Attachment Flashcards
What are innate actions?
Things all babies do
Pre-programmed behaviours
Internal (biological)
What is reciprocity?
Description of how two people interact
Turn-taking
Sensitive responsieveness
What is turn-taking?
Interaction flows both ways between adult and infant
What is sensitive responsiveness?
Adult attends sensitively to infant’s communications
What is interaction synchrony?
Adults and babies respond in time to sustain communication
Imitation
What is imitation?
Infant mimics/copies the adult’s behaviour
What was Meltzoff and Moore’s experiment?
When a face was made at a baby, the baby made the same face back
What was the still face experiment?
Asked mother to interact with baby and baby’s reaction was positive
When baby had still face, baby showed signs of distress
Shows importance of interacting with baby
What is imprinting?
When a baby recognises another object/person as a parent
What was Lorenz’s procedure?
Randomly divided clutch of goose eggs
One half hatched with mother goose in natural environment
Other half hatched in a incubator where the first thing they saw was Lorenz
Mixed goslings together to see who they would follow
What were the results of Lorenz’s experiment?
Incubator group followed Lorenz
Control group followed mother
Identified critical period in first few hours after hatching where imprinting takes place
What is a critical period?
Span of time in which a certain behaviour must be achieved and if it’s not completed during this time, the ability is lost forever
How did Lorenz test critical period?
Varied time between birth and seeing moving object
What is extrapolation?
Applying findings from animal studies to humans
What are the differences between humans and animals?
Human attachments more complex
Not based on sight
No imprinting
What are the similarities between humans animals?
Both have critical period
Benefit of introducing skin on skin contact
Strength of Lorenz - imprinting
Regolin and Vallortigara
Exposed chicks to simple shape-combinations that moved
When shown range of moving shapes, chicks followed these in preference to other shapes
Suggests young animals born with innate mechanism to imprint on a moving object
What was Harlow’s procedure?
Separated monkeys from real mother
Put monkey in cage with cloth-covered “mother” and food “mother”
Observed who monkey spent the most time with
Observed which “mother” the monkey went to when frightened
What were the results of Harlow’s experiment?
Cuddled cloth “mother” instead of food “mother”
22 hours with comfort
2 hours sporadically with food
When frightened, monkey went to cloth-covered mother
Monkeys who were deprived of real mothers were more aggressive, less sociable and less skilled in mating
Limitation of Harlow - ethical issues
Baby monkeys immediately taken away from mothers after birth
Missed 90 day critical period
Cannot replicate study so cannot validate the original experiment
Strength of Harlow - practical application
Zoo keeping
Limitation of animal studies - extrapolation
Problem with generalisability from findings of animals to humans
What was Bowlby’s monotropic theory?
Bowlby believes that baby have one main attachment figure known as primary attachment figure, which is typically mothers (or female figure)
What are social releases?
Any behaviour a baby shows to get an adult’s attention