attachment Flashcards
What are the 2 caregiver-infant interactions that Meltzoff and Moore posed?
- Reciprocity: infants coordinate their actions with caregivers in a kind of conversation, like turn-taking
- Interactional synchrony: imitating the facial expressions of the caregiver as well as their actions
Evaluate the study by Meltzoff and Moore
Strength and limitation:
It is difficult to distinguish whether the behaviour seen from the baby is just general activity or specific imitation behaviours - this shows that it is difficult to test infant behaviour and therefore makes it less reliably. However, aid their findings they got an observer (someone who wasn’t aware of the experiment) and had them judge the infants behaviour from a video - which suggests one way of increasing the internal validity
What did Lorenz do?
Animal study:
Clutch of gosling eggs and divided them into two groups (one with mother, and the other in the incubator), incubating eggs once hatched the first thing the saw was Lorenz - making them imprint on him - this happens during a time called the Critical Period. He found the effects were irreversible and long lasting
Evaluation of Lorenz’s study
Strength:
Guiton exposed chicks to yellow rubber gloves and found that the chicks had imprinted on them, showing animals don’t have a predisposition to imprint on a specific object but anything moving within the critical window. Also found the male chicks later tried to mate with the yellow gloves - linking imprinting with later reproductive behaviour. This shows clear support for Lorenz’s study
Limitation:
Characteristics of imprinting was that it was an irreversible process, how Guiton found that he could in fact reverse the behaviour of the male chickens who tried to make with the rubber glove as after they spent time with their own species, they has normal sexual behaviour
What did Harlow do?
Animal study:
He created 2 artificial mother monkeys (a cloth one and a wire one with a feeding bottle), he had 8 infant monkeys and have 165 days he measured who they spent most time with for general scenarios and for their frightened responses. All 8 monkeys spent time with the cloth mother for both scenarios. Showing that attachment doesn’t form based on the providing of food but in fact comfort (contact comfort). This had long lasting effects on the monkeys in later life, making them socially and sexually abnormal
Evaluation of Harlow’s study
Strength:
A number of animal studies have found that the observations made for animal attachment are mirrored in human studies - this is supported by Schaffer and Emerson’s study as attachment isn’t formed based off of the supply of food. Showing that animal studies can be generalised to humans, but to seek confirmation it should be based in actual people
Limitation:
Not only were the texture of the monkey’s bodies different but the heads were too which acted as a confounding variable as infant monkey’s preferred one ‘mother’ to the other was because the heads was more attractive. Making it lack internal validity
What are the 4 stages that Schaffer and Emerson created?
- Asocial: 0-2 months, babies produce similar responses to all objects, inanimate and animate
- Presocial (indiscriminate): 2 months, the prefer human comfort rather than inanimate objects, begin to distinguish between familiar/unfamiliar but stranger anxiety
- Specific: 7 months old, protest when a particular person puts them down (separation anxiety)
- Multiple: after primary attachment, the infant forms secondary attachments e.g. parent, grandparent, sibling etc, to which they also show separation anxiety towards
Evaluation of Schaffer and Emerson’s study
Limitations:
- Systematic bias and something that challenged validity as the mothers used self report - meaning some may have been less sensitive to their infants protests and therefore reported less
- Biased sample as the sample was of working-class mothers and done in the 60s and as infants don’t always have that maternal figure because there are more dads staying at home it may lack temporal validity
What does Learning Theory of Attachment suggest?
Proposes all behaviour is learned and is not innate.
Classical Conditioning - during the early weeks and months things become associated with food, usually the infants mother. The mother is then associated with food which creates a conditioned response. Just seeing this person gives the infant a feeling of pleasure
Operant Conditioning - Drive Reduction Theory, example: an infant feels hungry and has a drive to reduce the discomfort and when they are fed they feel pleasure (negative reinforcement). The behaviour that led to the infant being fed will most likely be repeated. Food = primary reinforcer and the mother = secondary reinforcer
Social Learning - children observe their parents affectionate behaviour and imitates this
Evaluation of Learning Theory of Attachment
Strength:
Learning Theory does have some explanatory power as infants do learn through association and reinforcement but food is not the main reinforcer. The responsiveness that the caregiver gives is something that infants imitate and thus learn about how to conduct relationships
Limitations:
Lacks validity as its an oversimplified version based off on animals that is then applied to humans - not all behaviour can be explained by conditioning, such as attachment, non-behaviourists argue it involves an innate predisposition which can’t be explained by conditioning
What are Ainsworth’s 3 types of attachment and what do they look like?
- Secure: unlikely to cry if parent leaves and shows distress around a stranger, see bodily comfort and easily soothed - uses parent as a secure-base
- Insecure-avoidant: avoids social interaction/intimacy with others, little response to being separated or reunited with parent doesn’t use secure-base but do have high anxiety levels
- Insecure-resistant: seeks and resists social interaction, immediate distress when separated, behaves similarly towards strangers, conflicted desires to comfort, e.g. angrily resist being picked up but will seek proximity in a different way
What was Ainsworth’s Strange Situation Study?
She observed a total of 106 middle-class infants to observe 3 types of attachment through 8 episodes:
1. Parent and infant play (no behaviour)
2. Parent sits while infant plays (parent = secure-base)
3. Stranger enters and talks to parent (stranger anxiety)
4. Parent leaves while infant is still playing and the stranger offers comfort if needed (separation anxiety)
5. If needed, stranger leaves (reunion behaviour)
6. Parent leaves infant alone (separation anxiety)
7. Stranger enters and offers comfort (stranger anxiety)
8. Parent returns and greets infant and offers comfort (reunion behaviour)
Evaluation of Ainsworth’s Strange Situation study
Strengths:
Has inter-observer reliability meaning a consistency of reviews by different judges/observers
Limitations:
The study doesn’t account for all attachment types and is therefore too simplistic as Main and Solomon identified a 4th category for attachment being an “insecure-disorganised type D”
What was Ijzendoorn and Kroonenberg’s study?
They did a meta-analysis where they did 32 studies of attachment behaviours, over 2,000 strange situation classifications in 8 different countries.
They found that the differences were small, secure attachment was most common and insecure-avoidant was second except in Israel and Japan. Secure attachment is the ‘norm’ and is the ‘best’ for healthy social and emotional development - showing innate attachment
Evaluation of Ijzendoorn and Kroonenberg’s study
Limitations:
Conclusions are drawn on countries and and comparing them rather than cultures - each country has a variety of subcultures each of which may have its own childcare practices; showing there needs to be caution in the term “ cultural variations”
