ANIMAL STUDIES OF ATTACHMENT Flashcards
LORENZ’S RESEARCH: IMPRINTING
PROCEDURE: randomly divided a clutch of goose eggs
- half hatched with the mother goose in their NATURAL environment
- other half hatched in an incubator where the first thing they saw after hatching was Lorenz
FINDINGS:
- incubator group followed Lorenz everywhere, WHEREAS the control group followed the mother
- when the two groups were mixed up, both groups continued to follow their attachment figure
- phenomenon = IMPRINTING - bird species that are mobile from birth attach to and follow the first moving object they see
- Lorenz identified a CRITICAL PERIOD in which imprinting needs to take place
- can be within a few hours after hatching
- if imprinting does NOT occur, Lorenz found that chicks do not attach themselves to a mother figure
SEXUAL IMPRINTING
LORENZ (1952) also investigated the relationship between imprinting & adult mate preferences
- observed that birds that imprinted on a human would later display courtship behaviour towards humans
- described a peacock that had been reared in the reptile house of a zoo where the first thing they saw was a giant tortoise
- as an adult, they would only direct courtship to giant tortoises
- he had undergone SEXUAL IMPRINTING
HARLOW(1958): THE IMPORTANCE OF CONTACT COMFORT
PROCEDURE: tested the idea that a soft object serves some of the functions of a mother
- reared 16 baby monkeys with two wire model ‘mothers’
- one condition - milk was dispensed by the plain wire mother
- second condition - milk was dispensed by the cloth-covered mother
FINDINGS:
- baby monkeys
cuddled the soft objects in preference to the wire one and sought comfort from the cloth one when frightened, regardless of which dispensed milk
- shows that ‘contact comfort’ = more important than food when it came to attachment behaviour
MATERNALLY DEPRIVED MONKEYS AS ADULTS
- followed the monkeys who had been deprived of a ‘real’ mother Ito adulthood to see if this early MATERNAL DEPRIVATION had a permanent effect
- monkeys reared with wire mothers = most dysfunctional HOWEVER, those reared with a sot toy did not develop normal social behaviour either
- more aggressive and less sociable and bred less often than typical monkeys - unskilled at mating
- as mothers, some neglected their young and others attacked and killed their children
CRITICAL PERIOD FOR NORMAL DEVELOPMENT
- concluded there was a critical period for this behaviour
- other figure had to be introduced within 90 days for an attachment to form
- after that, attachment = IMPOSSIBLE and the damage done by early deprivation = IRREVERSIBLE
AO3: LORENZ: GENERALISABILITY TO HUMANS
- although some of his findings have influenced our understanding of human development, there is a problem in generalising from findings on birds to humans
- mammalian attachment system = different from birds, e.g. mammalian mothers show more emotional attachment to young than birds & mammals may be able to form attachments at any time
- not appropriate to try to generalise any of Lorenz’s ideas onto humans
ETHICAL ISSUES: depriving animals from a mother figure from birth raises ethical issues as they have proven to have permanent effects on adulthood - COST/BENEFIT ANALYSIS
AO3: SOME OF LORENZ’S OBSERVATIONS HAVE BEEN QUESTIONED
- the idea that imprinting has a permanent effect on mating behaviour - GUITON(1966) found that chickens imprinted on yellow washing up gloves would try to mate with them as adults ( as Lorenz suggests) but that with experience, eventually learned to mate with other chickens
- impact of imprinting on mating behaviour = not as permanent as Lorenz believed
- calls into question the INTERNAL VALIDITY of his study
AO3: HARLOW: THEORETICAL VALUE
- his findings had a profound effect on psychologists’ understanding of human mother-infant attachment
- showed attachment does not develop as a result of being fed, but as a result of contact comfort
- also showed the importance of quality of early relationships for later social development, including the ability to hold down adult relationships and successfully rear children
- ability to prove his findings - HIGH INTERNAL VALIDITY
AO3: HARLOW: PRACTICAL VALUE
- insight into attachment from Harlow’s research = important applications in a range of practical contexts
- e.g. has helped social workers understand risk factors in child neglect and abuse so intervene to prevent it
- findings = also important in the care of captive monkeys - now understand the importance of proper attachment figures of baby monkeys in zoos and also in breeding programmes in the world
- HIGH EXTERNAL VALIDITY & APPLICATION TO THE REAL WORLD
HOWEVER: although monkeys more are similar to humans than geese, they are not human - psychologists disagree on the extent to which studies of non-human primates can be generalised to humans
AO3: HARLOW: ETHICAL ISSUES
- faced severe criticism for the ethics of his research
- his monkeys suffered greatly as a result of his procedures
- species = similar enough to humans to be able to generalise the findings, which also means that their suffering was presumably quite human-like
- Harlow was conscious of the suffering he caused, referring to the wire mothers as ‘iron maidens’ after a medieval torture device
- COST/BENEFIT ANALYSIS –> can be applied to humans so can be argued to be sufficiently important to justify the effects of the study on monkeys
