Learning Theory of Attachment: Conditioning Explained

Attachment!

1. a close, emotional relationship between two persons, characterised by mutual affection, with a desire to maintain proximity

2. learning theory

   • the learning theory explains that attachments are formed through a process of classical condition and operant conditioning
     • when a bay is hunger is experiences a drive state, it cries, gets food and then associates the feeder with comforter, find contact with the mother comforting child learns food it a primary reinforcement or reward, the mother becomes a secondary reinforcer
     • certain behaviours bring desirable responses, they repeat these behaviours to get what they wont, the baby seeks t be near this person as she is now referred to as a rewar
   • classical condition, a stimulus becomes associated with a response
   • operant conditioning, involves learning behieveour due to consequences via reinforcements
   • an infants will form an attachment to who ever feeds it
   • infants could logically link a primary caregiver with pleasure and so form a positive attachment with them
     • dollard and millar support, there are plenty of times for the mother to become associated with the removal of the unpleasant feeling of hunger
       • harlow and harlow also support the idea of attachment isn't just about food and the monkey went to the cloth mother for comfort rather than the wire mother who had the bottle of milk
         • shffer and emerson found that children formed an attachment to the people that played with them and didn't to those who feed them, meaning learning theory isn't the only way to explain attachment
     • fox disagrees with this as his study showed that learning theory is flawed, the mothers went to work whilst a career took over the car for the child, buut the infant was still attached to the mother

3. Bowlby

   • Adaptive/ innate, social releases, critical period, monotropy, internal working model
   • 44 thieves
     • Bowlby designed and conducted the experiment himself, experimenter bias, he was also the one who diagnosed affectionless psychopathy
     • privation rather than deprivation
     • investigate the long term effects of maternal deprivation
       • one group were thieves and the other as a control, these had emotional problems but not yet committed any crimes, he interviews the parents to find out if separation had occurred during the critical period
       • he found more than half of the thieves had been separated form there more for more than 6 months in the first 5 year, in the control only tow had, had this separation, he also found 32% of thieves showed affectionless psychopathy
     • correlation not cause, the two things only showed a correlation the fact that diet or parental income didn't come in account when finalising these results
     • very influential

4. imprinting, attachment is innate and programmed genetically.

5. ·

   • knln