5 - Bowlby's Monotropic Theory Flashcards
What is the principle behind Bowlby’s theory?
Attachment is an instinct that has evolved because it increases the chances of both the babies’ survival and the parents’ pass on their genes. It is therefore adaptive.
Attachment means infants will stay close to their caregiver and so be well protected and can survive.
How does Bowlby think attachment forms?
Infants have an innate drive to become attached to an adult.
Innate behaviours usually have a critical period in which they must occur or they never will. This is 3-6 months.
Infants who do not have an opportunity to form an attachment during this time will have difficulty forming attachments later on.
What did bowlby say attachment was determined by?
By the caregivers sensitivity.
Infants who are the most strongly attached tend to have a caregiver who is responsive, co-operative and more accessible than less closely attached infants.
What are social releases and how do the link to his theory?
Socials releasees are behaviours that elicit caregiving eg smiling and crying. Babies display them to encourage their caregivers to look after them.
They are important during this time to ensure that attachments develop between caregivers and their infants.
What is monotropy and how does this link to Bowlby’s theory?
Monotropy : when infants have one special emotional bond
This is often with the biological mother but not always.
Infants also form secondary attachments that also provide an important emotional safety net and are vital for healthy psychological and social development.
What are the are consequences of attachment?
The importance of monotropy is that the infants uses this relationship to form a mental representation called an internal working model of what all intimate and loving relationships should be like.
The continuity hypothesis proposes that individuals who are strongly attached in infancy continue to be socially and emotionally competent whereas infants who are not strongly attached gave more social and emotional difficulties in childhood and adulthood.
What are the advantages of Bowlby’s monotropic theory?
Hazan and Shaver found that attachments in childhood often predicted adult love relationships. This supports continuity hypothesis.
What are the disadvantages of Bowlby’s monotropic theory?
Schaffer and Emerson suggest that multiple attachment are more common in babies than the single attachment ( monotropy ) suggested by Bowlby. They found that by 18 months only 13% of the infants had only one person they were attached to. 31% had five or more attachments to extended family, such as grandparents and siblings.
Psychologists found that children who had never formed any attachments by the age of four, and were then adopted, could still form attachments to their new adopted parents. This goes against the idea of a critical period between 3 and 6 months in which an attachment must form or it never will.
It is impossible to test Bowlby’s argument that attachment has persisted in the same form throughout our evolutionary history, making it unscientific .
Feminists like Erica Burman have pointed out the idea of monotropy places a terrible burden of responsibility on mothers, setting them up to take th blame for anything that goes wrong in their child’s life. It also puts pressure on mothers to stay at home.
Kegan disagreed with Bowlby about the quality of an infants attachment being determined by the caregivers sensitivity. He explained infants attachments to their caregivers in terms of their innate temperament. According to his theory some infants are better suited to forming attachments than others due to their innate characteristics. Rovine found that infants who had been judged to have signs of behavioural instability between one and three days old were later more likely to have an insecure attachment.
