John Bowlby Emotional Attachment Theory

John Bowlby first introduced the theory of emotional attachment in the 1960’s when he conducted research on toddlers who were hospitalized for long periods of time due to chronic illnesses (Shaffer, 2009). In his observations he noticed how children slowly began to show signs of apathy and unresponsiveness to toys as well as other people and eventually showed indifference towards the presence and absence of their mothers (Shaffer, 2009). However the most concerning result of all this was the toddlers permanent withdrawal from human relationships, in which they would become uninterested in human contact, they were still able to communicate of their own accord but were more egocentric as well as shifting their attention to inanimate objects over humans (Shaffer, 2009).
In their study there were 28 mothers (between the ages of 22-37, 12-21 years of education), and their infants were between the ages of 4-6 months old (Atzil et al., 2011). Mothers were first screened using the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) and the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (Atzil et al., 2011). Five mothers were excluded from the study since they showed high levels of depressive symptoms (Atzil et al., 2011). The two consisted of two sessions, in the first the families were visited at home and several sessions of mother-infant interaction and infant independent play were videotaped, which were later used to fMRI stimuli and behavioral analysis (Atzil et al., 2011). During they fMRI study they showed mothers an image of their infant playing alone and one of the mother-infant interaction and for control purposes they also showed one of an unfamiliar infant and unfamiliar mother-infant interaction (Atzil et al., 2011). Maternal intrusiveness was defined as mothers providing stimulatory or proprioceptive touch or presenting objects when the infant showed gaze aversion and need for rest (Atzil et al.,