THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGYdistress. It seems they’d simply learned that to cause a fuss would make
the situation worse.
Another reaction to the strange-situation task is for a toddler to
become distressed when the parent leaves and remain inconsolable
when she returns: this is known as “insecure-resistant” attachment.
Finally, a more recent addition to the scoring of behaviour in the
strange-situation task is so-called “disorganized attachment”, in which
the child reacts unpredictably, fluctuating from one attachment-style to
another. Research using the strange-situation test has shown that attach-
ment style tends to be passed from one generation to the next, and that
parents who start thinking of their baby as a person before it’s born tend
to show more healthy attachment later on.
Siblings
To only children, the idea of having one or more siblings often
conjures up idealistic images of life-long companionship and cama-
raderie. While some brothers and sisters do enjoy such rosy relations,
many others endure bitter rivalry or a hurtful lack of interest. Unsur-
prisingly, parents are often keen to know just how to nurture their
The cuteness response. In
2008 Morten Kringelbach
at the University of Oxford
showed that a region at
the front of the brain – the
medial orbitofrontal cortex –
is activated within just over
a tenth of a second when
people look at baby faces, but
not adult faces. This could be
the neural correlate of our
perception that babies are
cute, a reaction that Charles
Darwin and Konrad Lorenz
saw as an evolutionary
mechanism by which adults
are prompted to care for
infants. Kringelbach plans
to test whether the reaction
is also triggered by baby
animals, and hopes the
finding might one day offer
a way to identify women at
risk of developing post-natal
depression.