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Attachment - Coggle Diagram
Attachment
Infant-Parent Attachment
imprinting
- Early view of attachment behaviour
- Behaviour is elicited by stimuli in the environment
- This elicitation is innate > no prior learning or experience
- This behaviour is fixed, complex, and automatic, and is probably a fixed circuit in the nervous system.
- Attachment by an infant to its mother can be explained by these processes
- Newly hatched goslings and ducklings follow and become socially bonded to their mother
- An image of the mother is stamped irreversibly on the nervous system
- Only happens during brief critical period > first few hours after hatching.
conditioning
- Attachment is no different to any other behaviour, it is not innate, instead it is acquired through experience, specifically through conditioning
- During early human infancy
- Mother is CS
- Breast milk is US
- Emotional attachment is CR
- Because attachment behaviour is a learned response, parents should minimise any displays of affection in case this encourages excessive attachment in the infant.
- Occurring during a time of high mortality rate.
harlow
- No evidence that nursing (feeding) is critical in infant monkey attachment to a mother
- Contact comfort is a far more important variable than nursing in determining infant attachment as measured either by time spent with a surrogate or by responses to a fearful stimulus.
- Later research showed that many other variables were just as important as contact comfort (rocking and cradling etc)
- Led to the development of attachment theory
attachment theory
- Sensitive responding by the parent to the infant's needs result in an infant who demonstrates secure attachment, while lack of such sensitive responding results in insecure attachment.
- Secure infants either seek proximity or contact or else greet the parent at a distance with a smile or a wave
- Avoidant infants avoid the parent
- resistant/ambivalent infants either passively or actively show hostility toward the parent
- Attachment styles in adults are based on experiences (mental modes) during infancy
- Secure adults find it relatively easy to get close to others and do not worry about being abandoned
- Avoidant adults are uncomfortable being close to others; they find it difficult to trust others completely, difficult to allow themselves to depend on others. Avoidant adults are nervous when anyone gets too close
- anxious/ambivalent adults worry that their partner doesn’t really love them or won’t want to stay with them. anxious/ambivalent adults want to merge completely with another person, and this desire sometimes scares people away.
Mother-Infant Attachment
- The infant-parent relationship is the first attachment relationship
- The formation of an emotional bond between infants and their mothers is essential for infant psychological wellbeing
- The absence of this bond can have profound and long-lasting effects.
- The President of Romania banned abortion and birth control to increase the population for economic development (1966).
- Many more children were being born into families that didn’t want them.
- The 1970s-80s created a demand for government-provided childcare, but it was very impoverished >children left on their own for long periods of time due to lack of caregivers.
- Developed severe attachment issues.
- Severity depended on the age at which they were adopted > the longer they spent in the orphanages, the worse it was.
rats
- Even normal variations in maternal care have profound influences on development.
- Individual differences in rat maternal care
- High vs low levels of licking and grooming pups (LG)
- High vs low levels of “arched back posture” from the mother when nursing (ABN)
- High levels of LG and ABN show significantly reduced stress responses to modest stressors.
- Levels of LG and ABN change the brains of the pups > it changes the expression of key genes in their brain that are important in regulating stress responses.
- Vasotocin has evolved into two distinct hormones > oxytocin and vasopressin (PSYC1029 notes)
- Important in mammalian reproductive and attachment behaviours.
- If you take a female mouse/rat and you co-house her with pups (not hers-virgin), she doesn’t pay attention to them. If you take a mouse/rat that has previously been a mother, she will display maternal behaviours with pups that aren’t hers (pup retrieval, responding to infant distress calls).
- If you block the actions of oxytocin in mother rats, they will do significantly less pup retrieval and response to calls.
- If you increase the action of oxytocin in virgin rats, they will do significantly more pup retrieval and response to calls.
- In terms of distress calls, the oxytocin makes rats able to detect the calls > it tunes the brains sensory system (sensitises the response in the primary auditory cortex neurons)
Adult Attachment
pair bonds
- Human adult couples are typically monogamous but only 5% of all mammalian species are monogamous, the rest are polygamous.
- Partner preference test
- Prairie voles pair bond for life, montane voles don’t
- Male and female are allowed to mate and one is later given a choice of spending time with that partner, or in a neutral chamber, or with a stranger of the opposite sex.
- Oxytocin and monogamy in females: blocking the actions of oxytocin in the female prairie vole brain prevents the formation of monogamous bonds.
- Vasopressin and monogamy in males: increasing expression of vasopressin in polygamous males increases pair-bond formation (montane voles).
- Adult pair-bonding attachment has a strong biological basis
- The same hormones which mediate parent-infant interactions contribute to formation of stable long-term monogamous relationships in adults
- Oxytocin: mother-infant attachment and monogamous relationships
- Vasopressin: father-infant attachment and monogamous relationships
- Differences in mating strategies (monogamous vs polygamous) are due, at least in part, to differences in levels of these two key hormones and their receptors.
addiction and love
- Attachment behaviour and drug use are both examples of motivated behaviour
- A process is reward by contact with loved one, whereas B process is separation distress.
- Across time B process increases and although romantic interactions arouse the A process, the B process has grown significantly and thus interactions fail to produce an A-state. They simply alleviate the B-process; separation distress.
- symptoms of separation distress and heroin withdrawal are similar
Father-Infant Attachment
- Increasing vasopressin in the male prairie vole brain increases paternal behaviour.
- Decreasing vasopressin in the male prairie vole brain decreases paternal behaviour.
- Similar studies to rats and maternal behaviours, but with male prairie voles.
- Overall levels of vasopressin receptors were significantly higher in fathers compared to controls > does not matter if its a first-time or more experienced father.
- Vasopressin receptor levels are negatively correlated with the age of the offspring (the younger the offspring, the higher the level of receptors).
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