Attachment

Attachment

1. Introduction to attachment

   • Care giver - infant interactions
     • Reciprocity
       • A description of how two people interact. mother and infant interaction is reciprocal in that both infant and mother responds to each others signals and response from the other
       • Brazelton et al described the interactions a dance because each person is responding to the others move.
     • Interactional synchrony
       • Mother and infant reflect both the actions and emotions of the other and do this in a co ordinated ( sychronised ) way
       • Melzoff and Moore - observed infants as young as two weeks old. An adult display one of three facial expressions. The childs response was filmed and identified by an independent observer
     • Evaluation
       • It is hard to know what is happening when observing infants - we cannot really know for certain that the behaviours seen in mother and infant interactions have special meaning
       • controlled observation capture fine detail - this is a strength because then the research has good validity
       • observations don't tell us the purpose of synchrony and reciprocity
   • Attachment figures
     • Parent infant attachment
       • Schaffer and Emerson - found that the majority of babies became attached to their mother at around 7 months. then secondary attachments to other family members formed including the father
       • 75% of the infants studied an attachment was formed with the father at 18 months. This was determined by the fact that the infants protested when the father walked away
     • The role of the father
       • Grossman - carried out a longitudinal study looking at both parents behaviours and its relationship to the quality of the childs relationship in their teens
       • Quality of infant attachment with the mother but not the father was related to the childrens attachments in adolescence. Suggesting that the father was less important
       • However the quality of father's play with infants related to the quality of adolescent attachments. This suggests that fathers have different roles in attachment
     • The father as the primary care giver
       • Field - filmed 4 month old babies in face-face interactions with the primary care giver - mother and fathers and secondary care giver - mother and fathers
       • primary caregiver fathers like mothers spent more time smiling and imitating and holding infants than the secondary caregiver fathers.
       • The key to the attachment relationship is the level of responsiveness not the gender of the parent
     • Evaluation
       • inconsistent findings on father - psychologists cannot easily answer a simple question - what is the role of the father
       • if fathers have a distinct role why aren't children without fathers different - MacCallum and Golombok have found children growing up in single or same sex families do not develop any different from those in two-parent houses. this would suggest that the role of the father as a secondary care giver is not important