Toward a Neurobiology of Attachment

Abstract

New laboratory research has begun to reveal a network of simple behavioral, physiological, and neural processes that underlie the psychological constructs of attachment theory. It has become apparent that the unique features of early infant attachment reflect certain unique features of early infant sensory and motor integration, early learning, communication, motivation, and the regulation of biobehavioral systems by the mother–infant interaction. This chapter is organized around the three major questions that gave rise to the concept of attachment: How does the infant find its own mother and stay close to her? Why does separation of the infant from its mother produce such severe physiologic and behavioral responses? How can individual differences in adult offspring and especially in their maternal behavior be related to the patterns of their early life with their parents? In each of these cases, we review the recent research that has given us new answers to these questions at the level of early behavioral and cognitive processes and their neurobiological substrates. Attachment remains useful as a concept, like hunger, that describes the output of subprocesses that work together within the frame of a vital biological function.