Stability of attachment styles across students’ romantic relationships, friendships and family relations

115 The term attachment is usually used to refer to the relationship between a mother and a child. That is, indeed, the basic example of attachment if the mother is the one who takes care of the child. But, a child can also be attached to the father, grandmother, grandfather, and later to friends, a partner and other people with whom the child may be in a long emotional relationship, regardless of its quality. Bowlby (1969) defines attachment as an affective relationship characterized by a tendency to demand and retain closeness with certain persons, especially when an individual is under stress. Attachment is formed in infancy between a child and a person or persons taking care of the child, which, in most cases, is the mother. Depending on the mother’s behavior towards the newborn, the quality of their relationship, the mother’s noticing of the child’s signals and their correct interpretation, adequate responding, care and gentleness, three types of the child’s attachment to the mother are formed: secure attachment, avoidant attachment, or anxious-ambivalent attachment (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978). If the mother notices the child’s signals, interprets them correctly and responds adequately, with care and gentleness, her child will develop the secure attachment style. On the other hand, if the mother is cold and does not respond to the child’s needs, the child will develop the avoidant attachment style. Finally, the mother who sometimes responds to her child’s needs with warmth and care, and sometimes coldly ignores them, will probably have a child with the anxiousambivalent attachment style. Although the attachment theory emerged as an explanation of the emotional relationship between a child and a caregiver, Bowlby (1969) thinks that the same attachment style system exists and functions throughout the individual’s lifetime. Attached behavior becomes organized within one’s self as an internal working model that defines emotional relationships during one’s life. Namely, a child develops an internal working model based on the mother’s adeŽeljka Kamenov, Department of Psychology, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Ivana Lučića 3, 10000 Zagreb, Croatia. E-mail: [email protected] (the address for correspondence);