Toward a Radically Embodied Neuroscience of Attachment and Relationships

HYPOTHESIS AND THEORY published: 21 May 2015 doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2015.00266 Toward a radically embodied neuroscience of attachment and relationships Lane Beckes1*, Hans IJzerman2,3 and Mattie Tops 2 1 Department of Psychology, Bradley University, Peoria, IL, USA, 2 Department of Clinical Psychology, VU University Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 3 Tilburg School of Behavioral and Social Sciences, Tilburg University, Tilburg, Netherlands Edited by: Andrew D. Wilson, Leeds Beckett University, UK Reviewed by: Jeffrey L. Krichmar, University of California, Irvine, USA Eric Phillip Charles, The Pennsylvania State University, USA *Correspondence: Lane Beckes, Department of Psychology, Bradley University, 1501 West Bradley Avenue, Peoria, IL 61625, USA Received: 25 April 2014 Accepted: 23 April 2015 Published: 21 May 2015 Citation: Beckes L, IJzerman H and Tops M (2015) Toward a radically embodied neuroscience of attachment and relationships. Front. Hum. Neurosci. 9:266. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2015.00266 Attachment theory (Bowlby, 1969/1982) posits the existence of internal working models as a foundational feature of human bonds. Radical embodied approaches instead suggest that cognition requires no computation or representation, favoring a cognition situated in a body in an environmental context with affordances for action (Chemero, 2009; Barrett, 2011; Wilson and Golonka, 2013; Casasanto and Lupyan, 2015). We explore whether embodied approaches to social soothing, interpersonal warmth, separation distress, and support seeking could replace representational constructs such as internal working models with a view of relationship cognition anchored in the resources afforded to the individual by their brain, body, and environment in interaction. We review the neurobiological bases for social attachments and relationships and attempt to delineate how these systems overlap or don’t with more basic physiological systems in ways that support or contradict a radical embodied explanation. We suggest that many effects might be the result of the fact that relationship cognition depends on and emerges out of the action of neural systems that regulate several clearly physically grounded systems. For example, the neuropeptide oxytocin appears to be central to attachment and pair-bond behavior (Carter and Keverne, 2002) and is implicated in social thermoregulation more broadly, being necessary for maintaining a warm body temperature (for a review, see IJzerman et al., 2015b). Finally, we discuss the most challenging issues around taking a radically embodied perspective on social relationships. We find the most crucial challenge in individual differences in support seeking and responses to social contact, which have long been thought to be a function of representational structures in the mind (e.g., Baldwin, 1995). Together we entertain the thought to explain such individual differences without mediating representations or computations, but in the end propose a hybrid model of radical embodiment and internal representations. Keywords: attachment, embodied cognition, interpersonal relationships, thermoregulation, neurobiology, oxytocin, ecological psychology Toward a Radically Embodied Neuroscience of Attachment and Close Relationships? People’s most intimate connections are bound to their earliest social interactions. These have been suggested to lead to internal working models of people’s social world. Or so attachment Frontiers in Human Neuroscience | www.frontiersin.org 1 May 2015 | Volume 9 | Article 266 Beckes et al. Radically embodied attachment Then, we will discuss support for the idea that the body – and its corresponding neural activations – plays a crucial part in interpersonal interactions, leaning heavily on the animal literature to describe sensory pathways through which social interaction influences psychological and physiological functioning (e.g., Hofer, 2006), and tie this literature with the sparser work in the human neurosciences related to interpersonal processes (e.g., Coan et al., 2006). We will suggest that many attachment phenomena can be understood as a dynamic coupling of the organism to its environment in which researchers’ interpretation via representational processes may be unnecessary (and perhaps even incorrect), simply relying on the organism’s homeostatic process. In order to take this radical embodiment view as far as we can, we will entertain the idea that many neural processes relating to individually variant attachment styles can be understood through their ties with the body. Subsequently we will reveal fundamental links between bodily states and relationship cognitions (e.g., IJzerman and Semin, 2009, 2010) with a discussion – and a framing through a radical embodiment lens – on work done on what some may term conceptual embodiment. In so doing, we will discuss Zajonc and Markus’ (1984) dichotomy between soft and hard interfaces of cognition, but will also suggest the theory of predictive and reactive control systems (PARCSs; Tops et al., 2010) to elucidate how representational cognition may emerge from more basic, radically embodied cognitive systems, providing an integration of non-representational approaches and representational approaches at the neural level. In the end, we will suggest a research agenda that might falsify positions we set forth here. theory (Bowlby, 1969/1982; see also Craik, 1943) has suggested. Highly influential, innovative, and integrative, the theory has grown to be one of the most generative theories of interpersonal relationships in psychology and human development. Accordingly it has provided a basis for strong claims about the nature of human relationships and human cognition. Some of those claims, such as the claim that humans are innately social animals, and that being social has consequences for mental and physical well-being, are nigh indisputable given the current support (e.g., Baumeister and Leary, 1995; Holt-Lunstad et al., 2010; Beckes and Coan, 2011). Other claims, however, such as the idea that people develop internal working models of their relationships and that those models influence behavior from cradle to grave are more debatable and our understanding of the processes that lead up the formation of such internal working models are still in their rudimentary phases. Many relationship theories that spring from attachment theories either explicitly posit or imply representational schemata or computational thought (e.g., Baldwin, 1992; Agnew et al., 1998; Andersen and Chen, 2002; Simpson, 2007). Here we entertain the thought that, in many instances, the cognitive neuroscience and psychology of relationships does not require representational cognition by “putting brain, body, and social relationships together again” (cf. Clark, 1998; see also Hendriks-Jansen, 1996). Notably, our primary goal with this article is not to argue that all attachment processes are necessarily radically embodied, but rather to (...truncated)