Attachment

Attachment

1. Early social development

   • What is attachment? An emotional two way bond between two people
     • Attachment figures
       • Parent-infant attachment
       • The role of the father
         • Play
       • Fathers as primary carers
   • Caregiver-infant interactions
     • Reciprocity
       • A description of how two people interact. Mother-infant interaction is reciprocal in that both infant and mother respond to each other's signals and each elicits a response from the other
     • Interactional Synchrony
       • mother and infant reflect both the actions and emotions of the other and do this in a co-ordinated way

2. Schaffer's stages of attachment

   • Stage 1: Asocial Stage
   • Stage 2: Indiscriminate stage
   • Stage 3: Specific attachment
   • Stage 4: Multiple attachments
   • Involved 60 babies 31 male 29 female From skilled working-class families The babies and their mothers were visited at home every month for a year and again at 18 months Mothers were asked questions about the type of protests their babies showed in 7 everyday separations Adult leaving the room (measure of separation anxiety) Stress anxiety was also assessed
     • Between 25 weeks and 32 weeks of age, 50% of babies showed signs of separation towards a particular adult Usually the mother Attachment tended to be to the caregiver who was most sensitive and interactive. Not necessarily the carer who spent the most time with the baby By the age of 40 week 80% of babies had a specific attachment and almost 30% displayed multiple attachments
     • Good external validity
     • Longitudinal design
     • Limited sample characteristics

3. Animal studies

   • Lorenz
     • imprinting
       • 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 environment. The other half hatched in an incubator where the first moving object they saw was Lorenz.
         • Findings: The incubator group followed Lorenz everywhere whereas the control group hatched in the presence of their mother, followed her. When the two groups were mixed the control group continues to follow their mother and the experimental group followed lorenz.
         • Lorenz’s study cannot be generalised to humans as there is a big difference between mammals and birds. Also as humans attachments are so emotional, lorenz’s study cannot be used to describe to explain human attachments. Humans can form an attachment at any time of their lives and it will stick, however geese cannot do this Some of Lorenz’s observations have been questioned
   • 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 milk was dispensed by the plain wire mother whereas in another condition milk was dispensed by the clothed wire mother. At the end of the experiment the monkeys were given the choice of the wire model with milk and the cloth model without milk - the monkeys chose the cloth model without the milk. Proving contact comfort was more important to the monkeys than food. Each monkey spent 24 hours in the cage with both models - 22 hours of that 24 were spent with the cloth model over the wire model.
       • 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.
       • It showed that attachment is not formed through being fed, but having comfort. Shows the importance of forming early relationships - clearly very important for the monkeys in later life
       • Like Lorenz, Harrow concluded that there was a critical period for this behaviour - a mother figure had to be introduced to an infant monkey within 90 days for an attachment to form. After this time attachment was impossible and the damage done by early deprivation became irreversible.

4. Learning theory

   • Pavlov's dogs
     • taught dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell
       • When the dogs saw the food they salivated - Unconditioned stimulus When the dogs saw the bell they did not react - Neutral stimulus When the bell was rang when the dog saw food the response become conditioned - Conditioned stimulus The dogs then salivated when they heard the bell, without food being presented - the salvation becomes a conditioned response
   • Young animals do not necessarily attach to (or imprint on) those who feed them. Lorenz’s geese imprinted before before they were fed and maintained these attachments regardless who fed them Harlow’s monkeys attached to to a soft surrogate rather than a wire one that dispensed milk. These studies show that attachment does not develop as a result of feeding The same must be true for humans - that food does not create the attachment bond.

5. Explanations of Attachment

   • Bolwby's theory
     • Monotropic theory
       • John Bowlby rejected learning theory as an explanation for attachment because, as he said, ‘were it true, an infant of a year or two should take readily to whomever feeds him and this is clearly not the case’. (1958) proposed that human infants have an innate tendency to form attachments to their primary caregiver, most often their mothers. Instead Bowlby looked at the work of Lorenz and Harlow for ideas and proposed an evolutionary explanation; that attachment was an innate system that gave a survival advantage. Based on evolutionary theory
     • critical period
       • Babies have to form attachments with their caregiver during a sensitive period This is between birth and 2 ½ - 3 years old. Bowlby said that if this didn't happen the child would be damaged for life - socially, emotionally, intellectually and physically Bowlby suggested that babies are born with a set of innate ‘cute’ behaviours like smiling, cooing and gripping that encourage attention from adults. He called these social releasers because their purpose is to activate the adult attachment system..,k

6. Ainsworth's strange situation

   • 7 Stages
   • Participants were 106 middle class infants (12-24 months) The strange situation is a controlled observation procedure designed to measure the security of attachment a child displays towards a caregiver with a two-way mirror through which psychologists can observe the infant's behaviour The behaviour used to judge attachment included: Proximity seeking, Exploration and secure-base behaviour, Stranger anxiety
     • 3 attachment types
       • Ainsworth et al (1978) found that there were distinct patterns in the way that infants behaved. She identified 3 main types of attachment;
         • secure attacment
         • insecure-avoidant
         • insecure-resistant

7. Cultural variations

   • the strange situation was used in Japan and different results were found

8. Bowlby's theory of maternal deprivation

9. Romanian orphan studies

   • Rutter's ERA study
   • Zeanah - The Bucharest Early Intervention Project

10. Influence of early attachment

    • Attachment through generations
      • attachment between mothers and babies and mothers and their own mothers
        • baby-mother attachment assessed using strange situation
        • mother-mother attachment assessed using an interview/questionnaire
          • Could of affected results as they wanted to be socially-desirable