In 1951, a researcher by the name of John Bowlby suggested that parental deprivation within the first 5 years of life would in turn affect the child‘s development in negative ways, ultimately resulting in the child becoming an ―affectionless character‖ as well as a delinquent (Bowlby, 1951; Farrington, 2007).
Bowlby also suggested that avoidantly attached children learn to express anger derived from their experiences of having unresponsive or intrusive parental figures, displacing the resulting anger at unmet needs outwardly towards their environment (Bowlby, 1973; Deklyen & Greenberg, 2008).
Between the 1960s and the 1970s, Mary Ainsworth began doing research on children‘s attachment to the adult figures in their lives. Through this research, she devised the concept of the ―secure base‖ and from this also devised three distinct attachment patterns in infants: secure attachment, avoidant attachment and anxious attachment (Bretherton, 1992).
Because of the nature of attachment, which is a direct result of a parental figure‘s interactions with the child, using the pre-established difference between sociopathy and psychopathology, it is presumed that attachment styles may have causal effect on a sociopathic outcome rather than a psychopathic outcome
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