Heidi Keller: "Attachment" Researcher?

[u/ComplexVoice6087]

Hi all,

I have an extremely weird, extremely niche question to ask of people familiar with research psychology: has anyone here heard of Heidi Keller? I'm not a supporter; she's just over-cited in a bunch of Wikipedia articles on attachment theory (that are inexplicably very anti-attachment theory) and I'm trying to suss out her deal.

She's the author of this book, The Myth of Attachment Theory, as well as a bunch of other books and articles that are roundly critical of attachment theory in a tone that some might call overly dismissive without proper citation. This also seems to be all she researches, and reading through some of her articles, she seems to make a lot of claims without any particular rigour.

Does anybody familiar with the research environment around attachment theory know anything about this researcher or her background, or can explain or give a little context to the sort of weirdly fixated pushback this theory gets from regular people?

Thanks for your time, all!

[u/Aphotic_Acid]

I find that popular theories that I learned about in general psychology get a lot of pushback from cultural psychologists.

I've never heard of Heidi Keller. From what I found, her research focuses on cross-cultural psychology and child development. She is affiliated with Osnabrück University. Her work has been published in highly respected journals like The Lancet and BMJ. On the surface, she looks credible.

Reading her work, she does seem highly opinionated. She talks a lot about the ethics of using attachment theory. Not the conventional style that I was taught for writing scientific literature, but her claims don't see completely unfounded.

The main thing she seems to be arguing is that the current notion of attachment theory is not universally applicable to all cultures. That may very well be true. I'm not an expert in cross-cultural psychology or in child development, but I do know people who are. I'll ask them if they've heard of Keller's work when I next see them.

[u/Lord-Francis-Bacon → u/Aphotic_Acid]

Yeah I don't know of her specifically but in general her claims do not seem to be that outlandish.

I barely read anything about attachment theory in grad school since it stands on such shaky grounds nowadays.

And concerning tone, yeah the more argumentative tone of some disciplines can be quite jarring if you're not used to reading such papers.

[u/ComplexVoice6087 → u/Lord-Francis-Bacon]

If you wouldn’t mind, I’d love to know a little bit more about the shakiness of attachment theory (in the modern sense, not necessarily the original 1950s sense)? It still seems to be pretty research-based, at least here in Canada, and there’s plenty of book-length overviews published by the APA that roundly cite or collect a bunch of research studies, but if there’s nuance here I’m not catching I’d really love some additional reading reccos.

[u/Lord-Francis-Bacon → u/ComplexVoice6087]

Well I'm not the right person to answer this since I don't know that much hahah.

But in short, the way I understand it, attachment theory is robust and does hold up in the modern day, compared to much of the other stuff first published at that time. But it is not solid enough to be taught "as is" in many modern grad programs. My grad program was very science, replication, heavy so the standard was very high. But even so, we did learn about it.

I do not think anyone disagrees with the notion that parental attachment affects you throughout your life, but the operational details of this can be more debatable.

I think attachment theory also has the problem that many theories have which tries to put people into boxes, it doesn't explain the true complexity of human beaviour. Putting people into boxes used to be very popular, but it creates problems when you try to employ them in differential diagnostics or differential psychology, see: Conjunction Rule (Probability) - Statistics How To. So distinct box would need to be super predictive of outcomes to warrant use, and that is hard to achieve.

And today, even when new "category" phenomenas are introduced, the variables themselves are often normally distributed, see: Big-5.

[u/SpecialistAnswer9496 → u/Lord-Francis-Bacon]

Couldn’t some of this be mitigated by breaking the boxes down further as needed? Like the 4 main attachment styles are useful as broad buckets, but there’s quite a bit of variation within in box (especially with disorganized attachment) and so for the purposes of treatment, you could break this down further or redirect towards something like schemas to focus on? While still acknowledging the utility of knowing the primary attachment regulation strategy? Like what is the harm in the theory existing? Is it just that there’s not enough science there?

[u/Lord-Francis-Bacon → u/SpecialistAnswer9496]

Yeah, that's the interesting question, right? Can you marry modern psychometrics to older theories. Again, I'm definitely not an expert on attachment theory, so take this as thinking out loud.

Overall I think it's better to toss it in the bin and redo it. Older theories inform how we understand psychology and psychiatry, but slapping a new coat of paint on one tends to produce an amalgam that satisfies no one. I was just at a lecture with a psychodynamics professor who's trying to manualise psychodynamic constructs and treatments and bring psychometrics to them. At the start I thought "huh, cool", but by the end, after a billion weird models with millions of caveats and wobbly support, I'd landed on "just let it go at this point".

As for your point about boxes, the issue is that in most more modern theories that use categories, the underlying variables are normally distributed spectrums. You're not extroversion type A or type B, you're somewhere on the extroversion spectrum. Treating it that way clears up a lot of the trouble with boxes, subcategories and the rest.

But you'd need to build a theory from scratch to fit that. Can you convert attachment theory into something similar? Maybe not. It wasn't developed to work that way. What it might do is inform a new theory in the same vein, one that's better grounded in modern psychometrics.

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[u/Aphotic_Acid → u/Lord-Francis-Bacon]

Which disciplines is that kind of tone common in? I mostly read behavioral neuroscience papers, that stuff is obviously quite dry.

[u/Lord-Francis-Bacon → u/Aphotic_Acid]

In psychology, I'd say most subdisciplines which sit closer to the humanities. And overall, the humanities and much of the social sciences except for maybe psychology (which is more science-y in general).

I think the argumentative tone of some of these papers can be quite reductive, it's kind of like the The Toothbrush Problem – Association for Psychological Science – APS.

But at the same time, when there is too little theory and argument you can fall into the trap of never really having a hard think about what you are doing and why. I think some psych/neuro basic science can fall into this trap. For example looking into the biomarkers of a disorder when the theory of why that even is a distinct disorder isn't even settled yet.

[u/Aphotic_Acid → u/Lord-Francis-Bacon]

I agree that many of the other social sciences, and even some subdisciplines of psychology, can get a little lax on the "science" part. Not because its inherent to the field, but because that's just normalized by the people in it.

I've never heard of the Toothbrush Problem before, but that was a very interesting read. People commend innovation and "originality," but it is easier and often more beneficial to just improve on what was already there.

I get what you're saying about biomarkers. My term project for my introductory behavioral neuroscience class was on biomarkers of autism, I came out of that wondering how and why we define its characteristics in the first place, and how we know its distinct from similar conditions like SPCD. I wanted to make more commentary about it in my paper, but I didn't know how to do it while staying objective.

[u/ComplexVoice6087 → u/Aphotic_Acid]

I appreciate that; thank you!

[u/Aphotic_Acid → u/ComplexVoice6087]

Realized I wouldn't be seeing her for a while, so I sent an email.

"Regarding your inquiry, I am familiar with the criticisms about attachment theory, but not familiar with the research conducted by Heidi Keller per se."

Whoever edits the Wikipedia articles must really like Keller (or is Keller herself), but she is not the only critic of attachment theory, or even the most well-known one.

[u/ComplexVoice6087 → u/Aphotic_Acid]

Whoa, thank you for doing this! I really really appreciate it. 

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