Animal studies of attachment

Question 1

What are animal studies?

Answer 1

Animal studies in psychology are studies carried out on non-human animal species rather than on humans, either for ethical or practical reasons.

Question 2

How have animal studies contributed to psychological studies of attachment?

Answer 2

Animal studies have looked at the formation of early bonds between non-human parents and their offspring. This is of interest to psychologists because attachment-like behaviour is common to a range of species and so animal studies can help us understand attachment in humans.

Question 3

Why are animal studies thought to be more practical than human studies when investigating attachment?

Answer 3

Animal studies are more practical than human studies because animals breed faster and researchers are interested in seeing results across more than one generation.

Question 4

Which two psychologists conducted animal studies of attachment?

Answer 4

Lorenz and Harlow

Question 5

What work was conducted by ethologists during the 20th century?

Answer 5

In the early 20th century a number of ethologists conducted animal studies of the relationships between infant animals and their mothers. Their observations informed psychologists’ understanding of mother-infant attachment in humans.

Question 6

What type of attachment was studied by Lorenz?

Answer 6

Imprinting

Question 7

When did Lorenz first observe the phenomenon of imprinting?

Answer 7

Lorenz first observed the phenomenon of imprinting when he was a child and a neighbour gave him a newly hatched duckling that then followed him around.

Question 8

What was Lorenz’s procedure when investigating imprinting?

Answer 8

As an adult researcher Lorenz set up a classic experiment in which he randomly divided clutch of goose eggs. Half of 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 9

What sample was used by Lorenz to investigate imprinting?

Answer 9

Lorenz used a clutch of goose eggs which were randomly divided into two groups.

Question 10

What was Lorenz’s control group?

Answer 10

The eggs that were hatched with the mother goose in their natural environment.

Question 11

What was Lorenz’s experimental group?

Answer 11

The eggs that were hatched in an incubator where the first moving object they saw was Lorenz.

Question 12

What did Lorenz find from his research into imprinting?

Answer 12

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 control group continued to follow the mother and the experimental group followed Lorenz.

Question 13

What is imprinting?

Answer 13

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

Question 14

Lorenz identified a critical period in which imprinting needs to take place. What was the critical period identified by Lorenz?

Answer 14

Depending on the species the critical period can be as brief as a few hours after birth.

Question 15

According to Lorenz, what is the consequence of a chick failing to imprint during the critical period?

Answer 15

If imprinting does not occur within the critical period Lorenz found that chicks did not attach themselves to a mother figure.

Question 16

What did Lorenz find when he later investigated the relationship between imprinting and adult mate preferences?

Answer 16

He observed that birds that imprinted on a human would later display courtship behaviour towards humans. In a case study (1952) Lorenz described a peacock that had been reared in the reptile house of a zoo where the first moving objects the peacock saw after hatching were giant tortoises. As an adult this bird would only direct courtship behaviours towards giant tortoises. Lorenz concluded that he had undergone sexual imprinting.

Question 17

What did Harry Harlow initially observe when investigating the attachment behaviour of rhesus monkeys?

Answer 17

Harlow initially observed that newborns kept alone in a bare cage usually died but that they usually survived if given something soft like a cloth to cuddle.

Question 18

What was Harlow’s procedure when investigating attachment behaviour?

Answer 18

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

Question 19

What was Harlow’s sample?

Answer 19

16 baby monkeys

Question 20

What did Harlow find from his research into attachment?

Answer 20

It was found that the baby monkeys cuddled the soft object in preference to the wire one and sought comfort from the cloth one when frightened, regardless of which dispensed milk.

Question 21

What was concluded by Harlow?

Answer 21

Harlow concluded that ‘contact comfort’ was of more importance to the monkeys than food when it came to attachment behaviour.

Question 22

What did Harlow find about maternally deprived monkeys as adults?

Answer 22

Harlow and colleagues followed the monkeys who had been deprived of a ‘real’ mother into adulthood to see if this early maternal deprivation had a permanent effect. The researchers found severe consequences. The monkeys reared with wire mothers were the most dysfunctional, however even those reared with a soft toy as a substitute did not develop normal social behaviour. They were more aggressive and less sociable than other monkeys and they bred less often than is typical for monkeys, being unskilled at mating. As mothers some of the deprived monkeys neglected their young and others attacked their children, even killing them in some cases.

Question 23

Harlow concluded that there was a critical period. What was the critical period identified by Harlow?

Answer 23

Harlow concluded that a mother figure has to be introduced to an infant monkey within 90 days for an attachment to form. After this time attachment was impossible and the damage done by early deprivation became irreversible.