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Attachment - Coggle Diagram
Attachment
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Learning Theory
Learning Theory of Attachment:
- Views children as blank slates, learning to form attachments through experiences
- Attachment formation explained through classical and operant conditioning
- "Cupboard love" concept suggests attachment forms due to association with caregiver providing food
Classical conditioning:
- Baby associates mother with pleasure of being fed
- Mother becomes conditioned stimulus causing pleasure for child
- Mother's presence leads to feelings of comfort and happiness for the child
Operant conditioning:
- Child's actions (e.g. crying) trigger response from mother (comfort or feeding)
- Child associated mother with rewards, reinforcing actions like crying
- Food acts as a primary reinforcer, while mother becomes secondary reinforcer
Evaluation:
- Contradictory evidence from animal studies - Harlow demonstrated contact comfort is more important than food, suggests there is no unconditioned stimulus
- Contradictory evidence from human studies - Brazleton et al importance of interactional synchrony and reciprocity in secure formation of attachments - universal features of attachment.
Attachments don't form around who spends the most time with the child but who is most attentive - deals with their signals most skillfully
- Loss of focus due to focus on unconditioned and conditioned stimuli - interactional synchrony and reciprocity are universal features of attachment, demonstrated by Feldman and Brazleton - these aspects aren't accounted for so the explanation is limited
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The Role of the Father
Schaffer + Emerson's findings:
- 75% of infants formed a secondary attachment to their father by age of 18 months, with 29% doing so within a month of forming a primary attachment
- Tiffany Field - doesn't mean the father cannot become the primary attachment - primary care givers are more attentive towards the infants and spend more time holding and smiling at them - mothers are often expected to be primary attachment but it's not always the case
Evaluation:
- Lack of agreement over the extent of the father as a primary attachment figure
MacCallum and Golombok - children growing up in homosexual or single-parent families were not different compared to children with two heterosexual parents
- Gender of the primary caregiver is largely determined by society. Women are expected to be caring and sensitive and biology, where women have higher levels of oestrogen and lower testosterone compared to men. - Social and biological constraints
- Socially sensitive subject - later abnormalities in development are often blamed on parents. Single parents may be pressured to return to work at a later point in order to increase the likelihood that the child forms a secure attachment
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