Читать книгу Attachment Theory and Research - Группа авторов - Страница 27

A stressor has been defined as any change in the internal state or external environment that disturbs a steady state and thereby elicits regulatory processes that have as their predictable outcome restoration of whatever steady state has been disturbed. Living organisms, however, usually do not wait for a stressor to act. More often than not they are forewarned and take one or another type of action the consequences of which are either to avoid the stressor’s striking or else to mitigate or cancel its effects.

It is evident that, in the development of an animal’s capacity to take appropriate avoiding action, learning plays a major role. Every experiment in which an animal suffers punishment if it fails (e.g. when the buzzer goes it must press the right bar, or must turns down the right branch of a maze) is concerned with such learning. Nevertheless, there is good evidence that, in addition to all the cues portending trouble that are learned, there are other sorts of cues that lead animals to withdraw but that do not have to be learned. The strong tendency to avoid anything strange, which appears to be universal in birds and mammals, is one of the best investigated examples. The response of birds to the alarm call of their own species, and often to those of relative species, is another.

That many of the cues that elicit avoiding action should be responded to instinctively is hardly surprising. For if every individual had to learn for itself the hard way what was dangerous and what safe casualty rates would be enormous. To respond to everything strange with caution or escape may perhaps lead on many occasions to unnecessary timidity; but if on even only a few occasions it saves life it is intuitively worthwhile. Better to be safe than sorry.

The obverse of avoiding the strange is to remain close to the familiar. Remaining close to the familiar is, of course, the state of affairs maintained in personal‐environmental homeostasis; and a principal position of this essay is that maintenance of personal environmental homeostasis is a particularly efficient method of forestalling and avoiding disturbances to morphological and physiological homeostasis, and also to ecological homeostasis. A corollary of that proposition is that the reason that, during evolution, higher vertebrates have become equipped with environmentally stable behavioural systems that have the effect of keeping an animal within its own familiar environment and close to its own familiar companions is that such systems, by maintaining that animal within a relatively safe arena, all make a major contribution to species survival.

The persistence of traditional customs in social groups, not only of man but also of some sub‐human primates (e.g. food habits of chimpanzees) and of some birds (e.g. migrating habits of geese), can be looked at in the same light. Although obviously the details of such customs are learned, there seems to be a strong tendency in the young to adopt the customs of the group in which they are [illeg.] and a strong tendency in other members to enforce conformity.

The same seems to obtain for a working model of the world. Each social group has its own such model which is acquired by the young during the course of their education. Despite the existence of well‐known exceptions in economically advanced countries, it seems likely that these conformist tendencies are an expansion of a genetic bias to develop in a conformist way in any environment that is not too far removed from the species environment of evolutionary adaptedness.¹³

Exploration and innovation are not overlooked. Even in animal societies and in tradition‐rooted human societies such exploration and innovation occur. Where westernised societies are unusual is in the amount of exploration and innovation that they encourage and, especially, in the high valuation nowadays put upon it. But it needs to remembered that such shift in balance between tradition and innovation is not only historically very recent but is giving rise to much unforeseen and unwanted instability. Whilst in the short run the survival value of western innovation is undeniably high, its survival value in the long run remains unproven.

It is true that a familiar environment, familiar companions, and traditional customs and worldview may well not be the best possible for survival. Yet the very fact that a young creature has been born and reared in that environment and has been cared for by others who have adopted those customs, is testimony that the environment and the customs together are a combination capable of sustaining life. In wild creatures, therefore, and in almost all human communities also, it is no surprise that there is strong bias to preserve a conservative way of life.

The evolution of personal‐environmental and representational homeostasis, it is therefore suggested, has provided higher vertebrates with an additional set of regulatory systems that contribute to survival. Evolved later than the systems that maintain morphological, physiological and ecological homeostasis, this additional set of systems acts as an outer ring. As a consequence of their evolution many hazards are avoided that would jeopardise safety by stressing the capability of the inner ring of regulatory systems evolved earlier. Seen in this light the evolution of personal‐environmental and representational homeostasis appears as a way of doubling safety measures.

In concluding this section, special emphasis is given to the hypothesis that the outer ring systems that maintain personal‐environmental and representational homeostasis are as ‘bred in the bone’ namely are as environmentally stable as are the inner ring systems that in an immediate way maintain morphological, physiological and ecological homeostasis. Thus, threats to outer ring steady states are responded to just as promptly and just as instinctively as are threats to inner‐ring steady states. Moreover, just as an animal learns cues that forewarn it of threats to morphological, physiological and ecological homeostasis, so does it also learn cues that forewarn it of threats to personal‐environmental and representational homeostasis. If this hypothesis is correct it would be expected that any disturbance, actual or potential to personal‐environmental and representational homeostasis will engender no less stress and no less anxiety than do disturbances, actual or potential to those categories of homeostasis that, because more obviously contributing to survival, are better known and understood.¹⁴