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Attachment - Coggle Diagram
Attachment
Explanations of attachment: Learning theory
Dolland and Millers (1950) Cupboard Love Theory: Suggesting that the reason children become attached to their caregiver is because hey provide them with food
All behaviour including attachment can be explained by calssical and operant conditioning
Classical condition: Learning by association - Unconditioned stimulus (milk) - unconditioned response (happy and fulfilled baby) - neural stimulus (mum) - neutral response (neutral behaviour) - Unconditioned stimulus (milk) + Neutral stimulus (mum) = Conditioned response (happy and fulfilled) - Conditioned stimulus (mum) = Conditioned response (happy and fulfilled)
Operant Conditioning: Learning by consequences - Pleasurable consequences for crying such as being given food positively reinforces crying
Attachment as a secondary drive: Primary drives (desire to complete an action) are instinctive such as food for hunger, sex for reproduction etc are based on biological needs - secondary drives (attachment) develop due to a learnt process in which are associated with the satisfaction of a primary drive (food)
Evaluation: :check: Clear and believable explanation of attachment - underlying theories backed up by well controlled research
:no_entry: Environmentally reductionist
:no_entry: Oversimplifying a complex interaction process
:no_entry: Harlow's research on monkeys suggests infants seek comfort over food therefore diminishing the idea of the cupboard love theory
Care - giver infant interaction in humans
Attachment - a strong reciprocal emotional bond between an infant and a primary care-giver
Reciprocal - two/both ways - the child has to bond with the mother and the mother has to bond with the child in order for the attachment to be successful
They must both be able to contribute to the relationship and generate a responses such as when a parent smiles at a child the child smiles back
Brazleton et al, who found that children as young as 2 weeks old can attempt to copy their caregiver
Interactional Synchrony - When the infant and primary caregiver become synchronised in their actions - when the primary care-giver makes a soothing noise the baby moves gently to it
Imitation - Infant mimics/copies the adults behaviour exactly i.e. smiles elicit smiles
Sensitive responsiveness - Adult pays careful attention to infants communications and responds in an appropriate manner (providing milk and changing)
Caregiverese - Adult moderates their voice, slowing it down, raising the pitch and making it almost song-like (baby talk)
Body contact - Physical contact, often skin to skin is seen as important in bonding - especially the first few hours of life
Melzoff and Moore (1977) - infants between 12 and 21 days had experimenters display facial gestures such as sticking out tongue, opening mouth in shock and manual gestures such as opening and closing of hands - recordings of the infants responses were rated by people blind to the experiment - results show that the infants were imitating the experimenters suggests that the ability to observe and imitate is active very early in infants - potentially as a way to form an attachment bond with caregiver
Evaluation: :check: Modern studies using multiple oberservers - inter-rater reliability
:no_entry: Infants cannot communicate their thoughts and feelings - findings depend on inferences made by experimenters about internal mental state - unscientific and may suffer from observer bias
:no_entry: Social sensitivity is a concern when investigating child rearing techniques - some women may find their lives being criticised such as mothers who decide to return to the workplace after childbirth.
Isabella et al - observed 30 mother and infants and their interactional synchrony - they found the higher the level of synchrony the more secure the attachment
Animal studies of attachment
Lorenz - imprinting - Geese
: Imprinting - when an animal e.g. a bird, will strongly attach to the first object they encounter (usually the mother) - the infant animal will then follow this object
Lorenz (1953) Imprinting - Half of the Greylag Gooses eggs were taken to be hatched by Lorenz using an incubater - the other half hatched naturally with the mother - The goslings who had been hatched by Lorenz followed him rather than the mother goose - the goslings that hatched naturally imprinted on her and followed her - Even if the goslings were placed together the half hatched by Lorenz followed him
Suggests imprinting is a strong evolutionary/biological feature of attachment in certain birds and imprinting is with the first large object not other potential cues (sound/smell)
Lorenz also noted a
critical period
around 32hours - if the gosling did not see a large moving object to imprint on in these hours then they will not imprint on anything
Evaluation: :no_entry: Serious ethical concerns about the level of suffering the monkeys endured in harlow's experiments as well as long term damage
:no_entry: Cannot generalise animal studies to human infants
:check: Harlows study has been applied to early childhood issues in the modern day - contact between mother and newborn within the first few hours
Harlow - Wire and cloth mothers with infant monkeys
Contact Comfort - Harlow tested "cupboard love" - babies love the mother because she feeds them
Harlow (1958) contact comfort - Attachment was studied in 16 newborn Rhesus monkeys. They were removed from their biological mother and placed in cages with surrogate mothers (wire and/or cloth) and either provided milk or didn't.
The monkeys with access to the cloth mother always preferred its company even if the wire mother provided milk - monkeys with cloth mothers also showed confidence in novel situations and returned to it when scared - wire mother monkeys showed signs or stress related illness
Suggests Rhesus monkeys and potentially other primates such as humans have a biological (nature) need for physical touch and will attach to whatever provides comfort not food - Harlow also found in follow up studies that the monkeys with maternal deprivation struggled socially in the long term including difficulty with mating and struggling to bring up their own offspring
Stages of attachment - identified by Shaffer
Shaffer and Emerson (1964)
Aim - To identify stages of attachment/ find a pattern in the development of attachment between infants and parents
Participants - 60 babies from Glasgow, all from same estate
Procedure - They analysed the interactions between the carers and infants - they interviewed the carers - The mother had to keep a diary to track the infants behaviours based on the following measures:
. Separation anxiety - signs of distress when the carer leaves and how much the infant needs to be comforted when the carer returns
. Stranger anxiety - signs of distress when a stranger interacts
. Social referencing - how often the infant looks at the carer to see how they should respond to something new
It was a longitudinal study lasting 18 months - infants were checked in on monthly and once at the end of the 18 month period
Findings and Conclusions: Found that babies of parents/carers who had 'sensitive responsiveness were more likely to form an attachment. They found that sensitive responsiveness was more important than the amount of time spent with the baby - infants formed more attachments with those who spent less time with them but were more sensitive to their needs compared to those who spent more time but were less sensitive. Infants who had parents who were attentive to their needs as well as spent a lot of time with them formed intense attachments. Attachment seemed to form when the carer communicated with the infant more than when the carer fed and cleaned the child.
Came up with different Stages of attachment:
Asocial Stage (0-6 weeks)
- This is when the infant responds to objects and people similarly but may respond more to faces and eyes
Indiscriminate attachments (6 weeks - 6 months)
- The infant develops more responses to human company. Although they can tell the difference between different people they can be comforted by anyone
Specific (7+ months)
- this is when the infant begins to prefer one particular carer and seeks for security, comfort and protection in particular people - also start top show stranger anxiety and separation anxiety
Multiple (10/11 months)
- Infant forms multiple connections and seeks comfort, security and protection in multiple people. May also show separation anxiety for multiple people
They found that by 10 months all infants reached the final stage and formed attachments with they mother, father, siblings, extended family members and family friends
Evaluation: :check: Research on the role of the father in social development and findings that males can take on more of a maternal role may provide confidence to fathers taking on the role of primary carer in single gender families that are becoming more prevalent in modern society
:no_entry: Infants are unable to communicate thoughts and feelings at such a young age and therefore findings depend on inferences about the internal mental state - unscientific and could suffer from observer bias
:no_entry: Social sensitivity when investigating child -rearing techniques - men that decide to take on the primary caregiver role may feel they are not biologically capable
Role of the Father - Shaffer
Shaffer and Emerson found that 75% of the infants in their study formed a secondary attachment to their father by the age of 18 months - 29% doing so within a month of forming a primary attachment, as demonstrated by separation anxiety - suggests father is important but is unlikely to be the first person to which the child develops an attachment too
This does not mean that the father cannot become the primary attachment figure as suggested by Tiffany Field - observed interactions between infants and the primary caregivers, mother or father and found that primary caregivers regardless of gender were more attentive towards the infant and spent more time holding and smiling at them - suggest either mother or father can be primary caregiver