The Logic of Connection: How Evolution and Biology Create Caregiving and Attachment is a monograph about the logic of giving, love, trust, and nurturance. Bowlby's theory of attachment provides the best starting point for an explanation of nurturance, but there are some limitations in this theory, especially its tendency to dismiss the caregiving side of the relationship. The book examines the evolutionary evidence for nurturance and finds the origins of nurturance in the earliest mammalian emotions. In addition, it describes neurobiological research that has identified the brain circuits that underlie nurturance: a dyadic preference bond that is common to all mammals and a caring emotion that shows clear evolutionary development among mammalian species.

On these foundations, The Logic of Connection describes a theory of relationships based on these neurobiological circuits and the resulting human desire to give and receive emotional contact. The theory shows the emotional logic of this relationship process. The proactive connection process (caregiving), characteristic of parents, unfolds naturally from the evolved emotional circuit of caring. The logic of connection also describes a receptive process typical of children (attachment), where trust grows from the experience of being cared for and nurtured. These processes coexist alongside other emotional motivations with which they interact.

The application of the theoretical orientation of connection leads to new insights about the parent-child relationship. It is used to create and test a connection theory of the parent-child relationship. When applied to adult relationships, this orientation is used to describe the development of an exchange relationship into a connection relationship, examining the positive normative as well as negative processes that may occur within the relationship.

Contents:

Chapter 1. The Riddle of Nurturance

The nurturance that occurs in and out of families has been a puzzle for the social sciences. A number of relatively unconvincing theoretical orientations have attempted to apply standard self-interest explanations to the family: exchange, adaptation, power, social bond. What is needed in an explanation of nurturance is a theoretical orientation that accounts for the emotional nature of relationships.

Chapter 2. Bowlby's Account of Attachment and Caregiving

John Bowlby's theory of attachment and caregiving has energized research on the parent-child relationship. His evolution-based psychological model of attachment (how the child depends on the parent for protection) has improved through several versions. Unfortunately, his complementary vision of caregiving (how the parent nurtures the child) was never fully developed, lacking a convincing emotional motivation for parental caregiving.

Chapter 3. Caring, Caregiving and Evolution

Bowlby's evolutionary logic is expanded to account for the evolution of caregiving beginning in the premammalian reptiles. Reptiles and mammals have an automatic fear and rejection of strangers. This response leads reptiles to attack their own young. This chapter presents evidence for the evolution of a mechanism that inhibited stranger rejection, and the subsequent development of a caregiving motivation that was a precursor for to the emergence of mammalian species. Subsequently the caregiving motivation continued to evolve among mammals, reaching its most extensive expression in humans as a commitment to the needs of the partner.

Chapter 4. Caring, Caregiving and Neurobiology

The neurobiology of nurturance is examined. Evidence from reptiles and mammals is examined to show how the evolution of the neurotransmitter vasopressin in mammals suppressed the stranger rejection response while the neurotransmitter oxytocin created a dyadic preference bond, at first between mother and child and later generalized in many species including humans to a bond between adults.

Chapter 5. Proactive Connection (Caregiving)

This chapter builds on the evolutionary and neurochemical evidence for an emotional caring motivation to describe the psychology of nurturance. Extending Bowlby's concept of a caregiving behavioral control system, this chapter reviews evidence showing how the dyadic emotion of caring produces empathy (called "sensitivity" in Bowlby's scheme), the intention to know the partner, and responsibility ("responsiveness"), the intention to meet the partner's needs. These proactive intentions in turn explain parental and other nurturance.

Chapter 6. Receptive Connection (Attachment)

Corresponding to Bowlby's concept of security attachment, the receptive connection process describes emotional processes in the person, whether child or adult, who accepts nurturance from a partner. The receptive connection process is motivated by dyadic trust, evolved like caring from the dyadic preference bond. Emotional trust is complementary to emotional caring and is the dyadic component of Bowlby's concept of security.

Chapter 7. Interconnections

This chapter discusses the positive and negative feedback processes of caregiving and attachment. First are various feedback processes by which caring increases as a consequence of other connection variables. Second are processes by which connection variables are constrained or reduced in value. In addition to the direct processes of connection, there are indirect feedback and feedforward processes that augment and constraint the development of caregiving and attachment. A number of nonconnection processes also have effects on the connection variables.

Chapter 8. Connection in Adult Relationships

The logic of caregiving and attachment is used to construct and test a theory of adult relationship formation. This theory describes the initial formation of an exchange relationship and its gradual transformation into a connection relationship. This analysis identifies a critical imbalance that can be created during such a transformation, when power and violence can arise. The connection theory describes some of the ways that close relationships can end.

Chapter 9. Reconsidering Caregiving and Attachment

The connection theoretical orientation adds some important elements to attachment theory, especially in terms of its ability to describe the logic of caregiving and nurturance. It also subtracts from traditional attachment theory by showing how the connection process is separate from the fear process, although it sometimes interacts strongly with it.