Attachment Flashcards
Care giver - infant ineractions
Reciprocity and interactional synchrony
-These interactions are believed to have important functions for the child’s social development
-Good early quality interactions are associated with the successful development of attatchments between babies and caregivers
Reciprocity in care giver-infant interactions
-Sometimes called turn taking
-Essential in any conversation otherwise people talk over eachother
-Responding to eachother’s signals and each elicits a response from eachother
-Alert Phase:
Babies signal they are ready for ineraction e.g eye contact
Feldman and Eidelman found mothers pick up on and respond to baby’s alrtness around 2/3 of the time although Findgood believes this varies towards skill of mother and external factors such as stress
-Feldman says from 3 months this interaction becomes increasingly frequent and involves both mother and baby paying close attention to eachother’s verbal signals and facial expressions
-Active involement:
-Traditional views of childhood portray babies in a passive role, recieving care from adult
-However babies aswell as caregivers take an active role
-Both initiate interactions and take turns
-Brazleton described this interaction as a ‘dance’ because they respond to eachothers moves
Interactional synchrony
-2 people are said to be synchronies when they carry the same action simultaneously
-Feldman sayd synchrony can be defined as ‘the termporal co-ordination of micro-level social behaviour’
-When caregiver and baby interact in such a way that their acions and emotions mirror the other
-Meltzoff and Moore observed the beginings of interactional synchrony in babies from as young as 2 weeks old
-An adult displayed one of 3 facial expressions or one of 3 gestures
-Babies expression and gestures were filmed and labeled by independent observers
-Babies; expression and gestures were more likely to mirror those of the adults more than chance were predict
-Significant association
-It is believed that interactional synchrony is important for the development of caregiver-baby attachment
-Isabella observed 30 mothers and babies together and assessed the degree of synchrony
-Researchers also assessed the quality of mother-baby attachment
-They found that high levels of synchrony were assocated with better motherbaby attathent e.g the emotional intensity of the relationship
Stages of attachment
By Schaffer and Emerson
Stage 1) Asocial stage
-First few weeks
-Observable behaviour to humans and inaminate objects are similar
-Babies do show signs they prefer to be other people
-Also show a preference for the company of familiar people and more easily comfoted by them
-Baby is forming bonds with certain people and forms the basis of later attachments
Stage 2) Indiscrimate attachment
-2-7 months
-Shows more obvious and observable social behaviours
-Now show a clear preference for being with other humans rather than inaminate objects
-Also recognise and prefer company of familiar people
-Accepts comfort from any person and do not show seperation anxiety when caregivers leace or stranger anxiety in precense of strangers
Stage 3) Specific attachment
-From 7 months
-Signs of attachment to one person
-Stranger anxiety and seperation anxiety
-Not necesaially the person who spend most time but one who offers most interaction and responds to the baby’s signals with most skill
-65% of time is the mther
Stage 4) Multiple attachments
-Shortly after baby shows attachment behvaiour of stranger anxiety and seperation anxiety to one person, they extend this behvaiour to multiple attatchments with other people they spend time with called Secondary attachments
-Schaffer and Emerson obsevered that 29% of the children formed secondary attachments within a months of forming a specific primary attachment
-By 1 year, majority of babies develop multiple attatchments
Schaffer and Emersons research
-Observational study
-Glasgow working class families
-Researchers visited mothers and baby in their homes every month for first year and again at 18 months
-Researchers asked mothers about the protests babies made in everyday seperations i.e seperation anxiety
-Also assesed stranger anxiety
Attachment to father research
-Evidence suggests that fathers are less likely to be babies’ first attachment figure compared to mothers
-Schaffer and EMerson found that majority of babies became attached to their mother at 7 months
-Only 3% was the father as sole attachment
-27% of cases was both father and mother
-But 75% of babies studied by Shaffer and Emerson formed attachment with father by 18 months
-This was determined by the fact that babies protested when their father walked away, sign of attachment
Distinctive role of fathers research
-Grossman carried out a longitudional study where babies’ attachments were studied until they were into thir teens
-Researchers looked at both parents’ behaviour and its relationship to the quality of the baby’s later interations to other people
-Quality of a baby’s attachment with mothers (not fathers) were related to attachments in adolecense
-This suggets that attachment to fathers is less important than attachment to mothers
-However Grossman found that quality of father’s play with babies was related to the quality of adolescent attachments
-Suggests fathers has a role to do with play and stimulation and less to do with emotional development
Fathers as primary attachment figures research
-Baby’s primary attachment is not only first but also had special emotional significance
-Baby’s relationship with their first primary atttachment figure forms the basis of all later close emotional relationships
-There is evidence that when fathers are the primary caregiver they are able to adopt the emotional role more typically associated with mothers
-Fiels filmed 4 month babies in face to face interaction with primary caregiver mothers, secondary caregiver fathers, and primary caregiver fathers
-Primary caregiver fathers and mothers spent more time smiling,imitating and holding babies than secondary caregiver fathers
-These are all part of reciprcoity and interactional synchrony which are part of the process of attachment formation (Isabella)
-Seems fathers have the potential to be more emotion focused primary attachment figure
-They can provide the reponsiveness required for aclose emotional attatchment but perhaps only when given role of primary care giver
Word for assumption that everything is heteto
Heteronormativity
Animal studies of attachment
Lorenz’s research and Harlow’s research
Ethologists conducted animal studies of realtionships between newborn animals and their mothers
Lorenz’ research
Imprinting:
-Lorenz disocvered the phenomenon of iprinting when he was a child and a newly hatched duckling followed him around
-As an adult he set up a classical experiment where he randomlu divided a larch clutch of goose eggs
-Half hatched with mother goose in natural environment and half hathed in an incubator where they first saw Lorenz
-Incubator group followed Lorenz everywhere, but control group followed their motheer
-When two groups were mixed up the control group kept following mother and experimental group followed Lorenz
-Imprinting: Wherby bird species that are mobile from birth like geese and ducks attach to and follow the first moving object they see
-Lorenz identified a critical period in which imprinting needs to take place
-Depending on the species this can be as brief as few hours after birth
-If imprinting does not occur within that time, Lorenz found that chicks did not attach themselves to a mother figure
-Sexual imprinting:
Lorenz also investigated the relationship betweeen imprinting and adult mate preferences
-He obeserved that birds that imprinted on a himan would later display courtship behaviour towards humans
-In Lorenz’s case study, he described a peacock that had been reared in the reptile house where the first moving objects the peacock saw were giant tortoises
-As an adult this bird would only direct courtship behaviour towards giant tortoises
-Lorenx concluded meant the peacock had undergone sexual imprinting
Harlow’s research
-Worked with rhesus monkeys which are more similar to humans than Lorenz’s birds
-Harlow observed that newborns kept alone in a bare cage often died but usually survived if given something soft like a cloth to cuddle
-Harlow tested the idea that soft objects 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 plain wire mother and the had milk dispensed by cloth covered mother
-Found that baby monkeys cuddled coth mother in preference and sought comfort from cloth when frigthened e.g by noisy mechanical teddy bear , regardeless of which mother dispensed milk.
-Shows that ‘contact comfort’ was more of importnace to monkeys than food when it came to attachment behaviour
Maternally deprived monkeys as adults
-Harlow followed monkeys who had been deprived of a ‘real mother’ into adulthood to see if maternal deprivation had a permanent ffect
-Monkeys reared with plain wire mothers were the most dysfunctional
-Cloth covered mother monkeys did not develop normal social behaviour
-These deprived monkeys were more agressive and less sociables and bred less often than typical for monkeys, being unskilled at mating
-When they became mothers, some neglected their young, others attacked their children and some killed their children
-The critical period for attachment formation in monkeys was concluded to be within 90 days
-After this time, attachment was impossible and damage done by early deprivation is irreversible
Learning theory and attatchment
-Dollard and Miller proposed that caregiver attachment can be explained by learning theory
-Their approachi s sometimes called a ‘cupboard love’ approach because it emphasised the importnace of the attachment figure as a provider of food
-Simply they proposed that children learn to love whoever feeds them
Classical conditioning for caregiver attatchment (learning theory)
Food - unconditioned stimulus
Pleasure from food - unconditioned response
Caregiver - neutral stimulus
-Caregiver becomes a conditioned stimulus when they are associated with food
-Caregiver overtime produces a conditioned response of pleasure
-To a learning theorist, this pleasure response is love thus an attachment is fromed and the caregiver becomes an attachment figure
Operant conditioning for caregiver attachment (learning theory)
-Can explain why babies cry for comfort, an important behvaiour in building attachment
-Crying leads to response from care giver e.g feeding
-Where caregiver provides correct response, crying is reinforced
-Baby then directs crying for comfort towards the caregiver who responds with comforting ‘social suppressor’ behaviour
-The baby is reinforced for crying but also the caregiver recieves negative reinforcement because the crying stops
-Escaping from something unpleasant is reinforcing
-This interplay of mutual reinforcement strengthens an attachment
Attachment as a secondary drive (learning theory)
-As well as conditioning , learning theory draws on the concept of drive reduction
-Hunger can be thought of as a primary drive
-Hunger is an innate, biological motivator
-We are motivated to eat to reduce the hunger drive
-Sears suggested that as caregivers provide food, the primary drive of hunger becomes generalised to them
-Attachment is thus a secondary drive learned by association between the caregiver and the satisfaction of a primary drive
Bowlbys monotropic theory type etc
-Criticised the learning theory and proposed an evolutionary explanation
-Attachment is an innate system that gives a survival advantage
-Attachment, like imprinting evolved as a mechanism to keep young animals safe by ensuring they stay close to adult care givers
