Читать книгу The Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of Childhood Social Development - Группа авторов - Страница 70

While several 20th‐century developmentalists, such as Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky, brought aspects of evolutionary theory into their writings, arguably the first to truly integrate natural selection into his model of social development was John Bowlby (Workman, 2014). During the middle of the 20th century Bowlby studied the development of the parent–offspring bond in great detail. Having become disillusioned with both psychoanalysis and behaviorism as a means of providing valid explanations of the social development of children, Bowlby turned to the Darwin‐influenced field of ethology. Finding both Freudian psychoanalysts and behaviorists belief in “cupboard love” (broadly, showing affection to those who feed you) theories of attachment to be wanting, Bowlby developed his own theory of attachment based on the recurrent challenges that neonates and infants faced during the evolutionary history of our species. Following Konrad Lorenz’s work on imprinting, Bowlby suggested the adaptive nature of the human mother–infant bond could be traced back to the period when our ancestors left the forests and began to live on the open savannah (Bowlby, 1969; Lorenz, 1935). He argued that, during this period of our species’ history, neonates were evolving a progressively larger brain in order to deal with the challenges of the savannah. Due to limitations of the human pelvic girdle, this increase in cranial size led to the delivery of an increasingly helpless and immature neonate (technically, an altricial birth). It was this state of immaturity that necessitated the formation of a complex and enduring protective bond with the caregiver. It also (according to Bowlby) led to an enduring romantic pair bond between the parents in order to increase survival rates by adding male parental care into the equation (while there are exceptions, the typical mammalian pattern is of maternal investment alone with males acting primarily or solely as “sperm donors”). Nowadays the evolution of our oversize brains is usually attributed to the challenges of increased group size and social complexity rather than to the physical environment (Dunbar, 1993, 2003).

Importantly, Bowlby labelled the time, place, and conditions under which the evolution of Homo sapiens took place as the “environment of evolutionary adaptedness” (EEA, Barkow et al., 1992). The EEA has subsequently become an important concept in the development of evolutionary psychology (Workman & Reader, 2021). Today the EEA is particularly associated with the Pleistocene epoch, between 2.5 million and 11,700 years before the present (YBP). Of course, there was never a single EEA, our ancestors lived in a variety of habitats at any given point, while these habitats and the social structures associated with them themselves changed over time (Barkow, 1989). But some aspects of the EEA were very resistant to change and the mother–infant bond is one of these. During his later years, Bowlby came to be so convinced of the importance of the EEA to a species’ evolution that he suggested:

Not a single feature of a species’ morphology, physiology, and behavior can be understood or even discussed intelligently except in relation to that species’ environment of evolutionary adaptedness.

(Bowlby, 1969, p. 64)

In terms of early social development, Bowlby suggested human infants have five adaptive attachment responses: Suckling, Crying, Clinging, Smiling, and Following. While suckling, clinging and (when a little older) following, all maintain close contact, smiling and crying make the caregiver aware of the neonate’s internal state. Importantly, smiling also helps to strengthen the social bond between the two. To Bowlby these important attachment behaviors help to provide a secure base, to which, as infants develop and explore, they are able to return.

Bowlby suggested children growing up in secure environments with responsive caregivers come to establish an internal working model (IWM) that includes the view that relationships are built on empathy and mutual support. In contrast, children growing up with unresponsive or absent caregivers develop an IWM that views relationships with mistrust. Bowlby considered the IWM to be formed by around the age of three. To him, parental deprivation leads to negative consequences for the infant that endure into later life. Such consequences include increased aggressive behavior, teenage delinquency, and a greatly increased likelihood of developing psychopathic behavior. He called this notion of a direct relationship between maternal deprivation and antisocial behavior the maternal deprivation hypothesis.