Book reviews I Early Human Development 46 (19%) 271-276 213

Caregiving, Cultural and Cognitive Perspectives on Secure-Base Behaviour and Working Models. New Growing Points of Attachment Theory and Research Edited by E. Waters, B.E. Vaughn, G. Possada and K. Kondo-Ikemura Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development. Serial No. 244,Vol. 60, 2-3, 1995.

John Bowlby’s attachment theory which he developed in the post-war years became a rallying point for those concerned with the improvement of services for children. His ideas, and their practical application through the films made by his Tavistock colleagues, Jimmy and Joyce Robertson, led to the opening of the doors of paediatric wards to parents. They also resulted in the abolition of the large inhuman institutions, in which children who came into the care of the State had been housed, and their replacement by smaller scale ‘family care’. His research also led to the introduction of rather more child friendly policies for fostering and adoption. Bowlby began his work by accumulating evidence that separation from a mother had both short and long-term ill effects for children. He then used ideas from his own background in psychoanalysis, together with animal ethology to build his theory of attachment. This set out to explain how mother and child came together and formed an attachment and how the breaking of this attachment led to difficulties for children. Children, he postulated, formed an inner ‘working model’ of the attachment relationship which allowed them to move away from the mother as they became more independent. Bowlby followed Freud in arguing that the attachment to the mother became a prototype for all adult love relationships.

These ideas became widely influential within psychology, as well as for social policy. They were a major stimulus for what many now see as a golden age for studies of parents and children and child development in the late 1960s and 1970s. Inevitably, new ideas and evidence from empirical studies have modified Bowlby’s original theory of attachment. His rather single-minded concentration on the mother was broadened to include fathers, siblings and other family members and his perhaps over zoological view of human relationships was considerably modified with perspectives from cognitive psychology and work on language and communication. While Bowlby’s ideas remain an important influence on the way that psychologists think about developing relationships, his attachment theory in its original form no longer holds sway.

However, there remains a small group of largely American psychologists who still work within the original attachment paradigm. The monograph under review comes from this tradition. It consists of 10 specially commissioned papers and an interview with Mary Ainsworth, to whom the book is dedicated. Mary Ainswortb worked with Bowlby as a research assistant in the 1950s and then went on to make major contributions to attachment theory through her study of mothers and infants in Uganda and by devising one of the most widely used procedures for assessing an infant’s attachment - the strange situation, This is a laboratory procedure in which an infant is placed in a room with the mother and then subjected to a series of episodes in which the mother leaves and returns and the infant is confronted with a stranger.

The current volume is much concerned with assessment. Because the strange

274 Book reviews I Early Human Development 46 (1996) 271-276

situation is a laboratory procedure it obviously has limited use in naturalistic studies. So recently, Q sort techniques have been devised for rating attachments and maternal relationships. Work reported in this volume reaffirms the grouping of attachment relationship into the tripartite classification of secure, avoidant and ambivalent which has long been traditional in the field and the links between sensitive mothering and secure attachment which are at the heart of attachment theory. Another paper extends the use of Q sort techniques to studies of Japanese macaques.

The monograph also includes research on the longer term consequences of attachment which uses another recently devised tool - the adult attachment interview. This attempts to measure an adult’s state of mind with regard to attachment. Using a further recent innovation, the current relationship interview, one of the papers suggests that adults have multiple, but related, working models of close relationships.

The volume is not without interest for those concerned with human (and primate) relationships. However, I think this is more a monograph for the specialist than for someone wishing to know where recent research stands. For that it is too focused on one view of the world; a view that has been widely influential but now, sadly, is in danger of becoming isolated in the wider rich and diverse stream of research on social relationships.

Martin Richards Centre for Family Research,

University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 3RF

UK

How Divorce Affects Offspring: A Research Approach By Michael R. Stevenson and Kathryn N. Black Part Developmental Psychology Series, Editor: Wendell Jeffrey. Brown & Bench- mark, Madison, Iowa, 1995.

There is political, social and economic concern in this country and elsewhere about the increasing number of children who will experience parental separation, accom- panied by an even greater worry about the growing number of children who experience multiple disruption. In the United Kingdom, a new bill to reform the divorce law has just been passed after much fierce parliamentary debate and media attention. The timely publication of this book might be expected to be welcomed by those who have an interest in family breakdown, as a refocusing on children’s issues.

On the surface the book does have just this focus, but on closer inspection, though presenting a wealth of research evidence, the authors seem to go out of their way to underplay the effects on children of family structure change. In criticising applicable