Animal studies of attachment: Lorenz and Harlow Flashcards
What is imprinting?
A phenomenon observed in the natural world and describes the process by which young animals follow and form an attachment to the first large moving object they meet
What year did Lorenz conduct his research?
1935
What was the aim of Lorenz’s research?
To investigate the mechanism of imprinting
What is the procedure of Lorenz’s research?
Lorenz took a large clutch of goose eggs and placed half with the mother and half with him. When the geese hatched Lorenz imitated duck sounds. All the goslings were marked so that they could tell the difference between the naturally hatched and incubated eggs. To ensure imprinting had occurred, Lorenz put all the goslings together under an upturned box and allowed them to mix. The dependent variable was the behaviour of the goslings when released from the box and who they went to. Lorenz varied the time between birth and seeing a moving object so he could measure the critical period for imprinting
What were the results of Lorenz’s study?
- The critical period for imprinting is between 4 and 25 hours after hatching
- Naturally hatched goslings went straight to the mother and incubated goslings went straight to Lorenz
- Bonds proved to be irreversible
- Goslings who imprinted on humans, as adult birds, attempted to mate with humans
What were the conclusions of Lorenz’s study?
Imprinting is an innate process that is biologically triggered rather than learnt. The concept of a critical period for attachments has been carried over to theories of human attachments and the fact that adult geese imprinted on humans later tried to mate with humans suggests that imprinting is important for later relationships as well as for short term survival
What year did Harlow conduct his research?
1958
What was the aim of Harlow’s research?
To investigate whether attachments were primarily formed through food as explained by learning theory or through comfort
What was the procedure of Harlow’s study?
16 monkeys separated from mothers immediately after birth and placed in cages with 2 surrogate mothers, one made of wire and one covered in cloth. They were studied for 165 days.
4 CONDITIONS
1) Wire mother produced milk and the cloth mother produced no milk
2) The wire mother didn’t produce milk and the cloth mother did
3) Wire mother only - producing milk
4) Cloth mother only - producing milk
DV: Amount of time spent with each mother, as well as the feeding time was recorded
Monkeys were frightened with a loud noise to test for mother preference during stress and also put into a larger cage to test their degree of exploration
What were the results of Harlow’s study?
- Monkey’s preferred the cloth mother even when not producing milk
- Only went to the wire mother when hungry then returned to the cloth mother
- Monkeys with only wire mother had diarrhea, a sign of stress
- When frightened infants took refuge with the cloth mother
- In the larger cage, the infants would explore more when the cloth mother was present and returned to her more frequently
What were the conclusions of Harlow’s study?
Supports the evolutionary theory of attachment in that it is the sensitive response and security of the caregiver that is important as opposed to food. For a monkey to develop normally they must have some interaction with an object to which they can cling to during the first few moments of life (critical period) clinging is a natural response. In times of stress the monkey runs to the object to which it normally clings as if the clinging decreases stress
