Dependency need

If adults lack partnership, their needs can usually be met by family and/or friend relationships.

(Larsen & Buss, 2008) Murray believed that human beings had their own hierarchy of needs, unique to each individual.

Attachment can be defined as a "deep and enduring emotional bond that connects one person to another across time and space."

(Hetherington & Parke, 1999) Harry Harlow and his research in developmental psychology showed that attachment between infant and caregiver is vitally important to the psychological development of the infant and requires physical contact with a warm and responsive mother.

(Larsen & Buss, 2008) These early experiences and reactions of the infants to the primary caregivers become working models for later adult relationships.

Social needs are "acquired psychological processes that activate emotional responses to particular need-relevant incentives."

Henry Murray's publication, Explorations in Personality (1938) describes differences and similarities between types of dependency needs.

As mentioned previously, Abraham Maslow was a key contributor to the establishment of a dependency need theory.

In his hierarchy, he outlined five needs crucial to human development and happiness across the lifespan; they are thought to occur in stages.

An example of this can be seen in people's choices of where they choose to live and work, and attaining medical insurance.

Freud's theory of psychosexual development Sigmund Freud came up with a five-stage theory that stated human beings are born with sexual energy; this energy was thought to develop in five stages (oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital stages).

In this stage, the child's main focus is on his or her anus, and the experience of toilet training is thought to be quite pleasurable.

Freud believed during this stage, that boys had the idea that they needed to compete with their fathers in order to possess their mothers.

A person's vital needs for mothering, love, affection, shelter, protection, security, food, and warmth are ever so important to an individual.

If these dependency needs are not met, particularly when an individual is younger, emotional, psychological, as well as physical problems may result down the road.

[1] In general, depression, sadness, and loneliness are likely results if dependency needs are not met, regardless of the individual's age.

At this time, Harlow and his team stated that love began developing as a feeding bond between an infant and its mother; this notion applied to family members, as well.

It was also thought that humans, along with other social animals, lived in organized societies in order to regularize sexual contact.

Harlow, being fascinated with the concept of love and nurturing, worked with monkeys to test these theories.

According to Berger, Harlow found that even when the wire mother was the source of food the infant monkey spent more of its time with the cloth surrogate.

The interpretation made by Harlow about this was that the liking for the cloth surrogate mother showed the importance of affection, emotion, nurturing, and dependency in mother-child relationships.

The phenomenon of infant dependency need was first noticed in René Spitz's orphan study.

When the obvious factors such as inadequate nutrition, contagious diseases, etc., were ruled out, researchers discovered that mortality rates could be greatly ameliorated by having the nurses in charge of the infants in the orphanages cuddle them in a way that approximated the amount of cuddling infants would normally receive from their own parents.

The results of this study show the more securely attached a person is to his or her parents; the easier it is for him or her to make friends.

The participants in the minority group had less social anxiety when they had a secure relationship with their parents, which in turn helped them be more sociable overall.

(Parade, Leerke, & Blankson, 2010) Another current study done by Gnilka, Ashby, and Noble, looked at "adult attachment styles and the psychological outcomes, like hopelessness and life satisfaction, using maladaptive and adaptive perfectionism as the mediators."

The focus of the article was on the dependency needs of female adolescent suicide attempters and non-attempters.

By looking at historical research pioneered by Murray, Maslow, Freud, and Harlow, as well as more recent concepts developed by Spritz, Colin, Parade et al., Beettridge and Favreau, one can determine that dependency need is an important psychological concept, encompassed in many areas of psychology.

It is also known that if these needs are somehow not adequately met, the person who has been neglected in this way, will likely develop deep-seated emotional, psychological, and possibly even physical hardships.

[citation needed] Nowadays, a lot of attachment theory studies are interested in seeing if there is a relationship between a person's style of attachment (developed in infancy) and the way in which he or she deals with whatever life throws his or her way (years later); i.e., dealing with emotions after a break-up or making friendships in college.