5048592
Description
Flashcards by Emily Sutton, updated more than 1 year ago
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Created by Emily Sutton
about 8 years ago
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| Question | Answer |
| Psychology - Attachment: Infant-caregiver interactions in humans, animal studies of attachment and learning theory as an explanation for attachment. | Attachment is an emotional bond between two people in which each seeks closeness and feels more secure when in the presence of the attachment figure. |
| Caregiver-Infant Interactions in Humans | interactions between very young babies and their parents are baby led, with the adult responding to the behaviour of the baby. |
| Reciprocity | A form of interaction between infant and caregiver involving mutual responsiveness, with both parties being able to produce response from each other. |
| AO3: Reciprocity influences the child’s physical, social and cognitive development. | It becomes the basis for development of basic trust or mistrust, and shapes how the child will relate to the world, learn, and form relationships throughout life. |
| Interactional Synchrony | Interactional synchrony is form of rhythmic interaction between infant and caregiver involving mutual focus, reciprocity and mirroring of emotion or behaviour. |
| AO3 Heimann showed that infants who demonstrate a lot of imitation from birth onwards have been found to have a better quality of relationship at 3 months. | Observations of mother-infant interactions are generally well-controlled procedures, with both mother and infant being filmed, often from multiple angles. |
| Stages of Attachment Identified by Schaffer | Asocial (0 - 6 weeks) - Very young infants are asocial in that many kinds of stimuli, both social and non-social, produce a favourable reaction, such as a smile. |
| Indiscriminate attachments (6 weeks to 7 months) - Infants indiscriminately enjoy human company and most babies respond equally to any caregiver. They get upset when an individual ceases to interact with them. From 3 months infants smile more at familiar faces. | Specific attachment (7 to 9 months) - Special preference for a single attachment figure. It shows fear of strangers (stranger fear) and unhappiness when separated from a special person (separation anxiety). |
| Multiple attachment (10 months and onwards) - The baby becomes increasingly independent and forms several attachments. By 18 months the majority (31%) of infants have form multiple attachments. | The most important fact in forming attachments is not who feeds and changes the child but who plays and communicates with him or her. Therefore, responsiveness appeared to be the key to attachment. |
| Multiple Attachments | Many of the babies from the Schaffer and Emerson study had multiple attachments by 10 months old, including attachments to mothers, fathers, grandparents, siblings and neighbours. |
| The Schaffer and Emerson study has low population validity. | However, accuracy of data collection by parents who were keeping daily diaries whilst clearly being very busy could be questioned. A diary like this is also very unreliable with demand characteristics and social desirability being major issues. |
| Role of the Father | mothers usually adopt a more caregiving and nurturing role compared to father, fathers adopt a more play-mate role. |
| AO3 Numerous factors effect the father's role and the impact he has on his child's emotional development. For example, culture, father's age, and the amount of time the father spends away from home. So many factors means it difficult to make generalisations about the father's role. | Social Policy: In the UK, fathers until last year were not given any paternal leave so the responsibility for child care was implicitly given to the mothers. |
| Biological factors: Men seem to lack the emotional sensitivity to infant cues (Heerman, et al. 1994) that women offer spontaneously this could be due to the fact that women produce a hormone, oestrogen which increases emotional response to other’s needs. | The child Age and gender: Freeman et al. (2010) found that male children are more likely to prefer their father as an attachment figure than female children. |
| Animal Studies of Attachment | Harlow: Procedure - 16 monkeys were separated from their mothers immediately after birth and placed in cages with access to two surrogate mothers, one made of wire and one covered in soft terry towelling cloth. Eight of the monkeys could get milk from the wire mother. Eight monkeys could get milk from the cloth mother. |
| Both groups of monkeys spent more time with the cloth mother (even if she had no milk). | Then Harlow observed the difference in behaviour differences between the monkeys who had grown up with surrogate mothers and those with normal mothers. They found that: They were much more timid. They didn’t know how to behave with other monkeys and could be aggressive. They had difficulty with mating. The females were “inadequate” mothers some even killing their offspring. |
| Harlow’s work has been criticized. His experiments have been seen as unnecessarily cruel (unethical) and of limited value in attempting to understand the effects of deprivation on human infants. | Harlow's experiment is sometimes justified as providing a valuable insight into the development of attachment and social behaviour. At the time of the research there was a dominant belief that attachment was related to physical (i.e. food) rather than emotional care. |
| Lorenz's Imprinting Theory | Lorenz (1935) took a large clutch of goose eggs and kept them until they were about to hatch out. Half of the eggs were then placed under a goose mother, while Lorenz kept the other half beside himself for several hours. |
| When the geese hatched Lorenz imitated a mother duck's quacking sound, upon which the young birds regarded him as their mother and followed him accordingly. | Lorenz found that geese follow the first moving object they see, during a 12-17 hour critical period after hatching. This process is known as imprinting. |
| Imprinting does not appear to be active immediately after hatching, although there seems to be a critical period during which imprinting can occur. | Lorenz and Hess believe that once imprinting has occurred it cannot be reversed, nor can a gosling imprint on anything else. |
| Explanations of Attachment | Learning Theory: Dollard & Miller (1950) state attachment is a learned behaviour that is acquired through both classical and operant conditioning. |
| Attachment can also be learned by operant conditioning. The presence of the caregiver is reinforcing for the infant. The infant gains pleasure / reward as they are being fed. The behaviour of the infant is reinforcing for the caregiver (the caregiver gains pleasure from smiles etc. – reward). | |
| AO3: Schaffer and Emerson found less than half of infants had a primary attachment to the person who usually fed them. Harlow’s research suggested monkeys became attached to the soft surrogate mother rather than the one who fed it. This goes against the learning theory of attachment. | Lorenz found goslings imprinted on the first moving object they saw which suggest attachment is innate and not learnt. |
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