Research figure: Mary Ainsworth · Written by Artificial Sapiens
Mary D. Salter Ainsworth’s 1989 paper, “Attachments Beyond Infancy,” is a systematic theoretical account of how attachment relationships change across development and how attachment contributes to different kinds of enduring human bonds. Published in American Psychologist, the article extends her earlier infant research to children beyond the first years of life, relationships between adult children and parents, caregiving ties, romantic partnerships, friendships, and kinship. Its central achievement is an analytic distinction: a close relationship may involve attachment, caregiving, reproduction, companionship, and social obligations in different combinations, and the presence of affection alone does not establish that a relationship functions as an attachment bond. The paper is best read as a framework for developmental and relational research, rather than a new experiment or a set of diagnostic categories. Ainsworth (1989).
What Is “Attachments Beyond Infancy”?
“Attachments Beyond Infancy” was published in April 1989 in American Psychologist, volume 44, issue 4, pages 709–716. Its author is Mary D. Salter Ainsworth, affiliated in the publication with the University of Virginia. The journal’s editorial note explains that the article developed from her Distinguished Professional Contributions award address delivered at the American Psychological Association meeting in Atlanta in August 1988. The distinction between the 1988 address and the 1989 published article matters for accurate bibliographic citation. The published paper is a single-authored scholarly synthesis and theoretical extension, rather than a report of a newly recruited cohort, a randomized trial, or a new attachment-classification procedure. Its bibliographic record is independently indexed under PMID 2729745. Original publication.
The research question is unusually broad yet carefully bounded: How do attachments to familiar caregivers evolve after infancy, and which other affectional relationships throughout life actually contain attachment functions? Ainsworth builds the analysis by identifying behavioral systems, their changing developmental organization, and the role each system plays in particular relationships. The paper therefore concerns attachment beyond the infant-caregiver dyad, but it does not assume that every caring, supportive, affectionate, sexual, or socially significant relationship is an attachment. This conceptual discipline remains valuable because the word attachment is often used informally for liking, dependence, emotional intensity, preference, or even a diagnostic condition.
Scientific Origins and Historical Position
John Bowlby constructed the central evolutionary and ethological framework of attachment theory, emphasizing the attachment behavioral system, protection, selective proximity, and internal working models. Ainsworth’s distinctive contribution was to elaborate these ideas through direct observations in Uganda and Baltimore, the secure-base perspective, caregiver sensitivity, and a structured laboratory procedure later known as the Strange Situation. Her work with Mary C. Blehar, Everett Waters, and Sally Wall was presented in the original 1978 book Patterns of Attachment, where infant attachment patterns were related to observations of caregiving relationships. The original secure, avoidant, and resistant classifications belong to this early program; the later disorganized/disoriented category is associated with Mary Main and Judith Solomon. Ainsworth and colleagues (1978).
The 1989 article appeared after attachment research had begun to extend beyond infancy. Ainsworth explicitly discusses Alan Sroufe’s developmental work and Mary Main and colleagues’ research on representations of attachment and the Adult Attachment Interview. She nevertheless states that the paper will concentrate on theoretical and normative questions rather than providing a detailed review of individual-difference studies. This announced scope is central to interpretation: one can evaluate its conceptual distinctions by the empirical literature that followed, while avoiding the mistaken description of the article as a longitudinal demonstration that infant classifications determine adult relationships. Ainsworth (1989); Bretherton (1992).
An adjacent tradition had already applied attachment ideas to romantic love. Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver published “Romantic Love Conceptualized as an Attachment Process” in 1987, using questionnaire-based analogies to infant attachment. Ainsworth’s 1989 contribution belongs to the wider historical emergence of adult attachment research, but it has a different objective: clarifying which basic motivational systems organize each kind of bond and how the functions change with age. Contemporary self-report dimensions of adult attachment anxiety and avoidance are products of the later measurement literature, not outcomes directly measured in Ainsworth’s 1989 article. Hazan and Shaver (1987); Fraley (2019).
The Foundational Distinction: Attachment, Affectional Bonds, and Behavioral Systems
Ainsworth begins with an attachment behavioral system: an organized set of processes whose functional outcome is maintaining or restoring access to one or a small number of significant figures, particularly when protection or reassurance is needed. A behavioral system is more than a visible act. Crying, following, searching, calling, or keeping someone in mind can be expressions of a changing organization regulated by threat, distance, expectations, age, and circumstance. Infants initially depend on signals that elicit caregiver approach; growing motor and cognitive abilities allow increasingly planned, selective, goal-directed proximity seeking. The observable form of attachment changes because the person’s capacities and environment change. Ainsworth (1989).
An affectional bond is a relatively enduring relationship in which another particular person is valued as an irreplaceable individual. Attachment is a more specific functional relationship: the individual uses or expects the other as a source of security, comfort, and protection. The distinction prevents an error of classification. A person may enjoy a group, admire a teacher, desire a sexual partner, care devotedly for a child, or cooperate with a friend without necessarily using that person as an attachment figure. Some ties contain several of these functions simultaneously; some change their configuration over years. The scientific task is to identify the functions through behavior and representations rather than assign one label based on emotional intensity alone.
The caregiving behavioral system has a different regulatory objective: responding to another’s vulnerability by providing protection, comfort, assistance, and support. A parent who soothes a distressed child primarily enacts caregiving; the child who seeks that parent as a haven primarily enacts attachment. Both may deeply value the bond, but the roles are asymmetric. In an adult relationship the partners may alternate between receiving and providing care, allowing attachment and caregiving to become reciprocal. Ainsworth’s conceptual model therefore describes the organization of specific relationships rather than a fixed personality type. Ainsworth (1989).
Attachment Development After the First Year
The transition from infant proximity to coordinated plans
Ainsworth treats development as a progressive reorganization of the attachment system. During infancy, a familiar caregiver’s availability may be maintained through direct physical proximity and readily observable behavior. As children acquire language, mobility, perspective taking, and increasingly elaborate working models, attachment needs can be regulated across longer separations and with more complex expectations about another person’s plans. The child remains attached while relying less on uninterrupted physical contact. The change is a transformation in the means of obtaining security, not necessarily a weakening of the relationship. Ainsworth (1989).
Goal-corrected partnership in early childhood
Building on Bowlby and on research by Robert Marvin, Ainsworth describes the emergence, around the preschool years, of a goal-corrected partnership. As the child becomes better able to appreciate that a parent has independent purposes, parent and child can communicate intentions, negotiate conflicting plans, and tolerate separations on the basis of expectations about reunion. The description is developmental rather than an instruction that all children reach the same competence on an identical birthday. Communication demands, neurodevelopment, disability, culture, stress, and the reliability of caregiving environments affect how such processes are manifested.
The cognitive component is important. Attachment behavior can be guided by representations of the caregiver’s accessibility even when the caregiver is physically absent. A child’s capacity to form and update expectations helps explain why the same relationship may look different at twelve months, four years, twelve years, and adulthood. Such representations are open to experience and therefore should not be construed as an immutable script fixed by one laboratory observation. Ainsworth’s extension suggests a program of observing developmental organization, communication, coping, and recovery across age-specific contexts. Ainsworth (1989); Fraley (2002).
Adolescence and the redistribution of attachment functions
Ainsworth identifies adolescence as a further developmental transition involving autonomy, changes in social opportunity, emerging intimate relationships, and shifts in the availability and salience of parents and peers. An adolescent can retain a meaningful attachment to a parent while seeking comfort or companionship elsewhere. The relevant research question is how functions are redistributed among particular people, rather than whether the parent-child bond has simply been severed. Some adolescents turn first to parents under severe threat while preferring peers for ordinary emotional disclosure; others show different arrangements. The existence, hierarchy, and function of each relationship require empirical assessment. Rosenthal (2010).
Adult children and continuing ties to parents
Ainsworth argues that adult autonomy can coexist with an attachment to parents. Even when a romantic partner becomes a principal attachment figure, an adult may continue to orient to parents as emotionally distinctive, protective, or consoling figures. The relationship can also evolve toward mutual care as parents age, become ill, or need assistance. She raises an open question about whether adult children and aging parents can come to occupy more symmetrical positions, alternately providing security to each other. The paper explicitly identifies this as a topic needing systematic research, which is a useful guard against presenting it as an established 1989 experimental finding. Ainsworth (1989).
Caregiving Bonds: The Parent’s Relationship to the Child
Why caregiving and attachment are distinct
A major section contrasts the child’s attachment to a parent with the parent’s bond to the child. Ainsworth challenges the loose habit of calling every strong parent-infant bond an attachment in the same sense. In the classic functional definition, the infant seeks security from the caregiver, while the caregiver responds to the infant’s needs. The parent’s relationship is often organized predominantly through caregiving and protection. Their behaviors can sustain a reciprocal emotional relationship without becoming identical psychological systems. This distinction is especially important when public discussion confuses affectionate parenting, infant attachment security, and a parent’s subjective experience of bonding.
Ainsworth also reviews debates around claims of a brief postnatal sensitive period for maternal bonding. Her analysis criticizes strong generalizations from animal separation studies to human parent-infant relationships and calls attention to the active role of infant signals and shared experience in sustaining care. The original discussion reflects research and terminology available in the late 1980s. Contemporary clinical claims about childbirth practices, skin-to-skin contact, bonding difficulties, or subsequent attachment outcomes require specific current evidence rather than inference from the historical article. Ainsworth (1989).
Mothers, fathers, and the caregiver role
Ainsworth explicitly allows that the primary attachment figure may be a mother, father, or parental surrogate, depending on who consistently provides care. She discusses the father-child bond and notes that fathers can perform responsive caregiving, while cautioning that the available studies were limited by the sampling and social arrangements of the time. Caregiver gender and caregiver function should be analyzed independently. The evolutionary language and historical gender assumptions in the paper are themselves subjects of contextual interpretation, particularly for families whose caregiving arrangements do not follow the period’s customary norms. Ainsworth (1989).
The modern evidence base supports the importance of responsiveness across caregivers. A 2024 meta-analysis of 174 studies and 22,914 parent-child dyads estimated a pooled positive correlation of r = .25 between caregiver sensitivity and child attachment security, with a confidence interval of .22 to .28. Maternal and paternal sensitivity associations were positive and not statistically different in magnitude in the reported analyses. The synthesis is relevant to the broader framework Ainsworth helped establish; it is not an evaluation of every theoretical proposition in her 1989 paper and should not be interpreted as a deterministic causal formula for individual families. Madigan and colleagues (2024).
Romantic Partnerships: Reproduction, Attachment, and Caregiving
Ainsworth describes enduring adult pair-bonds as relationships that may combine reproductive or sexual motivation, attachment needs, and caregiving commitments. Sexual attraction can help bring people together, while a sustained relationship may develop routines of comfort, protection, mutual dependence, and care that survive fluctuations in sexual interest. In reciprocal partnerships, each person may sometimes seek the other as a source of security and at other times provide that security. This combination distinguishes the model from any account reducing adult love exclusively to infant behavior or exclusively to sexuality. Ainsworth (1989).
The paper also considers partnerships in which caregiving roles are consistently uneven. Role asymmetry can be important for understanding illness, disability, dependency, or social arrangements, but the functional analysis does not supply a clinical diagnosis of either partner. Ainsworth notes that former partners can remain emotionally significant after separation, with longing and grief continuing beyond the formal end of a relationship. This observation makes attachment a useful construct for research on breakup and bereavement while leaving wide variation in people’s experiences and responses.
A historically specific passage addresses same-sex partnerships through the social norms and reproductive framework familiar to the author in 1989. A present-day interpretation should retain her recognition that such couples can form enduring bonds while locating her assumptions about social support and reproductive function in their historical context. The attachment functions of availability, comfort, caregiving, trust, and response to separation can be investigated across relationship structures without inferring that any particular sexual orientation or family form determines attachment security. Modern adult attachment research explores relationship quality, diverse partnership structures, shifting security, and how relational experiences revise internal working models. Fraley (2019).
Friendships, Companionship, and Selective Attachment
One of the paper’s most original theoretical moves is its treatment of friendship. Social approach, affiliative pleasure, shared activity, and cooperation can bring people together without automatically creating an attachment relationship. Ainsworth discusses a broader sociable or affiliative behavioral system associated with seeking peers and groups, then examines the narrower conditions under which one particular friend becomes uniquely valued and relied upon. Identification with a group and selective attachment to an individual have different relational structures. For her conceptual analysis, an affectional bond is organized around a distinguishable person rather than simply group membership. Ainsworth (1989).
She considers differences between acquaintances, regular companions, and intimate friends. Some friendships become enduring bonds marked by reciprocal trust, care, comfort under threat, response to separation, and distress after loss. Others depend heavily on shared settings or interests and fade as circumstances change. This framework suggests that friendship should be studied as a multidimensional relationship: time spent together, liking, reciprocal help, emotional disclosure, and attachment functions are related questions with different operational measures. It also permits friendships to matter deeply without demanding that every friendship match the caregiver-infant prototype.
In reviewing developmental accounts of friendship, Ainsworth discusses research suggesting that children’s articulated understanding of friendship shifts from play and sharing toward mutual assistance, trust, and reciprocal understanding. She also identifies a measurement caution: an interview with younger children may underestimate their implicit relational capacities because verbal reflection is itself developing. Thus, differences in interview descriptions cannot automatically be equated with the first appearance of a psychological capacity. This is an instructive historical example of separating the construct being studied from the ability of a particular instrument to express it. Ainsworth (1989).
Siblings, Extended Kin, and Intergenerational Bonds
Ainsworth examines how older siblings sometimes offer protection, reassurance, and care to younger siblings. In particular circumstances, a sibling may become an attachment figure or supplementary secure base. She also discusses findings involving siblings’ responses to brief separation and the role of perspective taking in supportive behavior. Such examples broaden the account of who can fulfill an attachment function and direct attention to family circumstances, caregiving practices, bereavement, and differences in sibling roles. They do not imply that all siblings are attachment figures for each other or that birth order independently determines attachment security. Ainsworth (1989).
Kinship bonds raise a related but distinct problem. Some ties with relatives persist despite distance, disagreement, or limited day-to-day companionship. Ainsworth considers cultural expectations of solidarity, obligations to assist relatives, shared history, and emotional identification as possible contributors to endurance. Longevity alone is insufficient to demonstrate a selective attachment function; a bond may be maintained partly through obligation, identity, or practical cooperation. This difference becomes analytically important in extended families and caregiving networks, where relationships may combine generosity, strain, rivalry, affection, and responsibility.
The broader implication is that attachment researchers must distinguish the mere presence of a family relationship from its actual function for a particular person. A grandparent, aunt, sibling, foster caregiver, coach, or mentor may serve as a source of security when the relevant patterns of availability and reliance are present. The role must be established empirically from the relationship; biological relatedness or a formal title does not settle the issue. Ainsworth’s discussion offers a conceptual vocabulary for such investigation rather than a universal ranking of caregivers.
Secure Base, Safe Haven, and Internal Working Models Across Life
The secure-base idea gives the paper developmental continuity. The infant uses a familiar caregiver’s availability to explore; a preschooler may rely on negotiated plans; an adolescent may maintain confidence in a parent while spending more time with peers; an adult may pursue demanding projects with confidence that trusted partners or family members remain available. These behaviors differ in appearance and context while potentially expressing related functions of security. Ainsworth’s framework invites an age-sensitive assessment of the relationship between felt availability and exploration, rather than applying one infant measurement unchanged to every later-life relationship.
A safe haven refers to turning toward a relationship for support during threat, fear, illness, loss, or distress. Secure base and safe haven functions can coexist, and they may be distributed among multiple figures. The distinction between physical proximity and representational availability also becomes more important across development. A familiar person may provide security through a phone conversation, an anticipated reunion, a stable history of responsiveness, or a remembered relationship. Working models connect past experience with expectations, although their contents can be revised as relationships and circumstances change. Ainsworth (1989); Fraley (2019).
What Kind of Scientific Evidence Did the 1989 Article Provide?
The paper is a conceptual synthesis informed by prior developmental observations, theoretical work, clinical reflections, animal research, and published studies of relationships. It is not a registered experiment, a population survey, a systematic review with a reproducible search protocol, or a meta-analysis. It offers an architecture of claims of different evidential strengths: foundational theoretical definitions, observations established in earlier infant research, historical interpretations, analogies among species and relationship settings, and explicit research questions for which evidence remained limited. The most defensible reading evaluates each proposition according to that status. Original 1989 article.
For example, the distinction between attachment and caregiving serves as an explanatory construct; studies of parent-child sensitivity and attachment support related empirical associations. The proposition that romantic partnerships may contain attachment and caregiving functions is supported by subsequent adult-attachment studies, although the constructs and instruments used in those studies vary. The claim that childhood and adult attachment show some continuity is a longitudinal and measurement question. The claim that a particular friendship, sibling relationship, or therapeutic bond is an attachment requires evidence about that specific relationship. The validity of one branch cannot be assumed to settle every other branch.
Subsequent Evidence: Stability, Change, and Attachment Networks
R. Chris Fraley’s 2002 meta-analytic and modeling paper examined stability from infancy toward adulthood, arguing that patterns show moderate stability over the first nineteen years and comparing models in which early representations exert lasting influence with models emphasizing their revision. Moderate stability permits both continuity and change. It gives a more appropriate empirical basis for developmental discussions than a rigid claim that an infant’s classification fixes adult personality or partner choice. Fraley (2002).
Fraley’s 2019 review of attachment in adulthood organizes continued debates over the transfer of attachment functions from parents to peers and partners, the relative roles of relationship histories and current experiences, how security changes, and differences among relationship structures. These questions connect directly to Ainsworth’s developmental agenda. A later research literature can improve operationalization and test hypotheses Ainsworth raised; it should retain its own authorship and methods rather than treating all subsequent findings as her original empirical discoveries. Fraley (2019).
A 2010 investigation of attachment hierarchies among adolescents and young adults used an Important People Interview to distinguish selective attachments from other relationships. Its sample comprised 212 high-school and 198 college participants and showed age-group differences in the ordering of attachment figures, including greater prominence of romantic partners among the college participants. The findings illustrate a measurable developmental question implicit in the 1989 synthesis, but their sampling and cross-sectional comparisons limit claims about universal individual trajectories. Rosenthal (2010).
A 2024 study by Junnan Tian and Harry Freeman examined the structure of adult attachment networks in 930 participants between the ages of 24 and 80 using a web-based hierarchical mapping technique. The analysis compared attachment figures and network dimensions across romantic and family circumstances, finding an important role for romantic partners and variation in hierarchy and network organization. Its design extends the type of relational mapping Ainsworth anticipated. It is a study of self-reported networks and their organization, rather than a direct replication of the 1989 text or a proof that all adults have the same attachment hierarchy. Tian and Freeman (2024).
The strongest modern quantitative summary of caregiver sensitivity, published in 2024, also demonstrates both the reach and limits of Ainsworth’s earlier contributions. The pooled sensitivity-security association was reliable but modest and varied by measure, observation quality, and study features. It cannot establish that early experience alone governs every later attachment. The quantitative result supports a probabilistic developmental influence and leaves ample scope for later caregiving, relationships, social conditions, and individual development. Madigan and colleagues (2024).
Methodological Challenges and Scientific Boundaries
Defining the relationship under study
Different investigators can use the word attachment to mean a selective bond, a behavioral system, an expectation about another’s availability, an adult self-report dimension, an interview-based state of mind, or an infant observation-based classification. These may be theoretically related, but they are not identical measurements. A scientific account should name the instrument, age group, relationship, unit of analysis, and construct before comparing findings. Otherwise, apparent continuity across life stages can be produced by shared vocabulary rather than demonstrated correspondence.
Cultural and historical context
Ainsworth sought general principles while acknowledging individual and cultural variation. Her examples and terminology nevertheless reflect the familial, marital, gender-role, and institutional assumptions of the late 1980s. Caregiving distribution, expectations of intergenerational assistance, peer intimacy, marriage customs, sexual partnerships, and permissible expressions of dependency vary across communities and historical periods. Cross-cultural interpretation should test which functional properties recur and which measurements are culturally bound. It should avoid treating one North American relationship arrangement as the benchmark for all societies.
Causality and developmental prediction
Correlations between caregiving sensitivity and attachment security, stability estimates across age, and associations between adult self-report scores and relationship quality do not, by themselves, identify a single causal path. Genetics, temperament, stress exposure, available caregivers, social policy, partner behavior, illness, changes in family structure, and measurement errors may affect observed associations. Longitudinal designs, careful controls, culturally relevant measures, and, where ethical, intervention studies improve the evidence. Ainsworth’s model supplies plausible mechanisms; the strength and specificity of each causal claim depend on actual data.
Attachment classification and clinical meaning
The Strange Situation was developed to study organized infant-caregiver behavior under standardized conditions. Its original A/B/C patterns describe observed relationship behavior in a particular assessment context. Main and Solomon’s later disorganized/disoriented category is historically distinct. These classifications are not stand-alone psychiatric diagnoses, and an infant classification cannot be translated directly into a fixed adult romantic style. Adult anxiety and avoidance scales, attachment interviews, and relationship-specific network maps ask different questions. A clinician may use developmental formulations where appropriate, but neither the 1989 theoretical paper nor a single attachment score constitutes a diagnostic examination.
Scientific Legacy of the 1989 Synthesis
The lasting value of “Attachments Beyond Infancy” resides in its system-level account of relational life. It establishes that the developmental question is how security-seeking and care-giving functions are organized and reorganized across particular relationships. The paper offers an intellectual bridge from Ainsworth’s early observational program to investigations of adolescent attachment hierarchies, adult partnerships, lifelong family bonds, and the architecture of social support. It also supplies a guardrail for interpretation: attachment has specific functions, and affectional closeness is not a sufficient operational definition. Ainsworth (1989); Fraley (2019).
Its influence must be attributed precisely. Bowlby developed the original attachment-theory framework; Ainsworth established central empirical methods and made the 1989 synthesis; Hazan and Shaver advanced an influential early romantic-attachment formulation; Main and colleagues pursued representational assessment, with Main and Solomon later formalizing the disorganized classification; and subsequent investigators have developed measurements, longitudinal evidence, and network analyses. The distinct contributions form a cumulative research history. The 1989 article retains importance because it asks conceptual questions that remain testable and provides a structured means of identifying what, exactly, each study claims to measure.
Questions About Ainsworth’s 1989 Paper
Did Ainsworth claim that attachment ends when childhood ends?
No. Her thesis is that attachment behaviors, representations, and the people who provide security change with development. Continuing attachment to parents can coexist with adulthood, independence, and new relationships. The paper explores the possibility that partners and selected friends also provide attachment functions. Ainsworth (1989).
Does every close friendship count as an attachment?
The paper distinguishes companionship and sociability from the selective provision of attachment security. Some particularly close friendships may include attachment and caregiving components, while other rewarding friendships organize around shared activity or companionship. The classification depends on the relationship’s functions rather than the label friend.
Did the article introduce adult attachment styles or a new psychological test?
No. It is an eight-page theoretical paper. The original Strange Situation classifications arose in Ainsworth’s earlier infant program. Adult romantic attachment questionnaires were developed within a separate research tradition, including Hazan and Shaver’s 1987 work, while attachment interviews and later network tools use other constructs and methods. Hazan and Shaver (1987).
Is attachment security fixed from infancy?
The available longitudinal evidence supports a degree of developmental continuity together with meaningful scope for change. Early experience can remain influential while later relationships and circumstances revise expectations and patterns. The paper itself raises developmental questions rather than establishing individual predictions for a lifetime. Fraley (2002).
What is the most useful way to read the original article today?
Read each section as a claim about the functions organizing a particular bond; distinguish definitions from empirical observations and proposed research questions; then compare those claims with subsequent age-specific and relationship-specific studies. The paper’s historical language deserves contextual attention, especially regarding gender, parent roles, marriage, and kinship. This approach preserves its theoretical contribution while respecting the diversity and methodological development of contemporary research.
Related Articles
Mary Ainsworth — The researcher’s life, observation-based studies, foundational concepts, collaborators, and historical influence.
Attachment in Infancy and Early Childhood: Security and Development — Early attachment processes, development, and evidence relevant to the infant-caregiver foundation of the 1989 synthesis.
Adult Attachment Theory: How Anxiety and Avoidance Shape Relationships — Later adult relationship measures and evidence, with a distinct thematic scope from Ainsworth’s original paper.
Mary Ainsworth's Scientific Legacy: Evidence, Limitations, and Influence
Mary Ainsworth and John Bowlby: Collaboration and Distinct Contributions
Mary Ainsworth's Contributions to Attachment Theory
References
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Fraley, R. C. (2019). Attachment in adulthood: Recent developments, emerging debates, and future directions. Annual Review of Psychology, 70, 401–422. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-010418-102813
Hazan, C., and Shaver, P. (1987). Romantic love conceptualized as an attachment process. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52(3), 511–524. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.52.3.511
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Rosenthal, N. L., and Kobak, R. (2010). Assessing adolescents’ attachment hierarchies: Differences across developmental periods and associations with individual adaptation. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 20(3), 678–706. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1532-7795.2010.00655.x
Tian, J., and Freeman, H. (2024). “All You Need Is Love” a social network approach to understanding attachment networks in adulthood. Behavioral Sciences, 14(8), 647. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs14080647