PSY 3109 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Attachment Theory
15 May 2018
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Unit 2: Epistemic Needs
Emergency situations: times when one of our basic needs are not met or are threatened
• When all of our basic needs are met, we are not in an emergency situation, we still spend
our time doing something
• According to White, that additional something is often in the service of exploring and
gaining information about the world
o Ex. When an infant repeatedly drops his spoon onto the floor, what looks like a game
is actually, according to White, an attempt to test hypotheses about the properties of
objects and about cause and effect
• On the one hand, there is a clear evolutionary function to learning the rules of how the
world works as a means to ensuring our survival
• On the other hand, White suggests that in many respects this information-seeking motive
has evolved so that it has become an end unto itself. People simply want to learn for
learnings sake
Effectance: tendency to explore and influence one's environment (you having an effect)
• The motivation to feel as if the world is a knowable, predictable, and controllable place is
something people are powerfully motivated to pursue
• When that sense of prediction and control has been disturbed, people pay extra attention to
their environment and systematically and methodically observe their surroundings to try
and reassert that I am a good predictor of what will happen next
o
Self-efficacy: a personal judgement of "how well one can execute courses of action required to deal
with prospective situations (Bandura, 1982)
• Feeling of being competent is central to the concept of self-efficacy
• In dozens of studies, Bandura and colleagues have demonstrated that people with high self-
efficacy outperform people with low self-efficacy in any number of domains, including
education, health, sports, and relationships
• Simply believing that you are competent often causes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy,
while believing that one is not competent can cause a downward spiral into incompetence
Self-fulfilling prophecy: a prediction that directly or indirectly causes itself to become true (e.g.,
you believe that you will fail and so you do fail)
• Ties back in to the notion of viewing a situation as a challenge vs as a threat
When standing at the top of a very high mountain, a skier with high self-efficacy is likely to view the
situation as: a challenge
Elliot & Reis (2003) documented the link between effectance and attachment
• Attachment theory posits that in early childhood people development one of several distinct
styles of relating to other people, some of which are secure and predictors of social
success, and some of which are insecure and predictors of social problems
• argued that a secure attachment style reflects that sense of competence that allows people
to view a difficult situation as a challenge rather than a threat and gives people the
confidence to explore and grow
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