Attachment

Attachment

1. What is attachment?

   • Attachment is an emotional relationship between infants and their caregivers

2. Learning Theory

   • Classical Conditioning
     • Learning through association. Getting food from a baby's mother gives them pleasure.
       • The desire for food is fufilled when the mother is around therefore the baby makes an association with the mother and food.
   • Operant Conditioning
     • Reinforcing behaviour.
       • Positive Reinforcement - Good behaviour will be rewarded. Children will repeat action
       • Negative Reinforcement - removing a discomfort e.g. crying so mother feeds them therefore removing discomfort. Children will repeat action
       • Punishment - Punishing a child for bad behaviour. Children will not repeat action

3. Attachment and comfort

   • Harlow
     • In a lab experiment, rhesus monkeys were raised in isolation. They had two surrogate mothers (wire with food and cloth with no food)
     • Monkeys spent most of the time with cloth mother and only went to food mother when hungry.
     • Monkeys grew up showing signs of social/emotional disturbance and female monkeys were bad mothers and violent to offspring
     • There was a strict control of variables. Can't generalise results as only monkeys were used. Ethical Issues. Low Ecological Validity.
   • Schaffer and Emerson
     • Studied 60 babies during first 18 months of birth. Many babies didn't have strong attachments.
     • The babies formed better attachments with those who interacted/played with them more

4. Ethological Approach

   • Lorenz
     • Randomly divided dreylag goose eggs in two groups. Group 1 left with mother and group 2 in an incubator.
     • Incubator eggs attached to the first moving thing they saw (Lorenz) which followed him. When the two groups were re-united they quickly grouped.
     • Imprinting was most likely between 13-16 hours of hatching. The critical period was 32 hours. After that it was too late to attach

5. Bowlby's Evolutionary Theory

   • Biological need to attach to a caregiver. Having one special attachment is called monotropy
   • Strong attachment provides a 'safe base' to explore. It gves us a template for future relationships
   • First 3 years of lfe is the critical period of atatchment. If no attachment is made it could damage a child's social and emotional development
   • Harlow supported this theory. Schaffer and Emerson was against this theory (multiple attachments). Harlow's study goes against monotropy.