Animal attachment

Animal attachment

1. Lorenz

   • Lorenz first observed the phenomenon of imprinting when he was a child and a neighbour gave him a newly hatched duckling that then followed him around.
   • Procedure: As an adult researcher Lorenz set up a classic experiment in which he randomly divided a clutch of goose eggs. Half the eggs were hatched with the mother goose in their natural environement. The other half hatched in an incubator where the first moving object they saw was Lorenz.
   • Findings: The incubator group frollowed Lorenz everywhere whereas the control group, hatched in the presence of their mother, followed her. When the two groups were mixed up the control group continued to follow the mother and the experimental group followed Lorenz. This phenomenon is called imprinting- whereby bird species that are mobile from birth (like geese and ducks) attach to and follow the first moving object they see. Lorenz identified a critical period in which imprinting needs to take place. Depending on the species this can be as brief as a few hours after hatching (or birth). If imprinting does not occur within that time Lorenz found that chicks did not attach themselves to a mother figure.

2. Harlow

   • Harry Harlow carried out perhaps the most important animal research in terms of informing our understanding of attachment. Harlow worked with rhesus monkeys, which are much more similar to humans than Lorenz's birds. Harow observed that newborns kept alone in a bare cage usually died but that they usually survived if given something soft like a cloth to cuddle.
   • Procedure: Harlow tested the idea that a soft object serves some of the functions of a mother. In one experiment he reared 16 baby monkeys with two wire model 'mothers.' In one condition the milk was dispensed by the plain wire mother whereas in a second condition the milk was dispensed by the cloth-covered mother.
   • Findings: It was found that the baby monkeys cuddled the soft object in preference to the wire one and sought comfort from the cloth one when frightened regardless of which dispensed milk. This showed that 'contact comfort' was of more importance to the monkeys than food when it came to attachment behaviour.