Animal Studies Of Attachment: Lorenz And Harlow Flashcards
What are animal studies?
Animal studies are carried out on non-human species, either for ethical or practical reasons. Practical because animals breed faster and researchers are interested in seeing results across more than one generation.
What do animal studies of attachment look at?
Animal studies look at the formation of early bonds between non-human offspring and their parents. This is of interest to psychologists because attachment like behaviour is common to a range of species and so they can help us to understand attachment in humans.
What did early views of attachment suggest about social interaction between caregivers and infants?
They suggested that social interaction between caregivers and infants was unimportant and this was true of both human and non-human species.
What did early views of attachment suggest that babies attach for?
They suggested that babies attach to their mother primarily to receive food (cupboard love theory). Attachments are based on physiological ‘love’ rather than comfort and psychological ‘love’.
What did Lorenz and Harlow suggest about attachment?
They investigated the need for early social interaction in animals; and their theories have roots in evolutionary psychology, suggesting that animals come into the world biologically pre-programmed to form attachments with others, because this will help them survive.
What animal did Harlow study?
Monkeys
What was the aim of Harlow’s investigation?
To investigate the behaviour of infant moneys separated from their mother at birth to assess the effects of separation on later behaviour.
Describe the procedure and findings of Harlow’s study into effects of separation.
Harlow reared 16 rhesus monkeys with two wire model ‘mothers’:
In one condition, milk was dispensed by the plain wire ‘mother’.
In a second condition, it was dispensed by a cloth-covered ‘mother’. The monkeys preference for which ‘mother’ was measured.
As a further measure of attachment-like behaviour, the reactions of the monkeys to more frightening situations were observed. For example, Harlow placed the monkeys in novel situations with novel objects. He also added a noise making teddy bear to the environment. Harlow and his colleagues also continued to study the monkeys who had been deprived of their ‘real’ mother into adulthood.
The findings showed that the bay monkeys cuddled the soft object in preference to the wife one regardless of which dispensed milk. This suggests that contact comfort was of more importance than food when it came to attachment behaviour.
The monkeys also sought comfort from the cloth wire mother when frightened.
Harlow and his colleagues followed the monkeys who had been deprived of their real mother into adulthood. This maternal deprivation produced severe consequences: the monkeys were more aggressive, less sociable and less skilled at mating than other monkeys. They also neglected and sometimes killed their own offspring.
What two important conclusions can be made from Harlow’s study?
- The monkeys’ early experiences seemed to have led to emotional problems, resulting in delinquent and anti-social behaviour. This supports Bowlby’s maternal deprivation theory.
- Secondly the study showed that infants do not attach primarily for food but for contact comfort. This contradicts the learning theory/’cupboard love’ theory of attachment
What did Harlow find about maternally deprived monkeys as adults?
Harlow found that as adults, monkeys who were reared with wire mothers only (they were maternally deprived) showed sever behavioural consequences. They were very dysfunctional in that they bred less often, they were unskilled at mating, female monkeys neglected their young and others attacked their children. Even those reared with a soft toy as a substitute did not develop normal social behaviour.
What did Harlow conclude about the critical period for normal development?
Harlow concluded that there was a critical period for attachments to occur. A mother figure had to be introduced to the young rhesus monkey within 90 days for an attachment to form. After this time, attachment was impossible and the damage done by early deprivation was irreversible.
EVALUATION OF HARLOW’S RESEARCH
Give one strength of Harlow’s research.
A strength is that Harlow’s research has important practical applications. It has helped social workers understand risk factors in child neglect and abuse and to intervene to prevent it. We also now understand the importance of attachment figures for baby monkeys in zoos and breeding programmes in the wild.
The usefulness of Harlow’s research increases its value.
Name two limitations of Harlow’s research
- Harlow faced severe criticism for the ethics of his research
- There may be a problem in generalising from monkeys to humans
Why did Harlow face sever criticism for the ethics of his research?
Rhesus monkeys are similar enough to humans for us to generalise findings, which also means their suffering was presumably human-like. There were some very disturbing features of Harlow’s research. He referred to the wire mothers as ‘iron maidens’ after a medieval torture device. To test the effects of a cold, rejecting parent, the monkeys were sometimes blasted with air or stabbed with a sharp object when they tried to approach the cloth mother. Female monkeys were restrained and forced to mate on a ‘rape rack’.
The counter-argument is that Harlow’s research was sufficiently important to justify the procedures - though many would disagree.
Why may there be a problem in generalising from monkeys to humans?
Although monkeys are clearly more similar to humans than Lorenz’s geese, they are not humans. For example, human babies develop speech-like communication (‘babbling’). This may influence the formation of attachments. Psychologists disagree on the extent to which studies of non-human primates can be generalised to humans.
