4 - Learning Theory of Attachment Flashcards
What are the two ways behaviour can be learnt?
Classical conditioning
Operant conditioning
How can attachment be explained via classical conditioning?
It is learnt through association.
Food = unconditioned stimulus
Pleasure due to food = unconditioned response
Provider of food = neutral stimulus
Overtime, the neutral stimulus becomes associated with food.
The person becomes a conditioned stimulus that produces pleasure as a conditioned response, because they have become associated with food.
Therefore, an attachment bond forms and is the reason why infants feel pleasure when with their caregiver.
Describe how operant conditioning can be used to explain attachment?
All humans have primary motives like hunger and thirst and we are driven to satisfy these.
Stimuli that satisfy primary motives are know as primary reinforcers such as eating and drinking.
Caregivers provide food that reduces the hunger drive and so they become a secondary reinforcer.
Infants seek to be with the person who has become a secondary reinforcer because they are a reward in themselves.
What are the negatives of this theory?
Harlow separated infant Rhesus monkeys from their mothers and put them in cages. Milk was provided either by a wire mesh ‘surrogate mother’ or one made of comfortable soft cloth. The monkeys clung to the soft cloth mother especially when scared by an aversive stimulus, even if it did not provide milk. This suggests that comfort is more important than food in determining who the baby will attach to.
Food may not be the main reinforcer for an infant. Attention and responsiveness from a caregiver are much more important than food in the formation of an attachment.
Schaffer and Emerson found that babies are often attached to people who play with them, rather than people who feed them. In 39% of cases even though the mother was the one who fed the baby, the baby was more attached to someone else.
This theory explains how attachments form but not why they form. According to Bowlby’s theory of attachment infants form an attachment to their caregiver to ensure they are protected.
Learning theory is reductionist as it explains a complex human behaviour in an overly simplistic way. The infant and caregiver relationship is a very varied, sophisticated and complicated behaviour, and there are many different types of infant caregiver attachment. Therefore, it is unlikely that attachment is merely the result of the caregiver providing the infant with food.
