Animal Studies Of Attachment Flashcards
What are the 2 animal studies of attachment?
- Lorenz’s goslings- 1952 (imprinting)
- Harlow’s monkeys- 1958 (importance of contact comfort)
What was the aim of Lorenz’s (1952) study?
Aim: To investigate the mechanism of innate imprinting where the newly hatched goslings will follow and form an attachment to the first large, moving object that they meet.
Background: Lorenz first observed the phenomenon of imprinting when he was a child and a neighbour gave him a newly hatched duckling which followed him around
What was the procedure of Lorenz’s (1952) study?
- Lorenz randomly divided a 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 (independent groups)
- in order to investigate the relationship between imprinting and adult male preferences, Lorenz also observed the geese and their later courtship behaviour
What were the findings and conclusions of Lorenz’s (1952) study?
-goslings hatched from the incubator group followed Lorenz everywhere whereas the control group hatched in the presence of their mother, followed her. When the two groups were mixed up the experimental group continued to follow Lorenz
- Lorenz identified a critical period in which imprinting needs to take place. Depending on the species, this can be as brief as a few hours after hatching (from birth). If imprinting does not occur within this time, Lorenz found that chicks did not attach themselves to the mother figure
- sexual imprinting also occurs- Lorenz noted that birds that had imprinted on a human would often display courtship behaviour towards humans = concluded that sexual imprinting also occurs whereby the birds require a template of desirable characteristics required in a mate
What is imprinting?
An innate readiness to acquire certain behaviours during a critical or sensitive period of development
What is a critical period?
The time within which an attachment must form if it is to form at all. Lorenz and Harlow noted that attachment in birds and monkeys had critical periods. Bowlby extended the idea to humans, proposing that human infants have a sensitive period after which it will be much more difficult to form an attachment
What is sexual imprinting?
Acquiring a template of characteristics of a desirable mate
Define animal studies
Studies carried out on non-human animal species rather than on humans, either for ethical or practical reasons- practical because animals breed faster and researchers are interested in seeing results across more than one generation of animals
What is an experimental group?
The group in an independent groups design containing the independent variable as distinct from the control
What are the evaluation points of Lorenz’s (1952) gosling imprinting experiment?
✅ further research support for the concept of imprinting- Guiton (1966) found the chicks imprinted on yellow washing up gloves would try to mate with them as adults. This supports the view that the young animals are born with an innate mechanism to imprint on some sort of moving object that is present in the critical period of development = supports Lorenz’s conclusions and increases the external validity of his findings
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❌ some of Lorenz’s conclusions have been questioned- Guiton et al (1966) found the chickens imprinted on yellow washing up gloves would try to mate with them as adults, but with experience they eventually learned to prefer mating with other chickens- this undermines Lorenz’s sexual imprinting prediction: the idea that imprinting has a permanent effect on mating behaviour and this study clearly suggests that the effects are not as permanent as Lorenz believed
❌ there is a problem generalising findings from birds to humans, an example of anthropomorphism, as it seems that the mammalian attachment system is quite different from that in birds. For example, mammalian mothers show more emotional attachment to young than birds do and mammals may be able to form attachments at any time, albeit less easy in infancy = not appropriate to try to generalise any of Lorenz’s ideas to humans
What was the aim of Harlow’s (1958) contact-comfort experiment?
To find out whether the provision of food or contact is more important in the formation of mother-infant attachments
What was the procedure of Harlow’s (1958) contact-comfort experiment?
- Harlow tested the idea that a soft object served some of the functions of a mother. He reared 16 rhesus monkeys with 2 wire model ‘mothers’. In one condition, milk was dispensed by the plain wire monkey and in the other condition, milk was dispensed by the cloth-covered monkey- the monkey’s preference was measured
- frightening situations were also tested- as a further measure of attachment-type behaviour, more frightening situations were also introduced and the reactions of the monkeys were observed. For example, Harlow placed the monkeys novel situations with novel objects. He also added a noise-making teddy bear to the environment
- effects of maternal deprivation were also observed as Harlow and his colleagues also followed the monkeys who had been deprived of their ‘real’ mother into adulthood
What are the evaluation points of Harlow’s (1958) contact-comfort experiment?
✅ Harlow’s research has also had important practical applications- for example, it has helped social workers understand risk factors in child neglect and abuse and intervene to prevent it. These findings are also important in the care of captive monkeys; we now understand the importance of proper attachment figures for baby monkeys in zoos and in breeding programmes in the wild. The usefulness of Harlow’s research increases its value and is important when considering ethical costs versus benefits
❌ Harlow faced severe criticism for the ethics of his research- the research monkeys suffered emotionally as a result of Harlow’s procedures. Monkeys are considered similar enough to humans to be able to generalise the findings, which also means their suffering was presumably quite human-like. Harlow himself was well aware of the suffering caused- he referred to the wife mother as ‘iron maidens’, a form of medieval torture device. The counter argument however is that Harlow’s research was sufficiently important to justify the effects as Harlow’s research helped social workers identify risk factors in child neglect and abuse to ultimately prevent it
❌ like with Lorenz’s findings, there may a problem in generalising findings on monkeys to humans, an example of anthropomorphism- although monkeys are clearly more similar to humans than Lorenz’s goslings, they are still not humans. For example, just after a few months, babies begin to develop speech-like communication (babbling). This clearly differentiates humans from monkeys and may influence the formation of human attachment. Ultimately, psychologists disagree on the extent to which studies of non-humans primates can be generalised to humans
