Attachment Flashcards
What is an attachment?
Attachment is a strong emotional bond formed between an infant and caregiver.
What is reciprocity?
A description of how two people interact. Mother-infant interaction is reciprocal in that both infant and mother respond to each other’s signals and each elicits a response from the other.
Who produced learning theory?
Dollard and Miller, 1950
What is learning theory?
An attachment is learned by classical conditioning and then maintained by operant conditioning.
What is classical conditioning?
Classical conditioning is the association of two stimuli. An unconditioned stimulus causes an unconditioned response. A neutral stimulus becomes associated with the unconditioned response. Neutral stimulus then becomes the conditioned stimulus leading to a conditioned response.
What is Bowlby’s monotropic theory?
Bowlby suggests that an infant will have one specific attachment, usually the mother. He believes this attachment is formed for survival and reproductive reasons.
What are social releasers?
Social releasers tend to be cute features or vocal noises to get caring reactions from the care-giver.
What is the critical period?
An attachment needs to be formed in the first 2.5/3 years if not the infant will not be able to form attachments or will struggle forming attachments.
What is the internal working model (IWM)?
The IWM provides expectations for future attachments. It is like a template and will shape you schema. For example, if you had an insecure-avoidant attachment with your mother you might expect to have the same attachment style with your children.
What is the continuity hypothesis?
This is the effects of your early attachments. This is how your future attachments will be, not just with your future children but romantic relationships as well.
What is a strength of Bowlby’s monotropic theory?
Lorenz supports the idea of biological attachments having survival value.
What is a possible weakness when using Lorenz’s study to back up monotropic theory?
You cannot generalise findings from animals to humans - Lorenz’s study was geese.
What study supports the continuity hypothesis?
Hazan and Shaver (1987) - love quiz. They found that securely attached infants tend to have secure relationships with adults. They also found that insecurely attached infants tend to have challenging relationships and were more likely to be divorced.
What is a criticism of Hazan and Shaver’s love quiz?
It was advertised in a magazine meaning that they would have found participants via volunteer sampling meaning there is bias. They had to fill out a survey so they perhaps could of lied.
