2/23 Pg 188-198 Flashcards
Specific bonds
Bonds to particular individuals
- Newborn does not have until 6-7 months
- Adoption agencies separate as soon as possible
Attachment
The strong and enduring emotional bond between a child and a significant other and the processes that create and maintain this long-lasting social relationship
Foundation for bonds between children and caregivers
Developing social skills
Separation distress/separation anxiety
8 months: specific bond
- Cannot be consoled by stranger
- No matter how skillful; infant wants particular person to come back, not just any social person
- All cultures
Psychoanalytic Approaches
Sigmund Freud: mental illness and unconscious
*Mother-infant bond: breastfeeding, source of oral gratification; most basic and earliest pleasurable act for infant ->prototype, profound attachment
Psychosexual development
Psychoanalytic approaches
*series of stages of development related to drives, instincts, and sources of pleasure, with a particular focus on sexual desire
Criticize Freud
- Father-infant bonds
- Amount of time spent with infant
- Predictor of strength and quality of attachment
- No differences on bottle-fed and breastfed babies
Learning Theory Approaches
- Infant’s behaviors and environmental reinforcements
- Positively reinforcing stimuli which is mother herself due to her close association with breastfed or bottle-fed
- Avoid infant’s internal mental states
- Simplest biological drives -> motivating forces
- Feeding schedules, form of feeding, age of weaning -> attachment
Problems of Learning Theory
- Cognitive components: infant’s thoughts or caregiver’s goals and intention
- Repeated and consistently negative interactions with caregiver or parents: abusive parent abused children
Ethological Approach
John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth
- Bowlby: Attachment -> parent or caregiver with infants “the infant’s ability to seek proximity”
- Ainsworth: “an affectional tie that one person or animal forms between himself and another specific one-a tie that binds them together in space and endures over time”
- Behaviors set up and maintain bonds between offspring and parents
- Evolutionary and comparative perspective: functional role
- Smiling, crying and clinging-> proximity
- Protecting infants from threats and their survival (Evolutionary)
- Attachment and attachment behaviors depend on situation
Secure base
Ethological approach
*caregivers become safe havens in situations
Four phases in development of attachment
- Preattachment (Birth-6 weeks): attachment -related behaviors but no target person
- Attachment-in-the-making (6 weeks- 6 to 8 months): start to use signals, focus on specific people
- Clear-cut attachment (6-8 months to 18 months- 2 years): more actively stay near a particular person by using more effective signals; maintain contact with that person; use the caregiver as secure base for exploration
- Reciprocal relationships (18months- 2 years and older): better able to take into account the parent’s needs and adjust behavior -> solve problems and get to common goal
Dependency
reliance on another person for basic physiological needs, and for protection from perceived or real threats
*Dependency not equal to attachment
Attachment complex
set of behaviors and mental states
- responsible for setting up and maintaining attachment
- vary considerably across different species
- trigger caregiving responses by adults toward infants
Smiling
Peter Wolff: which stimuli elicit smiles most effectively at different ages in infancy
- As infants get older -> prefer auditory and visual social stimuli
- Own internal state -> external stimuli -> social stimuli
- Close proximity, positive feedback loop
- High levels of neural activity in reward regions (ventral striatum and hypothalamus)
