AS ATTACHMENT; BOWLBY'S MATERNAL DEPRIVATION HYPOTHESIS

Question 1

Describe Bowlby’s maternal deprivation hypothesis

Answer 1

• Says disruption (even short term) to attachment can cause emotional, social and intellectual harm
• Disruption can occur in 3 ways…
  Separation: disruption over a v short period of time
  Deprivation: loss of an attachment figure/emotional care
  Privation: when an attachment was never formed in the first place
• Critical period of first 30 months; if maternal deprivation occurs here then psychological damage is inevitable
• Effects include poor intellectual development, i.e. low IQ, and affectionless psychopathy (lack of empathy and guilt which can lead to criminal behaviour as they don’t understand/ care about how their crime will affect others

Question 2

Describe Bowlby’s 44 juvenile thieves experiment

Answer 2

• Attempted to study the link between maternal deprivation and affectionless psychopathy.
• Found that 14/44 thieves had affectionless psychopathy, and 12 out of those 14 had experienced prolonged maternal separation
• Found that just 2/44 in the non-criminal control group had experienced prolonged maternal separation
• Concluded that maternal deprivation caused affectionless psychopathy

Question 3

Evaluate Bowlby’s MDH

Answer 3

(+) Supporting evidence from Bowlby’s 44 thieves exp
(-) Bowlby did the interviews and classifications himself so researcher bias
(-) Only correlation not causation
(-) Rutter (1981) said Bowlby failed to distinguish bet deprivation and privation properly; flawed explanation
(-) Later research by Koluchova (1976) shows that the critical period is actually more of a sensitive period; studied twins who were kept locked in a cupboard from 18 months until 7 years old but fully recovered and had no lasting psychological harm once they were adopted by a loving couple; period can’t be critical