1978) also demonstrated that two
main dimensions, anxiety and avoidance, under-
lie the three patterns of attachment. Subsequent
research on adult attachment established similar
categorization schemes for adults, using either in-
terviews (e.g., the Adult Attachment Interview
[AAI]; Hesse, Chapter 26, this volume) or adult
self-report measures of attachment anxiety and
avoidance (e.g., the Experiences in Close Rela-
tionships scale [ECR]; Brennan, Clark, & Shaver,
1998; see Crowell, Fraley, & Roisman, Chapter
27, this volume). In the following section, we ex-
plore attachment-related childhood roots of care
for others.

Childhood roots of Care
for Others

The capacity to care for others’ well-being is root-
ed in early development. Children as young as 8
months of age display concern for others’ suffer-
ing and in some contexts will act to relieve their
pain (Roth-Hanania, Davidov, & Zahn-Waxler,
2011; Zahn-Waxler, Radke-Yarrow, Wagner, &
Chapman, 1992). Among the multiple factors
that comprise care for others, two of the most im-
portant are empathy and prosocial behavior. Em-
pathy is an experience of affective resonance with
another’s emotions, along with a sense of concern
for his or her welfare; it may also include cognitive
apprehension of another’s condition or needs (De-
cety & Meyer, 2008; Eisenberg, 2000; Hoffman,
1984, 2001). Prosocial behavior is voluntary behav-
ior intended to benefit others (Grusec, Hastings,
& Almas, 2011); like empathy, prosocial behavior
may occur in response to distress, but it may also
arise in response to other cues such as instrumental
or material need (Dunfield & Kuhlmeier, 2013).
In addition to these dimensions, compassion refers
to the feeling of care for others’ suffering, as well
as the intention to relieve their suffering (Dalai

Lama, 2001; Gillath, Shaver, & Mikulincer, 2005;
Halifax, 2012; Siegel & Germer, 2012). Compas-
sion is similar in many respects to empathy, but
it involves a sense of acceptance, tenderness, and
motivation to act to relieve suffering, and it tends
to result in more positive affect than does empa-
thy (Klimecki, Leiberg, Richard, & Singer, 2014).
Despite its clear connection to concern for others,
virtually no research has specifically examined the
development of compassion in children, although
some classroom interventions cite compassion as a
desired outcome (Greenberg & Harris, 2012).

Together, empathy and prosocial behavior
have been the foci of most of the empirical and
theoretical work on children’s capacity to care. Be-
cause this chapter is concerned with care for oth-
ers, we focus on empathy and prosocial behavior
in this section, emphasizing children’s comforting
of others in response to distress and/or global mea-
sures of prosociality, and omit discussion of specif-
ic noncaring social capacities such as compliance,
cooperation, social competence, affection, and
moral reasoning (but see Thompson, Chapter 16,
this volume).

Although concern for others’ welfare is part
of normative development, clear individual dif-
ferences in empathy and prosocial behavior are
evident across childhood, with some children re-
sponding to a peer’s distress with immediate and
overt concern and helpful overtures, and others
responding with wariness, hostility, indifference,
or distress of their own. These differences are
linked to important developmental outcomes,
such as peer acceptance, friendship quality, school
performance, loneliness, and aggression (Asher &
McDonald, 2009; Cassidy & Asher, 1992; Clark
& Ladd, 2000; Findlay, Girardi, & Coplan, 2006;
Ladd, Birch, & Buhs, 1999; Wentzel, 2003).
Given the theoretical basis for expecting a link
between attachment and care for others described
in the previous section, a key question becomes:
Are individual differences in children’s empathy
and prosocial behavior related to attachment?

We begin by exploring theoretical consid-
erations regarding the link between attachment
security and children’s emerging capacity to care
for others, first by exploring potential mediators of
this link, then by discussing the role of parental
sensitivity in supporting the development of both
security and care for others. We then discuss defi-
nitions and operationalizations of empathy and
prosocial behavior. Next, we review empirical
investigations of the attachment–care link from
infancy through adolescence.

38. A Lifespan Perspective on Attachment and Care for Others 881

Theoretical Considerations

Mediators

As mentioned earlier, Bowlby (1973) proposed
that security provides a foundation for the de-
velopment of children’s emotional functioning,
particularly the capacity to regulate emotions.
Ainsworth’s (1969) observations suggested that
individual differences in children’s attachment
representations guide specific patterns of behav-
ior, and that a secure IWM provides the blueprint
for mutually responsive social interaction. Both
of these concepts—emotion regulation and the
secure IWM—are relevant to empathy and pro-
social behavior, and provide potential mediating
mechanisms in the link between attachment and
care for others.

With regard to children’s emotional func-
tioning, researchers studying empathy and pro-
social behavior in children have long recognized
that multiple emotional competencies underlie
the capacity to care for others, including emotion
recognition and understanding, intersubjectiv-
ity, affective resonance, distinction between self
and other, perspective taking, and effortful con-
trol (Batson, 1991; Davis, 1996; Decety & Jack-
son, 2004; Ickes, 2003; Kochanska, 1993; Laible,
2004). Attachment has been empirically linked
to many of these, with securely attached children
consistently showing, for example, better emotion
understanding (Denham, Blair, Schmidt, & De-
Mulder, 2002; Laible & Thompson, 1998; Raikes
& Thompson, 2006; see also Thompson, Chapter
16, this volume) and better effortful control com-
pared to their insecure peers (Viddal et al., 2015).

One of the most important and well re-
searched of these competencies is emotion regula-
tion (e.g., Eisenberg & Fabes, 1992; Trommsdorff,
Friedlmeier, & Mayer, 2007), which allows chil-
dren to perceive and respond to others’ distress
without becoming overly distressed themselves.
Research has shown that behavioral and physi-
ological indicators of self-regulation are related to
children’s empathy and prosocial behavior, where-
as personal distress (i.e., self-focused, dysregulated
negative emotion) is inversely related to or un-
associated with empathy and prosocial behavior
(Eisenberg, 2000; Eisenberg & Fabes, 1990, 1991,
1995; Fabes, Eisenberg, & Eisenbud, 1993).

The extent to which emotion regulation
capacities are linked to individual differences in
attachment is striking. Attachment theory holds
that emotion regulation arises from repeated ex-
periences of caregivers’ sensitive coregulation

of children’s distress, and views this capacity as
a major mediating mechanism explaining how
early experience affects later functioning (Bowlby,
1973, 1980, 1988; Calkins & Leerkes, 2011; Cas-
sidy, 1994; Hofer, 1994; Mikulincer, Shaver, &
Pereg, 2003; Schore, 2000; Sroufe, 1996, 2000;
Thompson, 1994; see Mikulincer & Shaver,
Chapter 24, this volume). Considerable research
has demonstrated that securely attached infants,
children, and adolescents are better able to regu-
late emotional arousal (Contreras, Kerns, Weimer,
Gentzler, & Tomich, 2000; Kerns, Abraham,
Schlegelmilch, & Morgan, 2007; Kobak, Cole,
Ferenz-Gillies, Fleming, & Gamble, 1993; Kopp,
1989; Leerkes & Wong, 2012; Nachmias, Gunnar,
Mangelsdorf, Parritz, & Buss, 1996; Sroufe, 1983,
2005; see Thompson, Chapter 16, this volume).
Thus, based on theory and empirical evidence, we
join others who have proposed a model in which
emotion regulation mediates the link between at-
tachment security and care for others (e.g., Panfile
& Laible, 2012).

With regard to cognition, a second path-
way by which attachment may be linked to care
for others is via the IWM. Through repeated ex-
periences with a responsive caregiver, secure at-
tachment provides children with a mental repre-
sentation of the self as worthy of and effective in
eliciting care, of others as available and responsive
to distress, and of the world as a generally safe and
caring place. One line of evidence for this part of
the model comes from visual habituation studies of
infants’ responses to geometric representations of
a caregiver and child: a large oval and a small oval
(Johnson, Dweck, & Chen, 2007; Johnson et al.,
2010). In these studies, securely attached infants
looked longer at visual displays in which the “care-
giver” oval was unresponsive to the “child” oval’s
distress upon separation, whereas insecure infants
looked longer at displays in which the “caregiver”
oval was responsive. In each case, infants attended
longer to visual displays that were presumed to
violate their expectations—that is, their mental
representations—that distress would be met with
responsive care (in the case of secure infants) or
unresponsive care (in the case of insecure infants)
(Johnson et al., 2007, 2010). These findings pro-
vide evidence for the existence of attachment-
based expectations about how social actors re-
spond to others’ distress. Specifically, the secure
child develops a representation of others as caring,
attuned, and responsive (in addition to a represen-
tation of the self as likely to receive empathic care
from others; Bowlby, 1973; Bretherton, Ridgeway,

882 VI. SYSTeMS, CuLTure, AND CONTexT

& Cassidy, 1990). (For discussions of topics related
to the concept of the IWM, see Lyons-Ruth et al.,
1998, for the idea of implicit relational knowing, and
Waters & Waters, 2006, for the idea of secure-base
scripts.)

The precise mechanism by which the secure
model of others as caring becomes integrated into
a model of the self as caring for others remains
unclear; however, Sroufe and Fleeson (1986)
proposed that care leading to secure attachment
shows children both sides of a responsive relation-
ship, and that children can draw upon both repre-
sentations when responding to the needs of oth-
ers. Empirically, securely attached children tend to
have more positive, reciprocal friendships in child-
hood (Elicker, Englund, & Sroufe, 1992; Shulman,
Elicker, & Sroufe, 1994) and more secure IWMs
of romantic relationships in adolescence (Furman
& Wehner, 1997), suggesting that implicit knowl-
edge of what it means both to give and to receive
responsive care is conserved as children enter into
close relationships with peers. It is also possible
that children incorporate behavioral routines for
care in the same way they model other kinds of
behavior, such as eating with a spoon, brushing
teeth, dancing, or throwing a ball.

Parental Sensitivity

Beyond the roles of emotion regulation and a se-
cure IWM as mediators of the link between at-
tachment and care for others (see solid lines in
Figure 38.1), there are other conceptual models
that may further illuminate this link. One model

to consider is one in which security and care for
others share common developmental antecedents
(see dashed lines in Figure 38.1). A wealth of re-
search demonstrates that caregivers’ emotionally
attuned, consistent responsiveness predicts at-
tachment security in young children (Ainsworth,
1969; Ainsworth et al., 1978; Egeland & Farber,
1984; Isabella, 1993; van den Boom, 1994), and
theories of empathic development posit that sen-
sitive parental behavior also contributes to the
development of children’s care for others (Hoff-
man, 1977; for evidence, see Eisenberg, Fabes, &
Murphy, 1996; Eisenberg et al., 1992, 1993; Gar-
ner, 2006; Hastings, Utendale, & Sullivan, 2007;
Taylor, Eisenberg, Spinrad, Eggum, & Sulik,
2013).

In addition to being influenced by parental
sensitivity, children’s care for others appears to be
guided by rules for responding to distress. Accord-
ing to recent empirical work, even young children
(age 3 years) appear to decide which emotional
displays are “appropriate” or “inappropriate” and
show greater empathy and willingness to help an
adult experimenter whose distress is perceived as
appropriate to the harm that caused it (Hepach,
Vaish, & Tomasello, 2013b). Thus, children as-
sess the appropriateness of emotions and use this
assessment to guide their empathy and prosocial
responses. It is reasonable to suspect that children
learn these decision rules for what constitutes “ap-
propriate” distress through experiences of how
their own distress was responded to, which is a
key contributor to secure child attachment (e.g.,
Beckes & Coan, 2015; Leerkes, 2011).

FIGUrE 38.1. Model of the link between secure attachment and care for others (i.e., empathy and prosocial
behavior) in childhood. Solid lines represent the principal model presented in this chapter, in which the link
between secure attachment and care for others are mediated by (1) secure internal working models (IWMs)
of self and other, and (2) emotion regulation. Dashed lines represent an additional model, in which caregiver
sensitivity provides a common developmental antecedent for both security and care for others.

IWMs,
emotion regulation

Caregiver
sensitivity

Child secure
attachment

Child empathy,
prosocial behavior

38. A Lifespan Perspective on Attachment and Care for Others 883

The perspective of attachment theory on the
role of parenting in the development of concern for
others differs from that of other conceptual models.
Traditional theories of socialization, social learn-
ing, and conditioning tend to rest on a top-down,
behaviorally oriented approach in which parents’
instruction, modeling, reinforcement, and punish-
ment shape children’s desired social behavior and
the internalization of parental values (Maccoby,
1992). In fact, historically, much of the research
on parents’ role in the development of concern
for others has focused on socialization practices
such as discipline and modeling of prosocial ac-
tion (Hoffman, 1970). In support of these theories,
considerable evidence indicates that adults’ gentle
discipline, inductive reasoning, emotion-focused
dialogue, prosocial modeling, and authoritative,
noncontrolling parenting style promote children’s
empathy and prosocial behavior (e.g., Grusec,
1972; Krevans & Gibbs, 1996; Perry, Bussey, &
Frieberg, 1981; Rushton, 1975; also see Hastings,
Utendale, & Sullivan, 2007). More recently, these
models have included the child’s role in socializa-
tion, with a focus on how children’s temperament
and view of their parents influence their receptivity
to the socialization efforts (e.g., Grusec & Good-
now, 1994; Kochanska, 1997; Maccoby, 1992).

According to Ainsworth, Bell, and Stayton
(1974), attachment theory offers a different view.
Rather than requiring parents’ active socializa-
tion efforts, children are thought to be inherently
social, biologically predisposed to respond to the
social signals of members of their species, and in-
trinsically motivated to comply with maternal re-
quests, especially within the context of a sensitive,
trusting relationship. For instance, Ainsworth and
colleagues proposed that the greater compliance
with maternal requests that is characteristic of se-
curely attached infants reflects the mutual respon-
sivity inherent to their IWMs of relationships. (In
other words, secure children represent relation-
ships as contexts within which recognition of and
responsiveness to the needs of other people are
the norm.) The central thesis of this argument is
that “socialization results from reciprocal mother–
infant responsiveness. When the mother is less
sensitive and less responsive to her infant than is
expected in the social environment of evolution-
ary adaptedness, the infant more than likely will
be less responsive and hence less compliant to the
signals of his mother and other social compan-
ions” (pp. 118–119). Extending this view to care
for others, we can speculate that empathy and pro-
social behavior need not be explicitly taught, but

instead develop naturally in the context of a mu-
tually responsive relationship. Such a relationship
provides the repeated firsthand, felt experience of
having a secure base and safe haven in times of
distress, which may then allow secure individuals
to extend such care to distressed others. For recent
similar viewpoints about a biologically based pre-
disposition toward caring for others, see Bartal,
Decety, and Mason (2011), de Waal (2008), and
Warneken and Tomasello (2006).

To point out these distinctions between the
attachment and socialization perspectives is not to
discount the unique contributions of each to the
development of care for others in children. Ko-
chanska (2002) suggested that attachment and so-
cialization work in concert in fostering children’s
conscience, with security representing a “mutu-
ally responsive orientation” that renders children
more willing to accept and integrate parents’ so-
cialization influence. In support of this view, she
observed that the effects of positive parenting on
children’s conscience held only for securely at-
tached children (Kochanska, Aksan, Knaack, &
Rhines, 2004). Similarly, Zahn-Waxler, Radke-
Yarrow, and King (1979) posited that children
must not only witness parents’ prosocial model-
ing and be exposed to prosocial values but must
also experience parents’ empathy and prosocial actions
themselves in order to develop these capacities.
Thus, socialization may be important, but it does
not provide a full picture of parents’ role in the de-
velopment of children’s care for others; crucially,
the lived experience of having a secure base and
safe haven in times of distress provides the founda-
tion for children’s ability to regulate emotion and
care for others, upon which socialization influ-
ences can build.

In summary, multiple theoretical pathways
link attachment security to a child’s capacity to
care for others. Here we focus on how security may
contribute to the development of empathy and
prosocial behavior, particularly in response to oth-
ers’ distress.

Definitions and Operationalization

In childhood, the definition and operationaliza-
tion of care for others is particularly complex. As
described earlier, empathy is the felt, emotional
dimension of concern for others’ welfare, whereas
prosocial behavior is the active, behavioral mani-
festation of that emotion, which encompasses ac-
tions intended to benefit others. A critical distinc-
tion is that the former refers to an internal state,

884 VI. SYSTeMS, CuLTure, AND CONTexT

the latter to expressed behavior. Thus, a key issue
for researchers is how to measure each construct
with sensitivity and specificity in young children,
before self-reports of internal experience are pos-
sible.

Relatedly, some prosocial behavior may
be motivated by empathy, but not in every case
(Hastings et al., 2007). For example, a child may
share a toy with a sad peer out of compliance with
a teacher’s expectations, or out of deference to the
peer’s social dominance, rather than out of genu-
ine concern for the peer’s well-being (see Hepach,
Vaish, & Tomasello, 2013a, for consideration of
empirical methods for examining children’s under-
lying motivations for prosocial behavior). Further-
more, children’s internal experiences of empathy
may not always manifest in prosocial behavior,
particularly when the situation is complex or
when prosocial intervention would be especially
difficult. Therefore, one can neither measure chil-
dren’s prosocial behavior and infer that it reflects
empathy, nor measure empathy and assume that
prosocial behavior will follow.

Researchers mindful of this distinction have
developed separate criteria to measure each di-
mension (e.g., Zahn-Waxler, Radke-Yarrow, et
al., 1992): Empathy is reflected in young chil-
dren’s looks of concern (“concerned attention”) or
expressions of sadness in response to a sad peer,
adult, or parent; prosocial behavior takes the form
of helping, sharing, or comforting (among other
behaviors), but may or may not be a response to
others’ distress (Dunfield & Kuhlmeier, 2013).
Understanding the link between attachment and
children’s capacity to care for others requires spec-
ificity in measurement and attention to the unique
contributions of both empathy and prosocial be-
havior. With this in mind, we review empirical
work on the links between attachment and both
empathy and prosocial behavior in childhood.

Empirical Work

Several studies have examined attachment-related
differences in care for others from infancy through
adolescence. In this section, we divide these stud-
ies by developmental period (based on the age of
the children when care for others was assessed),
and further by the measurement of care (i.e., em-
pathy, prosocial behavior, or a composite). For
each developmental period, we begin with a brief
summary of age-related changes in attachment re-
lationships, care for others, or both. Then, after
reviewing studies of the link between attachment

and care for others within each age group, we dis-
cuss evidence for the purported mediational role of
child emotion regulation.

Infancy and Toddlerhood

Children’s initial attachment relationships devel-
op during their first year of life (Bowlby, 1969/1982;
see Marvin, Britner, & Russell, Chapter 13, this
volume). Early precursors of empathy are evident
during this time as well, such as affect mirroring
and “empathic distress” (Hoffman, 2001), as are
early indications of empathy (e.g., Roth-Hanania
et al., 2011, who noted modest levels of affec-
tive and cognitive empathy as early as 8 months).
Prosocial behaviors are rare in the first year of
life (Roth-Hanania et al., 2011) but become in-
creasingly common between ages 1 and 2 (Zahn-
Waxler, Radke-Yarrow, et al., 1992). By their sec-
ond birthday, almost all infants readily provide
instrumental help (Warneken & Tomasello, 2006,
reported that 92% of 18-month-old infants provid-
ed help in at least one simple situation), and some
show concerned attention or provide comfort in
response to the distress of peers, siblings, strang-
ers, or their mother (Eisenberg, Fabes, & Spinrad,
2006). In addition, even young infants are able to
make social evaluations of others based on their
prosocial and antisocial behaviors. For example,
6- and 10-month-old infants show a preference
for actors (represented by colored shapes) who
helped compared to those who hindered another
actor’s attempt to attain a goal, an evaluation that
may serve as the foundation for later moral action
(Hamlin, Wynn, & Bloom, 2007).

Surprisingly, only a handful of studies have
investigated attachment-related differences in
empathy and/or prosocial behavior among infants
and toddlers. In one study, 36-month-olds’ attach-
ment security (assessed with mothers’ ratings using
the Attachment Q-Set [AQS; Waters & Deane,
1985]) was linked to mother-rated empathy, yet
was linked only indirectly to observed prosocial
behavior through empathy (Panfile & Laible,
2012). In another study, mothers’ reports of nei-
ther their 1-year-old infants’ empathy nor proso-
cial behavior were associated with infant behavior
in the Strange Situation (Carter, Little, Briggs-
Gowan, & Kogan, 1999).

Two additional studies used composite mea-
sures containing elements of both empathy and
prosocial behavior. One longitudinal study of 22-
to 23-month-olds recorded empathic responses to-
ward an experimenter who was simulating distress

38. A Lifespan Perspective on Attachment and Care for Others 885

(Bischof-Köhler, 2000). Toddlers who had been
classified as securely attached in the Strange Situ-
ation as infants were more likely to show concern
and provide help than those who had been classi-
fied as insecurely attached. Additional longitudi-
nal evidence came from a study measuring infants’
attachment and observed care for others at both
16 and 22 months, toward both the mother and
an experimenter simulating distress. Only one of
the eight potential associations (two behaviors,
two care recipients, two time points) was signifi-
cant: Infants’ security in the Strange Situation at
22 months was positively related to their concur-
rent empathic concern for the experimenter (van
der Mark, Van IJzendoorn, & Bakermans-Kranen-
burg, 2002). We also mention a third study that,
although it lacks a measure of attachment secu-
rity, seems relevant to the links considered here.
Main and George (1985) observed children in a
day care setting and reported that abused toddlers
(who typically are insecurely attached; Cyr, Euser,
Bakermans-Kranenburg, & Van IJzendoorn, 2010)
never reacted to a peer’s distress with concern, but
instead often reacted with physical attacks, fear,
or anger.

In contrast to the mixed evidence concern-
ing infants’ and toddlers’ behaviors and emotions,
studies of their expectations about the concern that
will be shown in response to the distress of others
reveal more consistent attachment-based differ-
ences. In a series of studies using a visual habitua-
tion paradigm (briefly described earlier), Johnson
and colleagues (2007, 2010) demonstrated that
securely attached infants expected others (i.e.,
a large oval) to help someone in distress (i.e., a
small oval simulating distress), whereas insecure-
avoidant and insecure-resistant infants expected
others to withhold comfort. These studies suggest
that infants’ attachment patterns influence their
representations of the ways in which people treat
each other, including whether caring and comfort-
ing are typical responses to distress.

Earlier, we described a mediation model (Fig-
ure 38.1) in which attachment security supports
the development of effective emotion regula-
tion, which in turn underlies children’s ability to
show concern for others without becoming overly
aroused with personal distress. The evidence for
each of these pathways in infancy and toddlerhood
(from attachment to emotion regulation, and from
emotion regulation to empathy and prosocial be-
havior) supports the possibility that such a medi-
ating pathway exists during this developmental
period. As noted earlier, several investigators have

argued that the quality of infants’ developing at-
tachments contributes to individual differences in
emotion regulation (e.g., Cassidy, 1994), and sev-
eral studies provide empirical evidence (e.g., Hill-
Soderlund et al., 2008; Kim, Stifter, Philbrook, &
Teti, 2014; Sherman, Stupica, Dykas, Ramos-Mar-
cuse, & Cassidy, 2013). Infants’ greater regulatory
skills, in turn, have been associated with prosocial
behaviors and empathy (e.g., Carter et al., 1999),
as well as the ability to maintain an optimal level
of arousal in the face of others’ distress (Geangu,
Benga, Stahl, & Striano, 2011), a crucial part of
empathic concern (Davidov, Zahn-Waxler, Roth-
Hanania, & Knafo, 2013). A recent test of this
mediation model revealed that toddlers’ emotion
regulation mediated the association between at-
tachment security and empathy (all mother-re-
ported variables), such that more secure toddlers
were better able to regulate their emotions, which
then predicted greater empathy (Panfile & Laible,
2012). Furthermore, greater empathy in this study
predicted more prosocial behavior toward an ex-
perimenter seeking a pacifier to soothe the (re-
corded) cries of a nearby baby.

In summary, few studies have examined the
link between attachment and caring for others
during the infancy/toddler period. The mixed
evidence that emerges from these studies suggests
that other factors may relate to empathy and pro-
social behavior more than attachment during this
period. Such factors may include genetics (Zahn-
Waxler, Robinson, & Emde, 1992, reported modest
evidence for heritability of empathy and prosocial
behavior at 14 and 20 months) and temperament
(van der Mark et al., 2002, found that tempera-
mental fearfulness in 16-month-old girls predicted
less empathic concern for a distressed stranger at
22 months). The possibility that infants and tod-
dlers are too young to experience complex social
feelings such as empathy in the ways that become
more evident by the preschool years may also in-
fluence the consistency of the link between at-
tachment and caring for others during this period.

Preschool

The preschool period ushers in developmental
changes that affect both children’s attachment
relationships, such as the emergence of a goal-
corrected partnership (see Marvin et al., Chapter
13, this volume), and factors underlying care for
others, such as maturing emotion regulation and
enhanced executive functioning (Eisenberg &
Sulik, 2012; Rothbart, Sheese, Rueda, & Posner,

886 VI. SYSTeMS, CuLTure, AND CONTexT

2011). Opportunities to care for peers in the class-
room or for younger siblings in the home increase
as preschoolers spend more time in the company
of other children.

Evidence for attachment-related differences
in care for others during this developmental pe-
riod emerges from some studies and not from oth-
ers. Two longitudinal studies of attachment found
links with later empathy. In one of these, 1-year-
old infants who were classified as secure in the
Strange Situation were later rated by their mothers
as more sympathetic to their peers’ distress at age
3 compared to children who were insecure as in-
fants (Waters, Wippman, & Sroufe, 1979). In the
other study, secure attachment (mother-reported
with the AQS) and care for others were measured
at both 42 and 48 months. Although neither con-
current link was significant, attachment security
at 42 months predicted concerned facial expres-
sions during a baby-cry procedure at 48 months,
even after researchers controlled for earlier em-
pathy (Murphy & Laible, 2013). In contrast, in
a third longitudinal study, attachment quality in
the Strange Situation at age 2 did not predict chil-
dren’s reports of their affective responses to emo-
tional photographs at age 5 (Iannotti, Cummings,
Pierrehumbert, Milano, & Zahn-Waxler, 1992).

Studies of prosocial behavior are also some-
what mixed. For example, when children (ages
2–7) were left alone in an unfamiliar room with
their younger (toddler) sibling, children rated as
more secure by their mothers on the AQS were
more likely to respond to the sibling’s distress with
comfort (Teti & Ablard, 1989); however, Volling
(2001) found no differences in sibling comfort-
ing between 4-year-olds previously classified as
secure or insecure in the Strange Situation (with
both mother and father) at 12 months. Addition-
ally, in two studies of preschool children, child at-
tachment (mother-reported AQS) was related to
concurrent mother-reported prosocial behavior di-
rectly (Laible, 2006) and, in a separate sample, in-
directly via child effortful control (Laible, 2004).

When peers are the targets of children’s
prosocial behavior, evidence is similarly mixed,
although the inconsistencies may be due to dif-
ferences in the measurement of attachment. For
example, security in the Strange Situation at age
2 predicted observed prosocial behavior toward a
peer 3 years later (Iannotti et al., 1992). In con-
trast, security assessed with an observer-rated AQS
did not relate to naturalistic observations of pre-
schoolers’ prosociality in the classroom (Mitchell-
Copeland, Denham, & DeMulder, 1997), nor did

mother- and father-reported AQS relate to teach-
er-reported prosociality (Lafrenière, Provost, &
Dubeau, 1992). There is also some evidence that
secure children are more prosocial with peers than
are avoidant, but not resistant, children, a finding
that is only possible using a measure of attachment
that differentiates the two insecure subtypes (e.g.,
the Strange Situation). Children who had been se-
cure in the Strange Situation at 12 and 18 months
were observed to be more prosocial and empathic
in the classroom as preschoolers than those who
had been avoidant, but not more than those who
had been resistant (Kestenbaum, Farber, & Sroufe,
1989). In the same sample, Sroufe (1983) found
that teacher reports of empathic responding were
“characteristic” of children who had been secure
infants and “uncharacteristic” of children who had
been avoidant. The children who had been clas-
sified as resistant were between these other two
groups.

Turning again to the model wherein the link
between attachment and children’s care for others
is mediated by emotion regulation, we note that
emotion regulation continues to develop through-
out preschool and remains an important contribu-
tor to social interactions. Preschoolers vary widely
in their ability to self-regulate, with individual
differences in this ability relating to differences in
empathy (e.g., Eisenberg & Fabes, 1995). Well-
regulated preschoolers can focus on the distress of
others in need and respond with empathy because
they are better able to control their own emotional
arousal (Eisenberg et al., 1990). A recent longi-
tudinal study provides some additional evidence
for preschoolers’ emotion regulatory capacities
predicting concern for others using physiological
measures of respiratory sinus arrythmia (RSA),
an indicator of heart rate variability thought to
underlie individual differences in emotion regu-
lation and arousal (Taylor, Eisenberg, & Spinrad,
2015). In this study, baseline RSA (for girls and
boys) and RSA suppression (for boys only) at 42
months were positively correlated with concurrent
mother-reported sympathy. Moreover, a marginal-
ly significant indirect path was evident from base-
line RSA, at 42 months, to greater mother- and
teacher-reported sympathy, at 72 and 84 months,
through effortful control at 52 months.

In summary, the majority of studies support
a link between secure attachment and care for
others among preschoolers, although some incon-
sistent findings highlight the need for further re-
search. It is worth noting that longitudinal studies
provide more consistent evidence than concurrent

38. A Lifespan Perspective on Attachment and Care for Others 887

studies when care for others is measured during the
preschool period and attachment is measured dur-
ing infancy/toddlerhood, particularly when peers
are the targets of care. This pattern could be due to
chance, methodological constraints (e.g., perhaps
prosocial behavior and empathy are more easily
measured in preschoolers), or developmental reali-
ties (e.g., early attachment may play a larger role
than current attachment in preschoolers’ care for
others, particularly their peers in the classroom);
future research could help tease apart these pos-
sibilities. We also note that some studies using the
Strange Situation as the measure of attachment
quality provide evidence for differential relations
between the insecure subtypes, with secure chil-
dren showing more care for others than avoidant,
but not resistant, children.

Early and Middle Childhood

By early and middle childhood, peers begin to play
a greater role in children’s social development,
and demonstration of empathy and prosocial be-
havior toward peers contributes to friendship for-
mation and popularity (Eisenberg et al., 2006).
Developmental advances in theory of mind (i.e.,
understanding that other people have minds),
emotion regulation, and cognitive flexibility
allow for enhanced understanding of others’ needs
(e.g., Devine & Hughes, 2013; Murphy, Eisen-
berg, Fabes, Shepard, & Guthrie, 1999; Piekny
& Maehler, 2013). The attachment behavioral
system makes significant developmental advances
as well: Its goal shifts from caregiver proximity to
caregiver accessibility, as children are able to han-
dle longer separations with the knowledge that at-
tachment figures will be available if needed (see
Kerns & Brumariu, Chapter 17, this volume).

Studies examining attachment-related differ-
ences in care for others during early and middle
childhood generally assess only behavior (e.g.,
volunteering to help others, kindness to younger
children), rather than empathic internal states.
In fact, all but one study assessed care for others
using parent or teacher reports of prosocial behav-
ior. The single exception contained observations
of 6-year-olds’ unsolicited prosocial interactions
with their younger siblings in the home and found
no behavioral differences between children with
secure and insecure attachment histories (assessed
at 12 months with the Strange Situation; Volling
& Belsky, 1992).

Among the studies using parent and teacher
reports of prosocial behavior, the evidence favors

a positive link between security of attachment and
prosocial behavior. Two longitudinal studies pro-
vide evidence that children who were securely at-
tached earlier in life are more prosocial than chil-
dren who had been avoidant, but not more than
children who had been resistant. In one of these
studies, 8- and 9-year-old children who had been
secure in the Strange Situation at 15 months were
rated as more prosocial (based on a composite of
parent and teacher reports) than those who had
been avoidant, but not those who had been resis-
tant (Bohlin, Hagekull, & Rydell, 2000). A con-
current link between attachment and prosocial
behavior was absent in this study, however, when
childhood attachment was assessed with the Sepa-
ration Anxiety Test (SAT; Slough & Greenberg,
1990; adapted from Klagsbrun & Bowlby, 1976),
a measure that does not differentiate insecure sub-
groups. In the other study, 5-year-olds responding
to a modified version of the Attachment Story
Completion Task (ASCT; Bretherton & Ridge-
way, 1990), with themes indicative of secure at-
tachment representations to parents were rated as
more prosocial by their teachers 1 year later than
children who had responded with avoidant (but
not resistant) themes (Rydell, Bohlin, & Thorell,
2005). An additional longitudinal study suggests
that children with secure attachment histories are
more prosocial than those with disorganized, but
not avoidant or resistant, attachment histories
(Seibert & Kerns, 2015). In this study, third- and
fifth-grade children who had been classified dis-
organized at 36 months in the Strange Situation
were rated as less prosocial by their mothers than
children who had been secure; ratings of previ-
ously avoidant and resistant children did not dif-
fer from those of any other group. Teacher ratings
in this study followed a similar trend, with secure
children given the highest ratings and disorganized
children given the lowest; however, although om-
nibus analyses revealed significant differences in
prosocial behavior among the four classifications,
post hoc tests to clarify the nature of these differ-
ences were not significant. In contrast to these
three studies, a fourth longitudinal study reported
no concurrent or longitudinal associations be-
tween attachment (measured at 6 years with ob-
served separation and reunion behavior; Main &
Cassidy, 1988, and at 8 years with a modified ver-
sion of the ASCT) and teacher reports of prosocial
behavior at 6 and 8 years (Bureau & Moss, 2010).

Two studies with concurrent measures of at-
tachment and care for others offer mixed findings.
First, in a sample of low-income, ethnically diverse

888 VI. SYSTeMS, CuLTure, AND CONTexT

families, 5-year-olds’ attachment-related narra-
tives in a story stem task were related to teacher
reports—but not mother reports—of the children’s
prosocial behavior controlling for verbal IQ and
sociodemographic risk (Futh, O’Connor, Matias,
Green, & Scott, 2008). Second, late elementary
school children’s perceived attachments to both
mother and father (assessed with the self-report
Security Scale; Kerns, Klepac, & Cole, 1996) were
associated with prosocial behavior (a composite of
mother, father, and teacher reports), but only in an
overall model that also included “positive parental
affection,” and only for girls (Michiels, Grietens,
Onghena, & Kuppens, 2010). When child-report-
ed attachment was tested as a unique predictor, the
association disappeared.

In considering which factors may explain
these attachment-based differences in care for oth-
ers, we once again turn to the example of the emo-
tion regulation mediation model (Figure 1). The
evidence supporting this model in early and mid-
dle childhood comes from several studies showing
that children’s ability to regulate emotional arous-
al predicts greater empathy and prosocial behavior,
whereas their dysregulated emotions in response to
others’ distress (i.e., personal distress) relate nega-
tively to their concern for others (e.g., Eisenberg,
Fabes, et al., 1996; Eisenberg et al., 1995, 1998;
Fabes, Eisenberg, Karbon, Troyer, & Switzer, 1994;
Rothbart, Ahadi, & Hershey, 1994). Additionally,
a few studies can be viewed as providing evidence
relevant to the full mediational model because
they indicate that sensitive parenting (which is
consistently linked to attachment security) pre-
dicts emotion regulation during early and middle
childhood, which in turn predicts child prosocial
behavior during this developmental period (see,
e.g., Chan, 2011; Davidov & Grusec, 2006).

In conclusion, studies of attachment and
care for others in early and middle childhood, as is
the case in other developmental periods, are few.
In fact, studies of attachment-related differences
in empathy during early and middle childhood
do not, to our knowledge, exist. The research on
prosocial behavior, however, supports a modest as-
sociation. As with the preschool period, some evi-
dence points to diminished care for others among
insecure-avoidant but not insecure-resistant chil-
dren. We also note another pattern similar to that
evident in the preschool period: Longitudinal as-
sociations between early-life attachment security
and care for others in early and middle childhood
are more likely to be present than links between
attachment and prosocial behavior when mea-

sured concurrently. Once again, more research
is needed, particularly studies using more diverse
measures of children’s care for others, beyond par-
ent or teacher reports of behavior.

Adolescence

As children enter adolescence, close, intimate
friendships and romantic relationships begin to
form, opening the possibility of attachment to
peers, as well as the potential for practicing the
provision of care within these new relational con-
texts. Significant advances in cognitive and brain
development (Paus, 2009; Piaget, 1972), provide
adolescents with a more complex understanding
of others’ emotions and needs, and sophisticated
meta-awareness allows adolescents to report more
accurately on their own empathy and prosocial
behavior. Moreover, adolescents’ representations
of specific previous and current attachment re-
lationships are gradually joined to form a more
global, integrated attachment organization (see
Allen & Tan, Chapter 19, this volume). Adoles-
cent attachment is typically examined through
self-report measures of attachment to parents
(e.g., the Inventory of Parent and Peer Attach-
ment [IPPA]; Armsden & Greenberg, 1987), self-
report measures of attachment style more broadly
(e.g., the ECR (Brennan et al., 1998), or an in-
terview-based measure of “state of mind with re-
spect to attachment” (the AAI; George, Kaplan,
& Main, 1985).

Given the similar methods used for assess-
ing attachment and care for others in adults and
adolescents, and the multitude of studies on at-
tachment-based differences in care for others in
adulthood (reviewed in the next section), it is sur-
prising that few studies have examined this link
during adolescence. The existing studies, however,
consistently find that secure adolescents are more
empathic and prosocial than insecure adoles-
cents, which provides a point of continuity with
the adult literature. Using the IPPA (Armsden &
Greenberg, 1987) and the Interpersonal Reactiv-
ity Index (IRI; Davis, 1980), Laible, Carlo, and
Raffaelli (2000) found that 16-year-olds reporting
higher secure attachment to peers (but not to par-
ents) also reported being more empathic, and a
combination of high attachment security scores in
relation to both peers and parents predicted the
highest levels of empathy (although see Andretta
et al., 2015, for evidence with African American
adolescents involved in the juvenile criminal jus-
tice system indicating that, using the same mea-

38. A Lifespan Perspective on Attachment and Care for Others 889

sures, secure adolescents were not more empathic
than their insecure peers; they were, however,
substantially more prosocial on the self-reported
Adolescent Prosocial Behavior Scale [APBS; An-
dretta, Woodland, & Worrell, 2014]). In a similar
study, Thompson and Gullone (2008) found that
12- to 18-year-old adolescents reporting higher
scores on a measure of secure attachment to par-
ents (the parent scale of the revised IPPA; Gul-
lone & Robinson, 2005) also reported being more
empathic (using the Index of Empathy for Chil-
dren and Adolescents; Bryant, 1982) and proso-
cial (using the Strengths and Difficulties Ques-
tionnaire; SDQ; Goodman, 2001). In that study
(Thompson & Gullone, 2008), empathy partially
mediated the link between attachment and pro-
social behavior. In a study with 11- to 16-year-old
British students using the same measures of at-
tachment (revised IPPA) and prosocial behavior
(SDQ), higher attachment security scores were
associated with more prosocial behavior (Old-
field, Humphrey, & Hebron, 2015; see also Chan
et al., 2013, for similar results in an ethnically
and racially diverse sample using a different self-
report measure of prosocial behavior). Another
study using the IPPA found evidence for a model
wherein attachment to mother and/or peers af-
fects bullying behavior in seventh, eighth, and
ninth graders indirectly via their self-reported
empathy on the Basic Empathy Scale (BES; Jol-
liffe & Farrington, 2006). For boys, cognitive em-
pathy mediated the indirect effects of attachment
to both mother and peers on bullying behavior,
whereas for girls, affective empathy mediated the
effect of attachment to peers on bullying (You,
Lee, Lee, & Kim, 2015). Consistent with these
studies using the IPPA, studies with other mea-
sures of attachment demonstrate positive links as
well. One such study found that the level of self-
reported secure attachment to the mother and to
a friend (using the Relationship Questionnaire;
Bartholomew & Horowitz, 1991), but not to fa-
ther, related to self-reported prosocial behavior
among youth in middle and early high school
(Markiewicz, Doyle, & Brendgen, 2001; see also
Keskin & Çam, 2010, for similar evidence among
Turkish youth).

Notably, the two studies from this develop-
mental period with measures of attachment that
differentiate the insecure subtypes—the observer-
rated Attachment Behavior Classification Proce-
dure (ABCP; Cobb, 1996; Hilburn-Cobb, 1998)
and the interview-based AAI—found that only
dismissing, and not preoccupied, adolescents re-

ported lower empathy/prosocial behavior, mirror-
ing some of the findings from studies of preschool-
ers and grade school children demonstrating lower
empathy/prosocial behavior among avoidant, but
not resistant, children. In one of these studies,
using the ABCP, both secure and preoccupied ado-
lescents (ages 11–18) reported greater empathy on
the IRI than avoidant adolescents (Hilburn-Cobb,
2004). In the other study, using the AAI, 11th-
grade students with a secure/autonomous state of
mind were more likely than students with an inse-
cure/dismissing state of mind to be nominated by
their peers as being prosocial (Dykas, Ziv, & Cas-
sidy, 2008).

We again consider the emotion regulation
mediation model described in relation to previ-
ous developmental periods. Adolescence is an
important period for the development of brain
regions involved in emotion regulation and ex-
ecutive functioning, such as the prefrontal cortex
and anterior cingulate cortex; it is not until late
adolescence that these regions reach full maturity
(Decety & Meyer, 2008). In support of our media-
tion model, evidence suggests that teens who are
more effective at regulating their emotions are
also more prosocial (Cui et al., 2015; Kanacri, Pas-
torelli, Eisenberg, Zuffianò, & Caprara, 2013) and
empathic (MacDermott, Gullone, Allen, King, &
Tonge, 2010), whereas teens who struggle with
self-regulation, such as those with conduct disor-
der, are less empathic than their peers (Cohen &
Strayer, 1996). Moreover, considerable research
indicates that secure adolescents are more effec-
tive at regulating their emotions than insecure ad-
olescents, and use more adaptive forms of emotion
regulation (e.g., Cooper, Shaver, & Collins, 1998;
Kobak & Sceery, 1988; Zimmermann, Maier, Win-
ter, & Grossmann, 2001).

In summary, the evidence suggests that se-
curely attached adolescents are more empathic
and prosocial than their insecurely attached coun-
terparts, mirroring evidence from the adult litera-
ture (reviewed in the next section). More studies
of this developmental period are needed, especial-
ly ones using non-self-report measures, to provide
a more fully developed understanding of the role of
secure attachment in adolescents’ care for others.

Empirical Studies of Children
and Adolescents: Discussion

Research to date provides moderate evidence for
a link between attachment security and care for
others in childhood. The majority of the empiri-

890 VI. SYSTeMS, CuLTure, AND CONTexT

cal work has focused on preschool-age children,
utilizing both adult report and observational mea-
sures in naturalistic and laboratory settings, with
the weight of the evidence in favor of the hypoth-
esized link. In early and middle childhood, stud-
ies have employed a wider variety of methods for
assessing attachment and care for others and have
yielded less conclusive findings. By the time chil-
dren enter adolescence, however, the use of self-
report measures provides a more direct, standard-
ized methodology for tapping children’s empathic
and prosocial capacities. Accordingly, although
studies with adolescents are few, they provide the
most consistent support for an association between
attachment security and concern for others before
adulthood, and these studies offer a point of con-
tinuity with findings from the adult literature (Mi-
kulincer & Shaver, 2005).

The inconsistent findings in the research
on children merit exploration. Methodological
differences across studies, sometimes as a result
of child age, may account for some of the incon-
sistencies. Before the use of self-report measures
becomes possible in adolescence, questionnaire
measures of care for others alternately tap parents’
and teachers’ perceptions of children’s apparent
concern for peer distress, tendency to share with
others spontaneously, helpfulness toward adults, or
a combination of these. These reports are likely
shaped in part by normative levels of care for oth-
ers in the child’s culture or social group, as well as
reporter biases, such as teachers’ esteem for more
compliant children or parents’ social desirability
tendencies and the degree to which the parents
hold prosocial values themselves. When observa-
tional measures are used, children’s care for others
may be influenced by contextual factors such as a
child’s relationship to the person in distress (e.g.,
sibling, peer, mother, teacher, experimenter), the
presence of other individuals, the salience of emo-
tional cues, and the setting in which observation
occurs (e.g., classroom, playground, home, labora-
tory), which also may influence the degree of felt
security the child experiences in the moment he
or she witnesses others’ distress. Both the variety
of measures employed and the multiplicity of fac-
tors influencing children’s emotions and behavior
at any one moment are likely to give rise to vari-
ability in the data.

Beyond the diversity of measures used, a
more fundamental distinction can be made be-
tween measures of care for others in the presence–
absence of an emotional display (i.e., whether
children are responding to distress or to a non-

emotional need, such as a bid for instrumental
help). This is an important distinction to make
when considering the role played by secure at-
tachment in emotional development. Specifically,
security fosters the development of cognitive and
regulatory skills that support children’s ability to
respond to others’ distress, such as emotion regula-
tion and emotion understanding (e.g., Panfile &
Laible, 2012), which may not play as large a role in
children’s prosocial response to nondistressed oth-
ers. Whereas measures of empathy almost always
exclusively involve response to emotion, several
of the studies of prosocial behavior reviewed here,
particularly studies using mother- and teacher-re-
ports, simultaneously assessed children’s ability to
comfort or demonstrate compassion in response to
distress, along with children’s responses to instru-
mental or material needs (e.g., “helps clean up,”
“shares toys”) in the absence of emotional stimuli.
Given recent evidence that prosocial behavior
is a multifaceted construct, and that comforting,
sharing, and instrumental helping behaviors show
unique developmental trajectories (Dunfield &
Kuhlmeier, 2013), unique neural and parenting
correlates (Brownell, Svetlova, Anderson, Nich-
ols, & Drummond, 2013; Paulus, Kühn-Popp,
Licata, Sodian, & Meinhardt, 2013), and few in-
tercorrelations among types of prosocial behavior
(e.g., Richman, Berry, Bittle, & Himan, 1988),
these disparate forms of behavior may have differ-
ential relations with attachment. Perhaps, for ex-
ample, comforting, which typically occurs within
an emotional context, relates to secure attach-
ment, whereas other forms of prosocial behavior
do not.

An additional explanation for the inconsis-
tent findings in studies of children concerns the
possible nonlinear relation between attachment
and care for others. Investigators of this topic
have observed that children with secure attach-
ment histories score neither extremely high nor
extremely low on measures of care for others, and
propose that middle scores may be optimal for
young children (van der Mark et al., 2002). This
may help to account for findings from some stud-
ies that the highest frequencies of empathic be-
havior were from children of severely depressed
mothers or from single mothers who depended
on their children as a source of comfort (Radke-
Yarrow & Zahn-Waxler, 1984; Rehberg & Rich-
man, 1989; Richman et al., 1988). Indeed, young
children of depressed mothers are more likely to
develop disorganized attachments, characterized
by caregiving toward the mother and parent–child

38. A Lifespan Perspective on Attachment and Care for Others 891

role reversal (Teti, Gelfand, Messinger, & Isabella,
1995; Van IJzendoorn, Schuengel, & Bakermans-
Kranenburg, 1999). Relatedly, Eisenberg and col-
leagues (1995) have argued that maintenance of
a moderate, but nonaversive, level of emotional
arousal is important for feeling sympathy in the
absence of debilitating personal distress; it may
be that attachment security helps maintain an
optimal level of arousal, such that secure children
neither avoid responding to others’ distress nor
engage in “compulsive caregiving” out of personal
distress. Consideration of “compulsive caregiving”
may also help to explain why insecure-resistant
children sometimes do not show reduced proso-
cial behavior; for these children, providing care
for others may serve as an adaptive strategy for
maintaining closeness with others, even if the
care is motivated by personal distress rather than
genuine, attuned concern for others’ welfare (for
discussion of compulsive care and adult anxious
attachment, see Bowlby, 1980; Feeney & Collins,
2001; Kunce & Shaver, 1994).

Another possibility is that the inconsistent
findings are in part due to moderating factors such
as parent socialization. As previously mentioned,
although attachment and socialization are con-
structs from distinct theoretical frameworks and
have unique pathways to care for others in child-
hood, there is some evidence that attachment and
socialization interact to predict moral develop-
ment (Kochanska et al., 2004). Security may pro-
vide a foundation upon which socialization can
build a stronger ethic of care across development.
When measured within the same study, the unique
effects of attachment and socialization practices
(e.g., elaborative discourse, response to distress,
gentle discipline) may reveal a more complete and
nuanced picture of the roots of care for others in
childhood.

Finally, we cannot rule out the possibility that
attachment does not, in fact, play a role in chil-
dren’s care for others, and that the links observed
thus far are explained by other factors, such as
parent socialization, genetics, child temperament,
cultural or contextual influences, or interactions
with teachers and peers. It may be that parents
who use sensitive, warm discipline and reinforce
prosocial behavior also use sensitive parenting
more broadly, contributing to children’s care for
others and to secure attachment via independent
pathways. Alternatively, there is some evidence
that more empathic parents tend to have securely
attached children (Oppenheim, Koren-Karie, &
Sagi, 2001; Stern, Borelli, & Smiley, 2015), so it

may be that secure children learn to empathize
simply by observing empathic adult models, or
that empathy is transmitted from parent to child
via genetic mechanisms (Knafo, Zahn-Waxler,
Van Hulle, Robinson, & Rhee, 2008). It is also
possible that children with high negative emo-
tionality (i.e., a fearful temperament) elicit in-
sensitive parental behavior and are more prone to
personal distress, limiting their capacity to care for
others. These and other pathways merit explora-
tion as we consider new directions for research on
the development of children’s concern for others.

Caring for Others in adulthood

Adult attachment researchers in the fields of per-
sonality and social psychology have tended to
consider prosocial motives, emotions, and behav-
iors as related to the caregiving behavioral system
proposed by Bowlby (1969/1982) in his effort to
explain why parents (and also older children, as
well as adults other than the parents) respond
to an infant’s, and indeed to any person’s, needs
for help, protection, or support (e.g., Mikulincer,
Shaver, & Gillath, 2008; Shaver, Mikulincer, &
Shemesh-Iron, 2010). Although this reliance on
the caregiving system construct is not essential for
studying links between attachment orientations
and prosocial emotions and behavior (and was not
emphasized in the previous section of this chap-
ter), it has proved to be a useful way to concep-
tualize adults’ responses to people in need. That
is, caregiving is not only a primary ingredient of
parental behavior but also a major part of romantic
and marital relationships, and a key to all forms of
prosocial behavior in adulthood.

An adult’s caregiving behavior is related to
his or her attachment orientation because the pa-
rameters of the attachment and caregiving systems
are shaped by some of the same forces (most nota-
bly, parenting), and because attachment insecurity
involves a degree of self-focus and self-protection
that interferes with attention to others’ needs
(just as attachment insecurity interferes with cu-
riosity and exploration in infancy, according to
Ainsworth et al., 1978). The two major kinds of
attachment insecurity, anxiety and avoidance, are
therefore expected to have somewhat different
implications for providing care and support to a
person in need. Anxiety is associated with feelings
of vulnerability and a focus on one’s own negative
feelings (in particular, what empathy researcher

892 VI. SYSTeMS, CuLTure, AND CONTexT

Daniel Batson [1991, 2010] called “personal dis-
tress,” as distinct from empathy). Avoidance is as-
sociated with not feeling comfortable getting close
to other people and attempting to avoid situations
that interfere with personal independence (Miku-
lincer et al., 2008).

Theoretically, the goal of the caregiving sys-
tem is to reduce other people’s suffering, to protect
them from harm, and to foster their growth and
development—in other words, to provide a safe
haven and secure base for them (Collins, Ford,
Guichard, Kane, & Feeney, 2010; B. C. Feeney &
Woodhouse, Chapter 36, this volume; Mikulincer
et al., 2008). According to Collins and colleagues
(2010), the caregiving system is activated in two
kinds of situations: (1) when another person has to
cope with danger, stress, or discomfort and is either
openly seeking help or would clearly benefit from
it, and (2) when another person has an opportuni-
ty for exploration, learning, or mastery and either
needs help in taking advantage of the opportunity
or seems eager to talk about it or to be validated
for having aspirations or achieving desired goals.
In either case, once a person’s caregiving system is
activated (whether appropriately or not), he or she
calls on a repertoire of behaviors aimed at restor-
ing or advancing another person’s welfare. This
repertoire includes showing interest in the other
person’s problems or goals; providing an open, ac-
cepting space in which the other person’s needs
are heard; affirming the other’s competence and
ability to cope with the situation; expressing love
and affection; providing advice and instrumental
aid as needed, without interfering with the per-
son’s own problem-solving efforts or exploratory
activities; and admiring and applauding the per-
son’s successes.

Optimal functioning of the caregiving sys-
tem requires psychological assets associated with
attachment security, as explained throughout the
earlier sections of this chapter—assets such as
emotion regulation strategies that allow caregiv-
ers to deal effectively with the discomfort entailed
by witnessing another person’s distress. Deficient
emotion regulation can cause a caregiver to feel
overwhelmed by personal distress, to slip into the
role of another needy person rather than occupy-
ing the role of caregiver, or to maintain distance
from the needy other as a way of reducing his or
her own negative emotions. Optimal caregiving
also requires effective self-regulation strategies
beyond emotion regulation. Addressing another
person’s problems often requires temporary sus-
pension of one’s own goals and plans. Moreover,

one has to diagnose the other person’s problem,
develop a plan for assisting the person sensitively
and effectively, and suppress motives that inter-
fere with effective helping. According to Collins,
Guichard, Ford, and Feeney (2006), caregiving
can be disrupted by social skills deficits, depletion
of psychological resources, lack of a desire to help,
and egoistic motives that interfere with empathic
sensitivity.

Attachment Orientations
and Patterns of Care

Bowlby (1969/1982) noticed that activation of
the attachment system can interfere with the op-
eration of the caregiving system because potential
caregivers may feel that obtaining safety and care
for themselves is more urgent than providing a
safe haven or secure base for others. At such times,
adults are likely to be so focused on their own vul-
nerability that they lack the mental resources nec-
essary to attend sensitively to others’ needs. Only
when a sense of security is restored can a potential
caregiver perceive others as not only potential
sources of security and support but also as worthy
human beings who themselves need and deserve
sympathy and support.

Reasoning along these lines, adult attach-
ment researchers (e.g., Collins et al., 2010; Miku-
lincer et al., 2008) hypothesized that attachment
security is an important foundation for optimal
caregiving. Moreover, being secure implies (given
the theory and the research reviewed in earlier
sections of this chapter) that a secure person has
witnessed, experienced, and benefited from his or
her attachment figures’ effective care (with those
figures being either parents or other important
care providers), which provides a model to follow
when the person comes to occupy the caregiving
role. Because secure individuals are more comfort-
able with intimacy and interdependence (Hazan
& Shaver, 1987), they can allow other people to
approach them for help and express feelings of
vulnerability and need (Lehman, Ellard, & Wort-
man, 1986). Secure individuals’ confidence about
other people’s goodwill makes it easier for them to
construe others as deserving sympathy and sup-
port, and their positive model of self allows them
to feel more confident about their ability to handle
another person’s needs while effectively regulating
their own emotions and helping behavior.

Adults who are insecure with respect to at-
tachment (i.e., are either anxious or avoidant, or
both) are likely to find it difficult to provide ef-

38. A Lifespan Perspective on Attachment and Care for Others 893

fective care. Although those who suffer from at-
tachment anxiety may have some of the qualities
necessary for effective caregiving (e.g., willingness
to experience and express emotions, and comfort
with psychological intimacy and physical close-
ness), their deficits in self-regulation make them
vulnerable to personal distress, which interferes
with sensitive and responsive care. Their tenden-
cy to become sidetracked by self-focused worries,
misplaced projections, and blurred interpersonal
boundaries can interfere with focusing accurately
on other people’s pain and suffering. Moreover,
attachment-anxious adults’ lack of confidence
can make it difficult for them to adopt the role of
“stronger and wiser” pillar of support. In addition,
their strong desire for closeness and approval may
cause them to become intrusive or overinvolved,
blurring the distinction between another person’s
welfare and their own.

Attachment-anxious individuals may use
caregiving as a means of satisfying their own unmet
needs for closeness, acceptance, and inclusion.
According to Collins and colleagues (2010), these
self-centered motives result in intrusive caregiv-
ing that is insensitive to a needy person’s signals.
Anxious people may try to get too close or too in-
volved when an interaction partner does not want
help, and this can generate resentment, anger, and
conflict, which in turn leave the anxious person
feeling unappreciated or falsely accused.

Avoidant adults’ lack of comfort with close-
ness and negative working models of others may
also interfere with optimal caregiving. Their dis-
comfort with expressions of need and dependence
may cause them to back away rather than get in-
volved with someone whose needs are strongly
expressed. As a result, avoidant individuals may
attempt to detach themselves emotionally and
physically from needy others, may feel superior
to those who are vulnerable or distressed, or may
experience disdainful pity rather than empathic
concern (Mikulincer et al., 2008). In some cases,
avoidant people’s cynical or hostile attitudes and
negative models of others may replace sympathy or
compassion with schadenfreude, or gloating.

Providing Care in Parent–Child
and Romantic Relationships

B. C. Feeney and Woodhouse (Chapter 36, this
volume) reviewed studies of caregiving in parent–
child relationships, demonstrating that parents’
attachment orientations systematically affect their
caregiving-related mental representations and be-

haviors (see also Jones, Cassidy, & Shaver, 2015a,
2015b). Secure parents find it easier to perceive
their children’s needs accurately and to respond
sensitively and appropriately. Anxious parents
tend to be anxious themselves, and their self-
preoccupation and biased perceptions can cause
them to miss or misread their children’s needs and
calls for help. Avoidant parents tend not to be
comfortable with children’s expressions of need,
and they act in ways that lead their children to
become more emotionally inhibited and self-
reliant. Viewed in terms of empathy or kindness,
these insecure parents’ attitudes and behaviors are
problematic.

In the romantic and marital domains, re-
search and common sense both indicate that a per-
son’s ability and willingness to respond sensitively
to a relationship partner’s needs are major deter-
minants of relationship quality (e.g., Collins &
Feeney, 2000). Adult romantic love involves not
only the attachment system, which helps maintain
proximity to a relationship partner, but also the
caregiving system, which motivates one partner to
attend and respond to the other’s needs (Shaver &
Hazan, 1988). As a result, romantic and marital re-
lationships provide good opportunities to discover
how attachment patterns shape caregiving orienta-
tions. Many of the relevant studies are reviewed
by B. C. Feeney and Woodhouse (Chapter 36, this
volume); others are discussed in detail by Miku-
lincer and Shaver (2007a). These studies indicate
that attachment insecurity interferes with com-
passion, empathy, and loving-kindness in couple
relationships. A few examples are provided here.

For example, attachment security is associ-
ated with care provision by adult spouses of cancer
victims—people who are clearly in need. Kim and
Carver (2007) found that greater attachment secu-
rity (assessed with self-report scales) was associated
with more frequent provision of emotional support
to a spouse with cancer. Attachment security was
also associated with favorable motives for provid-
ing care, such as accepting the need for caregiving,
feeling loving, and respecting the care recipient
(Kim, Carver, Deci, & Kasser, 2008). As expect-
ed, attachment anxiety was associated with more
self-focused motives for caregiving (e.g., providing
care in order to be appraised as a good person). In
another study, Braun and colleagues (2012) found
that avoidant attachment was associated with less
responsive and less sensitive care for a spouse with
cancer, whereas anxious attachment was associ-
ated with more compulsive caregiving (insisting
on care, being intrusive, failing to be sensitive to

894 VI. SYSTeMS, CuLTure, AND CONTexT

the spouse’s actual needs). This harks back to an
early study by Kunce and Shaver (1994) in which
anxious adults and their mates both agreed that
the anxious adults’ caregiving efforts tended to be
unempathic, self-focused, and intrusive.

In two laboratory experiments, B. Feeney and
Collins (2001) and Collins and colleagues (2010)
provided a detailed analysis of avoidant and anx-
ious adults’ caregiving deficits. Dating couples were
brought to a laboratory, and one member of the
couple (the “care seeker”) was informed that he or
she would perform a stressful task—preparing and
delivering a videotaped speech. The other couple
member (the “caregiver”) was led to believe that
his or her partner was either extremely nervous
(high-need condition) or not at all nervous (low-
need condition) about the speech task, and was
given the opportunity to write a private note to
the partner. In both studies, the note was coded
in terms of the degree of support it conveyed. In
addition, the caregiver’s attentiveness to the part-
ner’s needs was assessed by counting the number of
times the caregiver checked a computer monitor
for messages from the partner while the caregiver
was working on a series of puzzles (in a separate
room). To assess the caregiver’s state of mind, Col-
lins and colleagues added measures of empathic
feelings toward the partner, rumination about the
partner’s feelings, willingness to switch tasks with
the partner, partner-focused attention, and causal
attributions regarding the partner’s feelings. More
avoidant participants wrote less emotionally sup-
portive notes in both high- and low-need condi-
tions, and provided less instrumental support in
the high- than in the low-need condition, when
the partner most needed support. Moreover, avoid-
ant participants reported less empathy for their
partner, were less willing to switch tasks with the
partner, and were less distracted by thoughts about
the partner while doing puzzles. More anxious par-
ticipants were easily distracted by thoughts about
their partner and reported relatively high levels of
empathy and rumination, but failed to write more
supportive notes as their partner’s needs increased.

Because most such studies of attachment
and caregiving in parent–child and adult couple
relationships have been correlational rather than
experimental, making it impossible to determine
causality, Mikulincer, Shaver, Sahdra, and Bar-
On (2013) conducted a study, in both the United
States and Israel, to see whether experimentally
augmented security (“security priming”; in this case,
subliminal presentation of attachment figures’
names) would improve care provision to a roman-

tic partner who was asked to discuss a personal
problem. A second goal of the study was to see
whether security priming could overcome barriers
to responsive caregiving caused by mental deple-
tion or fatigue. Couples came to a laboratory and
were informed that they would be video-recorded
during an interaction in which one of them (the
care seeker) disclosed a personal problem to the
other (the caregiver). Caregivers were taken to
another room, where they performed a task that
induced (or did not induce) mental fatigue, while
also being subliminally exposed to either the
names of security providers or the names of un-
familiar people. Following these manipulations,
couple members were videotaped while talking
about the care seeker’s problem, and the recording
was later coded to assess the caregiver’s supportive
or unsupportive behavior. As predicted, attach-
ment security (security priming) was associated
with greater sensitivity and responsiveness to the
disclosing partner, and the priming overcame the
detrimental effects of mental depletion on sensi-
tive responsiveness.

Providing Care and Expressing
Social Virtues in the Wider
Social World

Empathy, Compassion, and Altruism

The discovery of connections between attach-
ment orientation and caregiving in both the
parent–child and romantic/marital domains led
researchers to explore the possibility that attach-
ment insecurity interferes with compassion toward
suffering others, even if the sufferers do not belong
to the caregiver’s family. If all forms of loving-
kindness draw from the same caregiving well, then
contamination of that well by attachment-related
worries and defenses is likely.

In fact, studies of adult attachment and pro-
social attitudes and behavior do show that avoid-
ant people score lower on diverse measures of
prosocial reactions to other people’s needs. For
example, more avoidant adults report less em-
pathic concern (e.g., B. Feeney & Collins, 2001;
Joireman, Needham, & Cummings, 2002; Lopez,
2001; Wayment, 2006), less inclination to take
the perspective of a distressed person (Corcoran,
& Mallinckrodt, 2000; Joireman et al., 2002), less
ability to share another person’s feelings (Trusty,
Ng, & Watts, 2005), less sense of communion with
others, and less willingness to take responsibility
for others’ welfare (Collins & Read, 1990; Shaver

38. A Lifespan Perspective on Attachment and Care for Others 895

et al., 1996; Zuroff, Moskowitz, & Cote, 1999).
Avoidant adults are also less likely to be coopera-
tive and other-oriented (DeDreu, 2012; Hawley,
Shorey, & Alderman, 2009; Van Lange, DeBruin,
Otten, & Joireman, 1997), to write comforting
messages to a distressed person (Weger & Polcar,
2002), to offer help to needy others in hypotheti-
cal scenarios (Bailey, McWilliams, & Dick, 2012;
Drach-Zahavy, 2004), or to be sensitive to moral
transgressions that can damage other people (Al-
bert & Horowitz, 2009). Sommerfeld (2009) also
found that more avoidant people (assessed with
the ECR) were more likely to feel a sense of bur-
den when acting generously.

With regard to attachment anxiety, research
once again suggests a pattern of overinvolvement
and intrusiveness during encounters with people
in distress. In particular, although Lopez (2001)
found a positive association between attachment
anxiety and a measure of emotional empathy,
people who score relatively high on measures of
attachment anxiety also report higher levels of
personal distress while witnessing others’ suffer-
ing (Britton & Fuendeling, 2005; Joireman et
al., 2002; Monin, Schulz, Feeney, & Clark, 2010;
Vilchinsky, Findler, & Werner, 2010). Moreover,
anxious adults score higher on a measure of unmit-
igated communion, which taps a compulsive need
to help others even when they are not asking for
assistance, and even when the help comes at the
expense of one’s own health and legitimate needs
(Fritz & Helgeson, 1998; Shaver et al., 1996).

In an observational laboratory study, West-
maas and Silver (2001) videotaped people while
they interacted with a confederate of the experi-
menter who, they thought, had recently been di-
agnosed with cancer. The authors found that both
kinds of attachment insecurity created specific
impediments to effective caregiving. As expected,
avoidant participants were rated by observers as
less verbally and nonverbally supportive and as
making less eye contact during the interaction.
Attachment anxiety was not associated with sup-
portiveness, but more anxious participants re-
ported greater discomfort while interacting with
the confederate and were more likely to report
self-critical thoughts after the interaction. These
are signs of emotional overinvolvement and self-
related worries, which can sometimes interfere
with caregiving.

It is worth mentioning, however, that Ein-
Dor and Orgad (2012) found that attachment-
anxious people acted prosocially when a real
danger threatened them and their group. In their

study, participants were led to believe that they ac-
cidently activated a computer virus that erased an
experimenter’s computer. They were then asked to
alert the department’s computer technicians to the
incident. On their way, they were presented with
four decision points at which they could choose
either to delay their warning or continue directly
to the technicians’ office. More anxious individu-
als (assessed with the ECR) were less willing to be
delayed on their way to deliver a warning message.
This finding fits with the “sentinel” mental script
characteristic of attachment-anxious individuals
(Ein-Dor, Mikulincer, & Shaver, 2011), which
might automatically cause them to act prosocially
in a dangerous situation by rapidly communicat-
ing the threat to others. Kogut and Kogut (2013)
also found that attachment-anxious people tend to
help others when they can identify with the help
receiver or feel similar to or specially connected
with him or her, probably thereby satisfying unmet
needs for merger and love.

There is also evidence that the link between
avoidant attachment and unhelpfulness can be
mitigated in specific relational contexts. For ex-
ample, Richman, DeWall, and Wolff (2015) found
that when highly avoidant participants were con-
vinced that helping would not increase closeness
to the receiver of help or would not change their
own emotions, they tended to help others as much
as less avoidant participants; that is, by reducing
the psychological linkage between helping and
emotional closeness, Richman and colleagues re-
duced avoidant people’s fears of becoming more
intimate with the needy other, allowing them to
act more prosocially toward him or her. This find-
ing fits with our belief that avoidant people’s reluc-
tance to help others is in part due to attachment
system deactivation and a preference for emotion-
al distance rather than intimacy.

In an influential study of adolescents that
spurred similar research with adults, McKinney
(2002) found that those who were insecurely at-
tached to their parents were less involved than
more securely attached adolescents in voluntary
altruistic activities, such as caring for older adults
or donating blood. Gillath, Shaver, Mikulincer,
Nitzburg, and colleagues (2005) extended this line
of research by assessing young adults’ motives for
volunteering in their communities. Avoidant at-
tachment was associated with engaging in fewer
volunteer activities; among those who did volun-
teer, avoidance was associated with being involved
for less altruistic reasons. Attachment anxiety was
not directly related to engaging in volunteer ac-

896 VI. SYSTeMS, CuLTure, AND CONTexT

tivities per se, but it was associated with more ego-
istic reasons for volunteering (e.g., hoping to be
socially accepted and receive approval), another
indication of anxious people’s self-focus. These
findings were replicated in a subsequent study with
Dutch students (Erez, Mikulincer, Van IJzendoorn,
& Kroonenberg, 2008). In all of these studies,
more avoidant adults were less likely to volunteer.

Insecure people’s relative lack of a prosocial
orientation is also manifested in career choice.
Using the AAI to measure adult attachment,
Horppu and Ikonen-Varila (2004) found that in-
secure students at a college for kindergarten teach-
ers endorsed less altruistic, less prosocial motives
for becoming teachers, compared with more secure
students. Similarly, Roney, Meredith, and Strong
(2004) found that less secure occupational therapy
students (identified with self-report scales) were
less likely to say they chose a therapeutic career
because they wanted to help people. In a sample
of medical students, Ciechanowski, Russo, Katon,
and Walker (2004) found that less secure students
(based on self-report scales) were more likely not
to choose primary care specialties because primary
care demands intense patient–physician relation-
ships that can cause patients to become emotion-
ally attached to their physician.

Recently, a number of investigators have ex-
amined the effects of security priming on feelings
and attitudes toward needy people. For example,
Bartz and Lydon (2004) primed attachment-re-
lated mental representations by asking people to
think about a close relationship in which they felt
either secure, anxious, or avoidant, then assessed
the implicit and explicit activation of commu-
nion-related thoughts (thoughts about devoting
oneself to others and maintaining supportive and
warm interactions with them). Implicit activation
was assessed in a word fragment completion task
(which identified the number of word fragments
completed with a communion-related word); ex-
plicit activation was assessed with the Commu-
nion scale of the Extended Personality Attributes
Questionnaire. Contextual priming of representa-
tions of avoidant attachment led to lower levels of
implicit and explicit communion-related thoughts
than did contextual priming of secure attachment.

Along the same lines, Mikulincer and col-
leagues (2001, Study 1) performed an experiment
assessing compassionate responses to others’ suf-
fering. Dispositional attachment anxiety and
avoidance were assessed with the ECR scales, and
a sense of attachment security was activated in one
condition by having participants read a story about

support provided by a loving attachment figure.
This condition was compared with the activation
of neutral or positive affect. Following the prim-
ing procedure, all participants read a brief story
about a student whose parents had been killed
in an automobile accident and rated how much
they experienced compassion and personal distress
when thinking about the distressed student. As
expected, dispositional attachment anxiety and
avoidance were inversely related to compassion,
and attachment anxiety (but not avoidance) was
positively associated with personal distress. In ad-
dition, enhancement of attachment security, but
not enhancement of positive affect, strengthened
compassion and inhibited personal distress in reac-
tion to others’ distress. These findings were repli-
cated in four additional studies (Mikulincer et al.,
2001, Studies 2–5).

In another set of three experiments, Miku-
lincer, Gillath, and colleagues (2003) found theo-
retically predictable attachment-related differ-
ences in value orientations. Avoidant attachment,
assessed with the ECR, was inversely associated
with endorsement of two self-transcendent values,
benevolence (concern for close others) and uni-
versalism (concern for all humanity), supporting
our notion that avoidant strategies interfere with
concern for others’ needs. In addition, experimen-
tal priming of mental representations of attach-
ment figure availability, as compared with enhanc-
ing positive affect or exposing participants to a
neutral priming condition, strengthened endorse-
ment of these two prosocial values. The findings
fit well with Van IJzendoorn and Zwart-Woudstra’s
(1995) discovery that secure attachment (assessed
with the AAI) is associated with more humanistic
moral reasoning. The conclusion is further sup-
ported by Clark and colleagues’ (2011) findings
that contextual priming of attachment security
reduced the endorsement of materialistic values
and decreased the importance people assigned to
material objects.

Mikulincer, Shaver, Gillath, and Nitzberg
(2005) examined the effects of security priming on
the actual decision to help or not to help a person
in distress. In the first two experiments, partici-
pants watched a confederate (an actress) while she
performed a series of increasingly aversive tasks.
As the study progressed, the confederate became
increasingly distressed by the aversive tasks, and
the actual participant (who was merely an observ-
er) was given an opportunity to take the distressed
person’s place, thereby self-sacrificing for the ben-
efit of the distressed confederate. Shortly before

38. A Lifespan Perspective on Attachment and Care for Others 897

the scenario just described, participants had been
exposed to a series of security or neutral primes
subliminally (rapid presentation of the name of
an attachment figure or a neutral control person)
or supraliminally (vividly recalling an interaction
with a supportive person), or in the control condi-
tion (recalling a neutral person). At the point of
making a decision about replacing the distressed
confederate, participants completed brief measures
of compassion and personal distress. In both stud-
ies, dispositional avoidance was related to lower
reported compassion and lower willingness to help
the distressed confederate. Dispositional attach-
ment anxiety was related to self-reported personal
distress but not to either compassion or willingness
to help. In addition, subliminal or supraliminal
priming of representations of a security-providing
figure decreased personal distress and increased
participants’ compassion and willingness to take
the place of the distressed confederate.

In two additional studies, Mikulincer and
colleagues (2005, Studies 3–4) examined whether
the contextual bolstering of attachment security
overrides egoistic motives for helping, such as
mood enhancement (Schaller & Cialdini, 1988)
or empathic joy (Smith, Keating, & Stotland,
1989), and results in genuinely altruistic (unself-
ish) helping. Participants were divided into two
conditions (security priming, neutral priming),
read a true newspaper article about a woman in
dire personal and financial distress, and rated
their emotional reactions to the article (compas-
sion and personal distress). In one study, half of
the participants anticipated mood enhancement
by means other than helping (e.g., expecting to
watch a comedy film). In the other study, half of
the participants were told that the needy woman
was chronically depressed and her mood might be
beyond their ability to repair (no empathic joy con-
dition). Schaller and Cialdini (1988) and Smith
and colleagues (1989) had found that these two
conditions, expecting to improve one’s mood by
other means or anticipating no sharing of joy
with the needy person, reduced egoistic motives
for helping because a potential helper would gain
no mood-related benefit from helping. However,
these conditions failed to inhibit altruistic mo-
tives for helping when helping was augmented by
security priming. The security-supported increased
willingness to help seemed to be genuinely unself-
ish. These findings support our theoretical view
that a sense of attachment security reduces self-
ishness (defensive self-protection) and allows a
person to activate his or her caregiving behavioral

system, direct attention to others’ distress, take the
perspective of a distressed other, and engage in al-
truistic behavior with the primary goal of benefit-
ing the other person.

Generosity

Generous actions are among the building blocks
of positive and stable social relations. However,
although extensive theoretical and empirical work
has been devoted to the study of empathy, com-
passion, and altruistic helping in adults, there is
little systematic research on acts of generosity, the
subjective experiences of people when they act
generously, or the associations of these experienc-
es with attachment orientations. One preliminary
exploration (Sommerfeld, 2009) involved the de-
velopment of the Experience of Generosity Ques-
tionnaire, a measure of the extent to which adults
are prosocially oriented when acting generously or
feel a sense of burden, self-criticism/guilt, or self-
congratulation when being “generous.” Sommer-
feld (2009) examined associations between these
experiential aspects of generosity and ECR attach-
ment insecurity scores (anxiety and avoidance).
She found that attachment anxiety was associated
with greater feelings of personal burden and self-
criticism/guilt, whereas avoidance was associated
with a less prosocial orientation, in addition to
feelings of personal burden. Much more research is
needed on attachment and generosity.

Gratitude

Gratitude has been portrayed in the psychologi-
cal literature in diverse ways: as a positive emo-
tion, as a personality trait, as a positive attitude
toward others, as a moral virtue, and as a construc-
tive approach to interpersonal relations (Emmons
& McCullough, 2003; Weiner, 1985). Emmons
and McCullough (2003) proposed that gratitude
be conceptualized in terms of three propositions.
First, the object of gratitude is always an “other,”
whether a human being, a nonhuman natural
being (e.g., an animal, the weather), or a super-
natural being (e.g., God). Second, gratitude is a
response to a perceived personal benefit (e.g.,
a material, emotional, or spiritual gain) result-
ing from another’s actions—a benefit that has
not necessarily been earned or deserved. Third,
gratitude stems from appraising the benefactor’s
actions as intentionally designed to benefit the re-
cipient, even if the intention is metaphorical, as

898 VI. SYSTeMS, CuLTure, AND CONTexT

in the case of good weather (“Thank you for not
raining on my parade”). According to Lazarus and
Lazarus (1994), gratitude results from recognizing
another’s goodwill and appreciating the other’s
generous action as an altruistic gift. Agreeing with
this conception, Tsang (2006) defined gratitude as
“a positive emotional reaction to the receipt of a
benefit that is perceived to have resulted from the
good intentions of another” (p. 139).

In Peterson and Seligman’s (2004) taxon-
omy of human strengths and virtues, the capac-
ity for gratitude is viewed as a core strength that
improves people’s well-being and mental health
(Snyder & McCullough, 2000). Similarly, Em-
mons and McCullough (2003) portrayed gratitude
as a remedy for many of life’s hardships and as a
way to achieve peace of mind, happiness, and sat-
isfying interpersonal relationships. In line with
this view, Watkins, Woodward, Stone, and Kolts
(2003) found that grateful people tend to experi-
ence greater “abundance” in their lives, feel more
thankful to other people for contributions to their
personal well-being, and are more likely than
other people to appreciate even the small plea-
sures in life. Moreover, the expression of gratitude
to a generous relationship partner has been found
to have beneficial effects on relationship satisfac-
tion, emotional and physical closeness, and posi-
tive appraisals of the partner (e.g., Algoe, Gable,
& Maisel, 2010; Algoe & Haidt, 2009; Lambert,
Clark, Durtschi, Fincham, & Graham, 2010).

From an attachment perspective, the expe-
rience of gratitude can be expected to be associ-
ated with feelings of being protected, accepted,
and valued by others. Warm, comforting interac-
tions with a sensitive, responsive, and supportive
caregiver during childhood foster not only positive
mental representations (working models) of others
but also a feeling that one has received a gift that
“keeps on giving” (as advertisers sometimes boast).
This feeling makes it easier, in later phases of life,
to feel grateful for other people’s kindness and gen-
erosity. In other words, attachment security can be
expected to correlate with dispositional gratitude.
In contrast, attachment-related avoidance may
constrict feelings of gratitude in response to others’
generous behavior because avoidant people tend
to doubt other people’s good intentions. More-
over, expressions of gratitude toward a relationship
partner can be interpreted as a sign of closeness or
dependence, which is inconsistent with avoidant
people’s preference for emotional distance.

Attachment anxiety may lead to ambivalent
reactions to others’ generous behavior. People who

score high on attachment anxiety tend not to be-
lieve they deserve others’ kindness and worry that
they will not be able to reciprocate adequately or
meet a generous person’s needs and expectations
(Mikulincer & Shaver, 2007a). This, in turn,
may taint gratitude with anxiety. In addition, for
attachment-anxious people, positive interpersonal
experiences may be reminiscent of previous expe-
riences that began well but ended poorly. Once
attuned to negative memories, the anxious mind
suffers from a spread of negative affect (Mikulincer
& Orbach, 1995), which is likely to interfere with
genuine gratitude.

In two studies, Mikulincer, Shaver, and Slav
(2006) explored links between attachment scores
and feelings of gratitude toward a generous rela-
tionship partner. The first study was cross-sectional
and correlational; it indicated that secure partici-
pants scored higher on a dispositional measure of
gratitude than avoidant participants and reported
more feelings of security, happiness, love, and gen-
erosity—and fewer feelings of narcissistic threat
and distrust—when feeling grateful. Attachment
anxiety was not significantly associated with dis-
positional gratitude, but it was associated with a
more ambivalent experience of gratitude. People
who scored higher on attachment anxiety recalled
experiencing security-related feelings (e.g., “I felt
there was someone who cared for me”), happiness,
and love, together with narcissistic threats and
inferiority feelings (e.g., “I felt weak and needy”),
which seemed to mar the otherwise positive expe-
rience of gratitude.

In a second study (Mikulincer et al., 2006),
newlywed couples (both husbands and wives)
completed a daily questionnaire each evening for
21 days. In it, they listed positive and negative be-
haviors exhibited by their partner on a given day
and rated the extent to which they felt grateful to-
ward the partner that day. For both husbands and
wives, attachment security predicted higher levels
of daily gratitude across the 21-day period. More-
over, more secure husbands reported greater grati-
tude on days when they perceived more positive
spousal behavior, whereas more avoidant husbands
reported relatively low levels of gratitude even on
days when they noticed their wife’s positive be-
havior.

Attachment insecurities also seem to inter-
fere with the positive effects that gratitude nor-
mally has on prosocial behavior. Mikulincer and
Shaver (2009) randomly assigned undergraduates
to a gratitude condition (“Think about the many
things in life for which you might feel grateful”)

38. A Lifespan Perspective on Attachment and Care for Others 899

or a control condition (“Think about your typical
day”). They then measured the extent to which
participants helped an experimenter’s confeder-
ate, who asked them to complete a cognitively
taxing problem-solving survey. The major depen-
dent variable was the time spent working on the
survey. The results indicated that participants in
the gratitude condition spent more time helping
with the survey than did participants in the con-
trol condition, and more anxious and/or avoidant
participants spent less time helping. However,
these effects were qualified by significant interac-
tions between gratitude and attachment insecurity
scores: The gratitude exercise led to more helping
behavior than the control condition mainly when
participants scored relatively low on anxiety and/
or avoidance. The prosocial effect of gratitude was
lower when attachment anxiety or avoidance was
relatively high.

Overall, research findings reported thus far
suggest that gratitude and its links with prosocial
behavior are complex and moderated by attach-
ment orientations. It seems relatively easy for a
secure person to feel grateful, especially after being
rewarded by someone else. It is difficult for an in-
secure person to be unambivalent about receiving
a benefit from another person, and to pass the ben-
efit along to someone else. To an important ex-
tent, gratitude depends on feeling loved, valued,
supported, and cared for, both in the moment and
over the years.

Forgiveness

Forgiveness is often key to maintaining relational
harmony and affectional bonds following con-
flicts, offenses, and transgressions in relationships
(e.g., Fincham & Beach, 2010; Gordon, Hughes,
Tomcik, Dixon, & Litzinger, 2009; Karremans &
Van Lange, 2004). In addition, forgiveness con-
tributes to positive emotions toward an offend-
ing other, to intimacy and emotional closeness,
and to relationship satisfaction and stability (e.g.,
Finkel, Rusbult, Kumashiro, & Hannon, 2002).
Moreover, the ability to forgive is related to psy-
chological and even to physical well-being (e.g.,
Karremans, Van Lange, Ouwerkerk, & Kluwer,
2003). However, forgiveness is not an automatic
response to another person’s offenses and trans-
gressions. It often requires a transformation (or
what Rusbult, Verette, Whitney, Slovik, & Lip-
kus, 1991, called “accommodation”) of interper-
sonal motives—containment of angry feelings
and regulation of the impulse to act destructively,

while finding a constructive way to overcome an
impasse created by another person’s hurtful behav-
ior (e.g., McCullough, 2000). According to Mc-
Cullough, Worthington, and Rachal (1997), for-
giveness requires “a set of motivational changes,
whereby one becomes decreasingly motivated to
retaliate against and maintain estrangement from
an offending relationship partner and increasingly
motivated by conciliation and goodwill for the
offender, despite the offender’s hurtful actions”
(pp. 321–322).

From an attachment perspective, the moti-
vational transformation involved in forgiving an
offending other is likely to be facilitated by attach-
ment security. Secure people are confident of oth-
ers’ availability and love, view others as generally
trustworthy and dependable, and believe in others’
goodwill (Shaver & Hazan, 1993). In addition, se-
cure people have been found to provide more be-
nign explanations for others’ hurtful actions and
attribute them to less intentional and less stable
causes. Therefore, they are more inclined to for-
give. In contrast, avoidant individuals are likely
to be less forgiving because they possess negative
working models of others and tend to attribute
others’ objectionable behavior to bad intentions.

In the case of individuals who score high on
attachment anxiety, reactions to others’ offending
behavior are likely to be influenced by two con-
flicting forces. On the one hand, their inclination
to intensify negative emotions and ruminate about
threats should fuel intense and prolonged bouts of
anger toward an offending other, thereby interfer-
ing with forgiveness. On the other hand, such peo-
ple’s fears of rejection and separation may cause
them to suppress or hide resentment and anger and
incline them toward self-protective forgiveness.
This kind of forgiveness might be accompanied by
recurrent intrusive thoughts about the transgres-
sion and heightened doubts about others’ avail-
ability and dependability. In other words, although
attachment anxiety may not preclude forgiveness,
it may engender ambivalence about forgiveness
and therefore reduce its relational and personal
benefits.

Correlational evidence indicates that attach-
ment anxiety and avoidance are in fact associated
with lower scores on measures of dispositional for-
giveness (e.g., Burnette, Taylor, Worthington, &
Forsyth, 2007; Kachadourian, Fincham, & Davila,
2004; Lawler-Row, Younger, Piferi, & Jones, 2006;
Mikulincer et al., 2006; Yárnoz-Yaben, 2009).
Moreover, Mikulincer and colleagues (2006)
found that less secure people were more inclined

900 VI. SYSTeMS, CuLTure, AND CONTexT

to report intense feelings of vulnerability or hu-
miliation and a strong sense of relationship dete-
rioration when forgiving a partner. In other words,
attachment insecurities were associated with a less
constructive experience of forgiveness. Burnette,
Davis, Green, Worthington, and Bradfield (2009)
provided evidence concerning the potential me-
diators of such effects: Whereas the link between
attachment anxiety and reduced forgiveness was
mediated by excessive rumination on relational
injuries, the link between avoidance and reduced
forgiveness was mediated by lack of prosocial at-
titudes.

In a diary study of daily fluctuations in the
tendency to forgive a spouse, Mikulincer and col-
leagues (2006) found that attachment insecurities
predicted lower levels of forgiveness across 21 con-
secutive days. Moreover, whereas secure people
were more inclined to forgive their spouse on days
when they perceived more positive spousal behav-
ior, less secure people reported little forgiveness
even on days when they perceived their spouse to
be available, attentive, and supportive. In other
words, attachment insecurities not only prevented
forgiveness but they also interfered with the ability
of a partner’s positive behavior to restore under-
standing and empathy.

Beyond these associations between dispo-
sitional measures of attachment and forgiveness,
there is increasing evidence that state-like senses
of security or insecurity can alter the tendency
to forgive a hurtful partner. For example, Finkel,
Burnette, and Scissors (2007) experimentally en-
hanced attachment anxiety or measured its natural
weekly fluctuations for 6 months and found that
heightened attachment anxiety reduced forgive-
ness for a partner’s offenses. In addition, Hannon,
Rusbult, Finkel, and Kumashiro (2010) found that
a betraying partner’s provision of security to the
injured partner (by genuinely expressing interest
in being responsive to the victim’s needs) pro-
moted forgiveness and restoration of relational
harmony. Karremans and Aarts (2007) found that
security priming (with the name of a loving other)
elicited more automatic forgiving responses to in-
terpersonal offenses than neutral priming.

In a series of experimental and longitudinal
studies, Luchies, Finkel, McNulty, and Kumashiro
(2010) showed that situational felt security (the
extent to which a partner is perceived to be re-
sponsive and able to provide a sense of security
and stability) is a prerequisite for the beneficial ef-
fects of forgiveness. For example, they found that
the association between marital forgiveness and

heightened self-respect over the first 5 years of
marriage depended on the extent to which spouses
appraised their partners as safe and responsive.
Moreover, the positive effects of forgiveness on
self-respect and self-concept clarity following an
experimentally induced hurtful relational episode
depended on the perpetrator’s expression of genu-
ine interest in being responsive to the victim’s
needs. Overall, these findings imply that, under
insecurity-heightening circumstances, forgiveness
negatively affects feelings about oneself, which
may help to explain why dispositionally insecure
people are often reluctant to forgive an offending
partner.

Empirical Studies of Adults: Discussion

Based on only the relatively small sample of studies
of adult attachment and caregiving reviewed here
(for a fuller treatment, see Mikulincer & Shaver,
2007a), a clear and quite general pattern emerges.
Adults who score high on self-report measures
of attachment anxiety have difficulty caring for
another person without becoming personally dis-
tressed in an unproductive manner, often because
they are more focused on their own needs and sense
of vulnerability than on the needs of a person who
needs their help. They are lacking not in empa-
thy but in what Buddhists call effective compassion,
which goes beyond empathy to include “skillful”
action. Attachment-anxious adults’ ineffective
compassion is evident in parent–child relation-
ships, romantic/marital relationships, and interac-
tions with peers and strangers. Their failure to take
effective action is also affected by their somewhat
negative models of self, which includes a sense of
poor self-efficacy. It is worth mentioning, however,
that although anxious adults’ heightened sensitiv-
ity to threats (to self) often results in poorly timed
or poorly considered efforts to help others, their
heightened vigilance can sometimes benefit mem-
bers of the groups to which they belong because
their ability to detect threats can sometimes save
their own and other people’s lives (Ein-Dor, Mi-
kulincer, Doron, & Shaver, 2010; Ein-Dor et al.,
2011).

Adults who score high on self-report measures
of attachment-related avoidance are quite differ-
ent. They are generally less empathic, less compas-
sionate, and less willing to help others. They are
often uncomfortable with other people’s reliance
on them, especially if it requires close physical or
emotional contact or prolonged assistance. At the
group level, however, their self-preoccupation,

38. A Lifespan Perspective on Attachment and Care for Others 901

and what Bowlby (1969/1982) called their “com-
pulsive self-reliance,” can sometimes make them
quick to figure out, in a threatening situation, how
to escape or save themselves, and this can provide
a useful model for other members of their group to
escape danger (Ein-Dor et al., 2010, 2011).

Both anxious and avoidant adults are capable
of feeling and being generous, grateful, and forgiv-
ing, but their versions of these feelings are often
colored by qualifications, such as feeling depleted,
“ripped off,” or overly obligated. Underlying such
complicated forms of what would otherwise be
positive feelings is a sense of insecurity, doubts
about one’s own value to others, and fear of vul-
nerability.

To date, an advantage of the literature on
adult care is the relative ease of conducting ex-
perimental studies involving various kinds of se-
curity priming: guided imagery or recall of being
treated well by attachment figures; pictures of
attachment figures’ faces; subliminal stimulation
with attachment figures’ names or words such as
being loved, hug, support, or affection (Mikulincer &
Shaver, 2007a, 2007b). This adds considerably to
the huge volume of correlational research, which
indicates that self-reported individual differences
in security, anxiety, and avoidance are associated
strongly with many questionnaire and behavioral
measures of empathy, compassion, gratitude, and
forgiveness. Activating an adult’s network of men-
tal associations related to security (associations
that are both cognitive and affective) increases
prosocial feelings and motivates prosocial behav-
ior. Fewer studies have been conducted with “in-
security primes,” but those studies show that being
reminded of insecurity (e.g., memories of past re-
jections and hurt feelings) reduces empathy and
prosocial behavior. Taken in combination with
the developmental studies of children and ado-
lescents reviewed earlier in this chapter, the adult
studies offer convincing evidence that attachment
security and insecurity influence a wide range of
prosocial motives, feelings, and behaviors.

Future Directions

Despite the impressive size of the literature re-
viewed in this chapter, indicating that attach-
ment orientations are related to various aspects of
concern for others, there are still many needs and
possibilities for future research. Because our large
sections on attachment and care in childhood and

attachment and care in adulthood are somewhat
different in focus and methods (because of the dif-
ferent developmental levels of the research par-
ticipants, requiring different verbal and nonver-
bal measures, and the different social contexts in
which they live; with parents, in university com-
munities, in homes with their spouses, etc.), we
consider future directions separately for the two
large research domains.

Future Directions for Research
on Attachment and Prosocial
Phenomena in Childhood

Existing research and its limitations indicate
that the field is ripe for further investigation of
the link between attachment security and the de-
velopment of care for others in childhood, when
these capacities are first coming online and there
is the greatest opportunity to influence their de-
velopment in the next generation. To do this, a
first priority is to improve the sensitivity and spec-
ificity of measures used to assess care for others at
different developmental stages. When operation-
alizing constructs, researchers should delineate
clear boundaries around empathy and prosocial
behavior, so that the unique developmental an-
tecedents and consequences of each can be iden-
tified. Further insights may be gained by measur-
ing specific dimensions of both constructs. For
example, it may be important to assess both cog-
nitive aspects of empathy (e.g., emotion recogni-
tion and understanding, perspective taking) and
its affective aspects (e.g., emotional resonance,
compassion, concern). Similarly, future research
should consider specific dimensions of prosocial
behavior such as sharing, helping, and comforting
behaviors, verbal versus nonverbal responses, the
relative success or effectiveness of prosocial over-
tures, and whether they occur in the presence or
absence of emotional stimuli.

Central to the pursuit of valid measures of
care for others is observational research in the
home, neighborhood, and school, as well as in
laboratory settings. Research has shown that re-
sponses to hypothetical situations (e.g., to imag-
ine donating to someone in need) do not always
map onto actual behavior (e.g., Ajzen, Brown, &
Carvajal, 2004). For example, although children
may know that they should share a prized teddy
bear with a child who has no toys, they may not
do so when faced with the immediate conflict be-
tween their own desires and another’s needs. Ob-
servational measures used to study the normative

902 VI. SYSTeMS, CuLTure, AND CONTexT

development of children’s empathy and prosocial
behavior provide creative and ecologically valid
tools that can be extended to the study of attach-
ment-related individual differences. These include
home-based observations of children’s reactions
to naturalistic and simulated distress (e.g., Zahn-
Waxler, Radke-Yarrow, et al., 1992); laboratory
situations in which an adult experimenter displays
needs that differentially call for helping, shar-
ing, and comforting (e.g., Dunfield & Kuhlmeier,
2013); and tasks that isolate specific motives (e.g.,
sympathy vs. seeking social rewards) underlying
prosocial behavior (e.g., Hepach et al., 2013a).
In addition, observational paradigms used with
adults, such as donating behavior and willingness
to help a distressed confederate (e.g., Mikulincer
& Shaver, 2005), have been used successfully with
children (e.g., Benenson, Pascoe, & Radmore,
2007) and provide other valid approaches to the
study of attachment-related individual differences
in care for others in childhood.

Exploring potential interactions of empathy
with other mental capacities such as emotion regu-
lation, theory of mind, and social information pro-
cessing may illuminate connections that help to
explain the development of care for others. Mov-
ing beyond cross-sectional, correlational studies
toward intervention and longitudinal designs may
shed light on questions of continuity and change,
sensitive periods, and the temporal sequence of
this link. For example, research examining the
effects of attachment interventions such as the
Circle of Security (Hoffman, Marvin, Cooper, &
Powell, 2006) on children’s empathy and proso-
cial behavior may illuminate whether enhancing
security might support the development of greater
capacities for extending care to others beyond the
parent–child relationship.

Furthermore, priming studies of the kinds de-
veloped by researchers studying adult attachment
provide a promising paradigm for investigating
causal pathways in the short term. It is reasonable
to hypothesize that experimental priming of at-
tachment security in children will enhance their
empathy and prosocial behavior given evidence of
this link in the adult literature. Indeed, one study
by Over and Carpenter (2009) demonstrated
that subliminal priming of affiliation (i.e., a pic-
ture of two dolls facing each other) significantly
enhanced 18-month-old children’s spontaneous
helping toward an experimenter who had dropped
her pencils. In adult samples, however, attach-
ment priming has been shown to have specific
effects beyond those of affiliation in enhancing

empathy and willingness to help a distressed other
(Mikulincer et al., 2005). It remains to be seen
whether attachment priming has similarly unique
effects beyond affiliation in children.

Alongside developmental questions regard-
ing individual differences, future research may
be informed by the recent upsurge of creative
methods used to examine the normative develop-
ment of human altruism, which have shed light
on contextual, motivational, and evolutionary
factors influencing children’s care for others (e.g.,
Warneken & Tomasello, 2009). For example,
evidence suggests that toddlers sympathize with
and are motivated to help victims of harm, even
when the victims show no emotion, suggesting
that children’s early perspective taking and un-
derstanding of harm support their care for oth-
ers, even in the absence of distress cues (Vaish,
Carpenter, & Tomasello, 2009). It may be that
the link between attachment and children’s care
for others is moderated by whether harm occurs
in the presence or absence of emotional distress.
A study of 5-year-olds demonstrated that children
show the bystander effect made famous by social
psychologists (Darley & Latane, 1968), helping at
high levels when alone but less often when others
are available to help (Plötner, Over, Carpenter, &
Tomasello, 2015). Attachment security may mod-
erate children’s susceptibility to the bystander ef-
fect. Other research has shown that children are
more prosocial following reciprocal (vs. simply
friendly) social interactions with an adult (Barra-
gan & Dweck, 2014) and following synchronous
music making (Kirschner & Tomasello, 2010),
suggesting that responsive, coordinated social in-
teractions experimentally boost children’s care for
others. On one level, attachment security involves
similar experiences of responsivity and mutual co-
ordination; however, questions remain regarding
how specific the role of caregiver–child interac-
tions may be in promoting children’s concern for
others. Future investigations may benefit from
drawing on the novel methods and context-spe-
cific paradigms in the emerging literature on child
altruism to illuminate the nature of attachment-
related individual differences.

In addition, it will be important to continue
the search for further mechanisms underlying the
link between security and care for others. For ex-
ample, it may be that security reduces attention
to threat to oneself, which allows children to shift
mental resources away from the self and toward
others in need (as described in this chapter in
relation to adults). Examining the parameters of

38. A Lifespan Perspective on Attachment and Care for Others 903

the automatic nature of some prosocial behavior
should also prove useful. Alternatively, security
may foster openness to emotional pain and vul-
nerability (Cassidy, Shaver, Mikulincer, & Lavy,
2009), such that others’ suffering need not be
defensively excluded. One particularly interest-
ing avenue to explore is the biological basis of the
ways in which attachment gets “under the skin”
(in this volume, see Polan & Hofer, Chapter 6,
and Ehrlich, Miller, Jones, & Cassidy, Chapter 9),
and how, in turn, this may influence the capac-
ity to care for others who are suffering. A viable
starting point may be to examine the role of oxy-
tocin in the development of children’s concern for
others, as it has been implicated in attachment
and pair bonding (Carter, 1998; Feldman, Weller,
Zagoory-Sharon, & Levine, 2007; Young & Wang,
2004), parenting (Bakermans-Kranenburg & Van
IJzendoorn, 2008; Feldman et al., 2012; Galbally,
Lewis, Van IJzendoorn, & Permezel, 2011), empa-
thy (Bartz et al., 2010; Hurlemann et al., 2010),
and altruistic behavior (De Dreu et al., 2010; Zak,
Stanton, & Ahmadi, 2007). (See also Hane &
Fox, Chapter 11, this volume.) These mechanisms
likely interact with emotion regulation in linking
security and concern for others.

Pursuing further research along these lines
has broader implications for attachment theory.
Specifically, a better understanding of attach-
ment-related differences in children’s care for oth-
ers may prove useful in illuminating key processes
involved in the intergenerational transmission of
attachment. In parents, self-reported attachment
security has been linked to their own enhanced
emotion regulation capacities, which in turn are
associated with parents’ more empathic responses
to their children’s distress (Jones, Brett, Ehrlich,
Lejuez, & Cassidy, 2014). A similar model may
apply to children, whereby attachment security
in childhood supports the development of both
emotion regulation capacities and the capacity
to care for others, so that, in adulthood, secure
individuals are able to extend such care to their
own children in the form of sensitive, empathic
parenting. Indeed, evidence suggests that empathy
and prosocial behavior early in development are
carried forward into adulthood (Eisenberg et al.,
2002), that adults’ empathic concern is positively
related to retrospective accounts of their parents’
sensitive responses to their distress in childhood
(Kanat-Maymon & Assor, 2009), and that paren-
tal empathy mediates the link between parent and
child attachment security (Stern et al., 2015). As-
sembling the pieces of the intergenerational puzzle

calls for future longitudinal work on attachment
and concern for others across the lifespan.

More broadly, there is a need for a positive
psychology of children—encompassing virtues
such as compassion, gratitude, mindfulness, and
forgiveness (e.g., Froh et al., 2011; Greenberg &
Harris, 2012)—that includes the potential influ-
ence of attachment. The extensive and exciting
findings reported in the adult literature provide
an avenue for similar exploration in childhood,
with the creative adaptation of existing measures,
as well as the development of new paradigms and
methods for enhancing concern for others in the
short and long term. We echo Greenberg and
Turksma’s (2015) call for leveraging the unique in-
sights from developmental research to foster kind-
ness and empathy in homes, neighborhoods, and
schools, and add that these efforts likely need to
be rooted in secure human relationships if they are
to be effective, sustainable, and transmitted to the
next generation. Understanding the developmen-
tal roots of care for others in childhood is central
not only to attachment research but also to the
broader goal of cultivating a kinder, more compas-
sionate society.

Future Directions for Research
on Attachment and Prosocial
Phenomena in Adulthood

As demonstrated in this chapter, there is exten-
sive evidence linking attachment security and two
major forms of insecurity (attachment anxiety and
avoidance) with prosocial motives, emotions, and
behavior. The connections between attachment
and prosociality have been demonstrated in the
laboratory and in the community, using both cor-
relational and experimental designs. It is now im-
portant to branch out in new directions.

One rich source for new studies would be a
search for both mediating and moderating factors.
In particular, future studies should examine times
and situations in which secure attachment fails to
promote prosocial behavior as well as the condi-
tions that may favor prosocial behavior among in-
secure people. The priming studies conducted thus
far clearly indicate that security can be heightened
temporarily by priming. It has been assumed that
longer-term priming (1) would produce stronger
and more lasting effects on mental and behavioral
processes, and (2) might be similar to what hap-
pens naturally in security-enhancing close rela-
tionships with friends, romantic partners, mentors,
leaders, or therapists. But more work is needed to

904 VI. SYSTeMS, CuLTure, AND CONTexT

explore the process of security enhancement in
real-world relationships and to determine whether
that kind of natural security enhancement results
in increased empathy and care for other people. If
it does have this bonus benefit, it will be impor-
tant to learn how the effects are mediated (e.g.,
through changes in working models of self, such
as increased self-esteem and self-efficacy, or chang-
es in working models of others, such as formerly
avoidant individuals changing their critical, skep-
tical working models of others).

In addition, research should examine how
cultural settings and variables moderate the link
between attachment and prosocial behavior given
that physical and cultural settings can shape cog-
nitive representations of people and relationships.
For example, although there is evidence to suggest
that security priming attenuates hostile attitudes
toward outgroup members, even among groups en-
gaged in years of intractable conflict (Mikulincer
& Shaver, 2001, 2007c), one pilot study found that
more secure Palestinians living in the territories
occupied by Israeli soldiers were more, rather than
less, hostile toward Israeli Jews and more accepting
of violence against them (Mikulincer & Shaver,
2007c). Thus, although the pursuit of the possible
benefits of psychological security enhancement is
promising, the assumption that security and paci-
fism are synonymous would be faulty. Achieving a
world at peace requires humane ethics, a more tol-
erant cultural and educational climate, and good
judgment and effective political will on the part
of leaders, not just securely attached individual
citizens.

Because of the growing emphasis in adult
attachment research on physiological and neuro-
logical underpinnings (in this volume, see Coan,
Chapter 12, and Hane & Fox, Chapter 11), it will
be important to explore further how the brain
and various hormones underlie the link between
attachment orientations and prosocial behavior.
There are already numerous studies showing that
self-reported anxiety and avoidance are related to
various neurophysiological processes (e.g., reac-
tions to social rejection; DeWall et al., 2012; Gil-
lath, Bunge, Shaver, Wendelken, & Mikulincer,
2005). The next step would be to extend these
studies into the realm of prosocial emotions and
behavior.

Bowlby (1969/1982) viewed attachment
and caregiving as two innate behavioral systems,
both of which evolved because they increased the
likelihood that primate (including human) in-
fants would survive in a world of full of danger,

despite these infants’ immaturity at birth. The
attachment and caregiving behavioral systems
presumably develop throughout life as a function
of experiences in important relationships, and by
the time adults enter psychological studies, their
dispositional attachment and caregiving orienta-
tions, although not identical or totally unified, are
clearly intertwined. In adult attachment research,
prosocial emotions and behavior have generally
been viewed as aspects of the caregiving system,
but in the child attachment literature, less atten-
tion has been given to the concept of a developing
caregiving system. Ideally, future research would
involve measurement of both the attachment and
the caregiving systems and then would determine,
using longitudinal designs, how the two influence
each other over time, and how each is influenced,
separately or simultaneously, by social experiences
of various kinds, with parents, other caregivers,
teachers, coaches, and so on.

There might be other kinds of influences
worth assessing, such as books, films, television se-
ries, and religious practices. Granqvist, Mikulinc-
er, and Shaver (2010; see also Granqvist & Kirk-
patrick, Chapter 39, this volume), for example,
have reviewed literature showing that religious
figures, such as Jesus or the Virgin Mary, can serve
as symbolic attachment figures, and many religions
encourage their adherents to pray to such figures
for help in times of distress or crisis. In Buddhism,
there have long been meditation practices that
involve imagining being loved by a family mem-
ber (e.g., one’s mother) or a religious figure (e.g.,
the Buddha), then turning that feeling of love, in
one’s mind, toward other people, including “dif-
ficult” ones, which might make it easier to engage
in constructive (prosocial) relationships with such
people in real life (e.g., Hoffman, 2015b; Mipham,
2013; Nhat Hanh, 2014). Empirically, these lov-
ing-kindness practices have been shown in turn
to strengthen feelings of social connectedness
(Hutcherson, Seppala, & Gross, 2008) and boost
prosocial behavior (Block-Lerner, Adair, Plumb,
Rhatigan, & Orsillo, 2007; Kemeny et al., 2012;
Leiberg, Klimecki, & Singer, 2011).

The role of the attachment system in prayer
and Buddhist loving-kindness meditation is indi-
cated by prayers that stress such factors as being
protected in times of danger, and being “nearer”
to God. A common Buddhist prayer is “I take
refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma (the Buddha’s
teachings and Buddhist practices), and the Sangha
(the community of fellow practitioners).” Many of
these religious practices are being recast in a more

38. A Lifespan Perspective on Attachment and Care for Others 905

secular form as Buddhist practices such as mind-
fulness meditation and self-compassion medita-
tion make their way into Western psychology and
psychiatry (e.g., Hoffman, 2015a, 2015b; Miller,
2009, 2015). In the same way that mindfulness
meditation is being studied by psychologists and
neuroscientists, it should be possible to assess the
effects of other forms of meditation—focusing on
self-compassion, compassion for others, and lov-
ing-kindness—on the brain, and on people’s pro-
social emotions and behavior.

Concluding Comments

It is interesting that ideas stemming at first from
close scrutiny of the parent–child relationship have
proven to apply not only to other close relation-
ships but also to all kinds of social relationships in
which concern for others’ welfare arises. It seems
that all forms of sensitive, responsive, and compas-
sionate care across the lifespan (e.g., caregiving in
parent–child relationships, in adult romantic re-
lationships, in relationships between middle-aged
adults and their infirm older adult parents) and
in different contexts (e.g., in close relationships
and in the wider social world, where thousands of
strangers need help and support) have a common
basis and resemble each other. This implies that
the research literatures on parenting, romantic
caregiving, social support, helping, empathy, and
counseling and psychotherapy—and even social
justice/human rights and peace-building—are fun-
damentally related, and that further theoretical
and empirical efforts should be made to create an
overarching perspective on them.

Generous caregivers—human, nonhuman,
spiritual, and symbolic—can contribute to a per-
son’s sense of security and to his or her caregiving
propensities; they can also provide models of com-
passion and loving-kindness that can be copied.
Thus, if we wish to create a kinder and more peace-
ful world, we need to foster better parenting, more
nurturing romantic relationships, better mentor-
ing, and more positive and prosocial spiritual mod-
els. Simply championing virtues in the abstract or
using socialization practices alone to encourage
virtue, without providing a sense of love and se-
curity, is unlikely to be very helpful because, as we
have shown here, insecure individuals do not ex-
perience opportunities for kindness and virtue in
simple, unadulterated ways. They tend not to have
confidence in the possibility of goodness.

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