animal studies of attachment

Question 1

why are studies carried out on animals rather than humans?

Answer 1

• ethical reasons
• practical reasons
  > animals breed faster and researchers are interested in seeing results across more than one generation of animals

Question 2

what is the procedure of lorenz’s research (1952)?

Answer 2

• randomly divided a large clutch of goose eggs
• half the eggs were hatched with the mother goose in their natural environment
• the other half hatched in an incubator where the first moving object they saw was lorenz

Question 3

what did lorenz find?

Answer 3

• the incubator group followed lorenz everywhere
• the control group, who hatched in the presence of their mother, followed her
• when the two groups were fixed, the control group continued to follow their mother and the experimental group followed lorenz

Question 4

what is imprinting?

Answer 4

whereby bird species that are mobile from birth attach to and follow the first moving object they see

Question 5

what is lorenz’s critical period?

Answer 5

• a time period where imprinting needs to take place
• this can be as brief as a few hours after hatching (or birth)
• if imprinting does not occur within that time, lorenz found that chicks did not attach themselves to a mother figure

Question 6

what did lorenz also investigate?

Answer 6

• the relationship between imprinting and adult mate preferences
• he observed that birds that imprinted on a human would often later display courtship behaviour towards humans

Question 7

what did lorenz (1952) observe in a peacock case study?

Answer 7

• a peacock had been reared in the reptile house of a zoo
• the first moving objects the peacock saw after hatching were giant tortoises
• as an adult it would only direct courtship behaviour towards giant tortoises
• lorenz concluded that this meant the peacock had undergone sexual imprinting

Question 8

evaluation: research support for imprinting (lorenz)

Answer 8

• lucia regolin and giorgio vallortigara (1995) supports lorenz’s idea of imprinting
• chicks were exposed to simple shape combinations that moved, such as a triangle with a rectangle in front
• a range of shape combinations were then moved and they followed the original most closely
• this supports the view that young animals are born with an innate mechanism to imprint on a moving object present in the critical window of development, as suggested by lorenz

Question 9

evaluation: generalisability to humans (lorenz)

Answer 9

• mammalian attachment system is quite different and more complex than that in birds
• eg. in mammals, attachment is a two-way process, so mammalian mothers also show an emotional attachment to their young, not just the young becoming attached to their mothers
• inappropriate to generalise lorenz’s ideas to humans

Question 10

evaluation: applications to understanding human behaviour (lorenz)

Answer 10

• there have been attempts to use the idea that some kind of ‘imprinting’ explains human behaviour
• peter seebach (2005) suggests that computer users form an attachment to their first computer operating system, leading them to reject others

Question 11

what did harlow find out?

Answer 11

• the importance of contact comfort
• he observed that newborns kept alone in a bare care often died but they usually survived if given something soft like a cloth to cuddle

Question 12

what was harlow’s (1958) procedure?

Answer 12

• he tested the idea that a soft object serves some of the functions of a mother
• he had 16 baby monkeys with two wire model ‘mothers’
• in one condition milk was dispensed by the plain-wire mother
• in a second condition the milk was dispensed by the cloth-covered mother

Question 13

what were harlow’s findings?

Answer 13

• the baby monkeys cuddled the cloth-covered mother in preference to the plain-wire mother and sought comfort from the cloth one with frightened, regardless of which mother dispensed milk
• this showed that ‘contact comfort’ was of more importance to the monkeys than food when it came to attachment

Question 14

what was the effect of early maternal deprivation in adult monkeys?

Answer 14

• permanent effect
• severe consequences
• monkeys reared with plain-wire mothers only were the most dysfunctional

Question 15

what social behaviour did the deprived monkeys display?

Answer 15

• more aggressive and less sociable than other monkeys
• bred less often than is typical for monkeys, being unskilled at mating
• when they became mothers, some of them neglected their young and others attacked their children, even killing them in some cases

Question 16

what was the critical period for normal development for harlow?

Answer 16

• a mother figure had to be introduced to a young monkey within 90 days for an attachment to form
• after this, attachment was impossible and damage done by early deprivation became irreversible

Question 17

evaluation: real-world value (harlow)

Answer 17

• helped social workers and clinical psychologists understand that a lack of bonding experiences may be a risk factor in child development, allowing them to intervene to prevent poor outcomes (howe 1998)
• understand the importance of attachment figures for baby monkeys in zoos and breeding programmes in the wild
• harlow’s research has practical value and is not just theoretical

Question 18

evaluation: generalisability to humans (harlow)

Answer 18

• rhesus monkeys are much more similar to humans than lorenz’s birds
• all mammals share some common attachment behaviours
• human brain and human behaviour is still more complex than that of monkeys
• inappropriate to generalise harlow’s findings to humans

Question 19

evaluation: ethical issues (harlow)

Answer 19

• harlow’s research caused severe and long-term distress to the monkeys
• however, his findings and conclusions have important theoretical and practical applications