Attachment Shadow.

On the Barnum Effect, how the meaning of attachment concepts can get lost in translation, attachment neurobollocks, and, as a bonus: everything you ever wanted to know about attachment (but were afraid to ask).

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Co-written Ana x Pascal Vrticka

The Barnum Effect and Attachment Theory

To me the shadow of attachment theory overlaps with the very reason why it is so popular. 

In the language of cognitive biases it is called the Barnum effect. Basically, this applies to statements that appear personal yet are general enough to apply pretty much to everyone, at least some of the time. Like one of those magical mirrors from fairy tales that show us whatever we want to see.

Consider the following questions:

• Are you dependent on others?

• Do you feel an intense desire for intimacy or closeness?

• Are you sensitive to changes to how people feel, speak or behave?

• Do you have the tendency to feel or act jealous?

• Do you feel you are unworthy of love?

• Do you fear abandonment?

• Do you have low self-esteem?

• Do you overextend on work projects to please your coworkers?

• Are you frequently checking social media for information?

• Are you going along with whatever your friends want to do even if you don’t feel like it?

And what are your answers to these questions? If you find that you can relate to some of them in various aspects, then—drumroll, please—you might be anxiously attached.

Yet to me, all of the statements above apply to most people some of the time. Hence, the Barnum effect.

Some obvious manifestations of the Barnum effect in action include the success of astrology and fortune-telling. The lasting and continuous success of these arcane arts is a testament to the incredible power of this effect.

Therefore, to me, the remarkable success of attachment theory overlaps somewhat with its shadow, the Barnum effect, a factor incidentally amplifying its broad appeal.

The Shadow of Attachment

I had the pleasure (and luck!) of getting to ask someone who knows way more about attachment than I do, including about its 'shadow.' Pascal Vrticka is a total badass in attachment and social neuroscience (his bio is at the end of this post). Below, he breaks down what he sees as the shadow of attachment into four categories.

Shadow 1. Lost In Translation

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I think that one very large shadow is attachment theory’s popularity and its widespread use. Everybody seems to be talking about attachment nowadays, especially on social media. The problem thereby is that people either use the same terms to describe different things, or link the same process to different terms. Both of these issues cause a lot of confusion – we are currently literally “lost in translation”. 

One example is that many people keep saying that they have an “insecure-disorganised adult attachment style”. This is inaccurate in two ways. 

• First, attachment disorganisation is a category that only exists in childhood attachment measures derived from behavioural observations. Attachment self-reports, which are predominantly used in adulthood, do not have a disorganised category. Instead, they include a description of individuals in whom there is a co-occurrence of insecure-avoidant and -anxious attachment tendencies – i.e., how they think about the availability and responsiveness of others, as well as their own ability to depend on and be close to them. Thus, disorganised and fearful(-avoidant) attachment are two different things. 

• Second, attachment disorganisation (in childhood) is a separate category, not another type of insecure attachment. There are the three organised categories of secure, insecure-avoidant and insecure-anxious attachment, plus a separate category of disorganised attachment. 

Taken together, there is no such thing as an “insecure-disorganised adult attachment style”. 

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I see two things in play here...

Mess With Vernacular

The problem being that, when it comes to psychology, the categories used to designate the formal concepts often originate from words of everyday use, from the vernacular language.

This general issue was highlighted in a recent paper by Nicole C. Rust and Joseph LeDoux, which focuses on how the word 'fear' is used in neuroscience. A scientist might study fear conditioning in animals or fear-related brain circuitry, but when neuroscientists talk about 'fear,' they’re actually referring to the relationship between a threatening stimulus and the animal's defensive response.

The same goes for words like pleasure, motivation, love, bonding, learning, and of course, attachment. In everyday language, attachment means two people being emotionally connected. So, it's no surprise that people feel they already understand what attachment is, even within the context of attachment theory, because some of that everyday meaning inevitably sneaks in.

Mess With Definitions

The second problem comes from how confusing the definitions in attachment theory can be. Think about it: for infant attachment in the Strange Situation Procedure (SSP), there's a ‘secure’ category, but when you move to the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI), it’s called ‘autonomous’—only for it to be called ‘secure’ again when discussing adult attachment styles. Not confusing at all.

Another example: the infamous (and nonexistent – see above) 'insecure-disorganised adult attachment style' derived from self-report questionnaires. Yet, the 'unresolved/disorganised' adult attachment category derived from the AAI does seem to exist, but it's not exactly a category on its own. Again, not confusing at all, right? And it gets better.

Take insecure-ambivalent/resistant/preoccupied or -anxious attachment - they all refer to the same thing, yet for some reason they go by different names. And I am pretty sure I’ve seen terms like ‘anxious-avoidant attachment’, which totally throws me off balance. At this point, I have no idea what is going on.

It is a definitions mayhem!

I really feel that, as therapists, we need someone to give us clear and simplified definitions of what’s what. That way, we can become more fluent in the language of attachment theory and be able to better apply the theory that we so much love.

Here is what Pascal says on the origins of this messy situation:

Different attachment measures were independently developed for different ages (mainly children vs. adults), are based on different measurement tools (behavioural observations vs. interviews vs. self-report questionnaires), have different objectives in mind (infant behaviour towards caregivers and strangers vs. verbal recollections of previous attachment experiences with one’s parents vs. self-reported thoughts and emotions within romantic relationships), and they furthermore stem from two different attachment traditions (developmental vs. social psychology).

However, the modern community of attachment researchers is actively trying to address the current state of widespread confusion. Please make sure to check this website of the Society for Emotion and Attachment Studies if you wish to get up-to-date and reliable definitions and explanations of attachment theory concepts.

To clear things up, here is an attempt to provide an overview with some examples of attachment orientations as assessed by three different attachment measures.

Please note that the unresolved attachment category – derived from the AAI (row 2 of the table above) – refers to a specific difficult event of loss or trauma, rather than being a person’s overall attachment orientation. Thus, for instance, a person can be overall securely attached, yet also have an unresolved attachment narrative when it comes to a specific person and/or event in their life.Therefore, the unresolved attachment category is not included in the table as a separate category.

And to be even clearer:

• Disorganised attachment is an attachment orientation attributed to infants derived from the SSP (see first row in the table). It is assigned if there is conflicted, confused, and/or apprehensive child behaviour towards their caregiver, or a complete lack of an organised child behavioural attachment strategy.

• There is NO such thing as an “insecure-disorganised adult attachment style”.

• Fearful-avoidant attachment is NOT another name for disorganised attachment.

• Insecure-avoidant and -dismissive attachment are different terms that designate essentially the same attachment orientation. The same logic goes for insecure-ambivalent/resistant/preoccupied/anxious attachment. And for autonomous and secure attachment.

You can download the above classification for future reference here.

Shadow 2. Just Because Something Has the Word 'Attachment' Doesn't Mean That It is Based On Attachment Theory

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Another example is the parenting philosophy of “attachment parenting”, which many people believe to be based on attachment theory. Simply because of the word “attachment” in its name. But this is also inaccurate. Attachment parenting was developed by two paediatricians in the 1980s independent of the considerations that inspired attachment theory several decades earlier, and initially called “the new continuum concept” or “immersion mothering”. It was only later on renamed into “attachment parenting”, although its core assumptions always remained independent from attachment theory. Crucially, there is very little scientific evidence that “attachment parenting” practices – such as the seven Baby Bs – yield secure child attachment development.

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This, too, underlines the fundamental point that just because someone adds the word 'attachment', it doesn’t automatically mean that it is supported by attachment research. In the same way that just because someone prefixes their method with 'quantum', it doesn't automatically mean it is supported by quantum physics (e.g., quantum healing), or the prefix 'neuro' that it is backed by neuroscience.

Shadow 3. Fundamentals of Attachment Theory Revisited

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Another growing shadow is that many people are unaware of how much attachment theory has changed over the years. Since John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth first described and developed attachment theory about 70 years ago, a lot of new scientific evidence has emerged that strongly changed or even replaced many of its initial claims. For example, we nowadays appreciate that attachment can and does change across the life span, that both mums and dads (and other caregivers) are important attachment figures for their children, and that constantly being “tuned in” with one’s children is not always a good thing. 

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So what are some of these fundamental attachment theory tenets, and have they stood the test of accumulated empirical evidence over 70 years?

Some of the original tenets of attachment theory

1. The main attachment figure always is the mother 

2. Attachment is due to nurture (environment), not to nature (genetics)

3. Attachment is stable over the lifetime

4. There is an intergenerational continuity of attachment

Tenets revisited (according to empirical evidence available today)

1. Fathers are attachment figures, too, as well as are any other caregivers who are reliably present in a child's life

2. Attachment is due to a nature (genetics) by nurture (environment) interaction

3. Attachment can and does change over the lifetime (albeit not that easily)

4. There is intergenerational continuity of attachment, but its effect is weak - in other words, it is far from deterministic and there are no fixed rules for attachment transmission

Overall, it’s fair to say that the fundamental assumptions of attachment theory are nowhere near as deterministic and immutable as originally thought. Instead, it seems there’s a lot more 'noise in the signal' when it comes to attachment. This is actually good news for therapy—no matter what happens to us, who our parents are, or what starting position we are given in life, we can always change for the better. 

Shadow 4. Attachment Neurobollocks

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The same holds true for the initial claims made about the underlying neurobiology of attachment. At the time when these claims first emerged, we had a very different view of the human brain, its organisation and functioning. We believed in things like people being either left- or right-brained, the brain consisting of three separate layers called the “reptile brain”, “mammal brain” and “human brain” (as part of the triune brain model), or the existence of a separate dorsal and a ventral vagal pathway (as part of polyvagal theory). Unsurprisingly, such views of human brain organisation and functioning also influenced the formulation of particular therapeutic approaches in the context of attachment. Recent scientific evidence, however, clearly shows that the human brain works very differently and that such views are no longer valid. This not only has many implications on how the neurobiology underlying attachment should be described, but also how such a neuroscience-based view informs therapy. In short, while we absolutely need social neuroscience data to fully understand human attachment, it is only helpful when applied properly and based on state-of-the-art scientific evidence. 

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OH NO! I AM NOT EVEN GOING THERE!

😳 😵

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Bonus: All you ever wanted to know about attachment theory (but were afraid to ask).

Is there anything you would like to know about attachment theory and research, especially from a social neuroscience perspective? 

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In the next feature, we will be talking about what makes attachment so important and special.

As always, thank you for reading.  

To follow Pascal on social media, where he makes concepts and research findings from attachment theory and neuroscience accessible, you can follow him on BlueSky, X, LinkedIn or Instagram.

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Dr Pascal Vrticka is an Associate Professor in Psychology at the University of Essex (Colchester, UK) where he leads the Social Neuroscience of Human Attachment (SoNeAt) Lab. He has been studying the neurobiological basis of human attachment for almost 20 years and published the first neuro-anatomical models of human attachment (NAMA and NAMDA). Dr Vrticka furthermore recently started three attachment series on Instagram to dissolve the most prominent confusion and misconceptions about attachment, one of them specifically dedicated to Attachment Myth-Busting.