Bases of Adult Attachment

A great deal is known about how infants form attachments, and how these processes carry over into adolescence. But after that, the trail grows cold: the study of adult attachment emphasizes individual variations, paying little attention to the normative mechanisms of adult bonding.

A much-needed corrective, Bases of Adult Attachment examines this under-investigated topic with an eye toward creating a robust theoretical model. The first volume of its kind, its multilevel approach integrates current findings from neuroscience and psychology to analyze the processes by which adult relationships develop, mature, function and dissolve. Here in relevant detail are factors contributing to initial attraction, possible scenarios in the evolution from friendship to attachment and the changes that occur on both sides of a relationship as partners mutually influence each other's behavior, emotions, cognition and even physiology. And expert contributors address long-neglected questions in the field with stimulating topics such as:

• The distress-relief dynamic in attachment bonding.
• An expectancy-value approach to attachment.
• The biobehavioral legacy of early attachment relationships for adult emotional and interpersonal functioning.
• How early experiences shape attraction, partner preferences, and attachment dynamics.
• How mental representations change as attachments form.
• Insights into the formation of attachment bonds from a social network perspective.

Bases of Adult Attachment will interest scholars approaching adult attachment at multiple levels of analysis (neural, physiological, affective, cognitive and behavioral) and from multiple perspectives. This wide audience includes developmental, social and cognitive psychologists as well as neuroscientists, neuropsychologists, clinicians, sociologists, family researchers and professionals in public health and medicine.

Vivian Zayas is an Associate Professor of Psychology and Director of the Personality, Attachment, and Control Laboratory at Cornell University. Her research examines the cognitive and affective processes that regulate behaviors within close relationships. She approaches the study of the individual and his or her relationships from a multi-level, interdisciplinary perspective that bridges the study of attachment processes with research on executive control and self-regulation and blurs traditionally defined boundaries between social and personality psychology and cognitive and cognitive neuroscience. Her research appears in journals such as Psychological Science, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Child Development, Nature Neuroscience, and Journal of Personality. She has received funding from National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health.

Cindy Hazan received her Ph.D. from Denver University. Her current research focuses on the normative aspects of adult attachment formation and maintenance, with special emphasis on identifying markers of attachment at multiple levels of functioning. She is an associate professor in the Department of Human Development at Cornell University.