Attachment Flashcards
Reciprocity
- A way in which caregiver and baby interact
- Both care giver and infant respond to each other’s signals
Alert phases
- Phases in which the baby signals that they are ready for an interaction
- According to research mothers pick up on these phases around 2/3 of the time
- After three months alert phases become more frequent
Active involvement
- Both caregiver and infant can initiate interactions
- Brazelton et al. describes reciprocity as a dance
Interactional synchrony (IS)
- Caregiver and baby interact in such a way that their actions and emotions mirror each other
Synchrony begins
- Meltzoff and Moore
- Observed IS in babies as young as 2 weeks old
- An adult would make one of three faces and the babies response was filmed to be assessed by an independent observer
- They found a significant association between the baby and adults gestures
Importance of IS
- Isabella et al.
- Found that high levels of synchrony was associated with better quality attachment
Filemd observations
- Babies do not know they are being filmed so won’t act differently
- Filming it means that important behaviour wont be missed, and other people can give their own observations, high inter-rater reliability
Difficulty observing babies
Babies have limited movements, making it hard to determine what their behaviours actually mean
Developemental importance of IS and reciprocity
- Feldman, points out that IS and reciprocity just give names to observable patterns of behaviour rather than giving us understanding into how they affect the developement of a child
- Isabella et al. found a positive correlation between IS and quality of attachment
Practical and ethics of IS and reciprocity
Practical
- Crotwell et al. found that a 10 minute Parent- Child Interaction Therapy improved interaction synchrony between 20 low income mothers and their pre school children
Ethics
- This research can be used to criticise mothers for going to work
What is Schaffer and Emerson’s first stage of attachment
- A social stage
- First few weeks
- Their behaviour towards humans and objects are fairly similar
- However they prefer the comfort of people and familiar faces demonstrating how they are starting to form bonds
What is Schaffer and Emmerson’s second stage of attachment
- Indiscriminate attachment
- 2 to 7 months
- Their behaviours clearly demonstrate their preference to other humans over inanimate objects
- they prefer familiar faces
- They normally don’t express seperation or stranger anxiety
What is Schaffer and Emmerson’s third stage of attachment
- Specific attachment
- from seven months
- This is one when the baby forms a specific attachment the person who the attachment is formed with is called the primary attachment figure, this wont necessarily be the person the baby spends most with but rather has the most interactions with
- This primary attachment forms the basis of all close emotional relationships in later life
- In 65% of cases it is the mother, in 3% it is the father and in 29% its is both parents
- During this stage the baby will start to display separation and stranger anxiety
What is Schaffer and Emmerson’s fourth stage of attachment
- multiple attachments
- Shortly after babies form their first attachment they are able to form another
- these attachments are called secondary attachments
- Schaffer and Emmerson found that 29% of babies form a second attachment within a month from their first attachment
- By 12 months the majority of babies have developed multiple attachments
Schaffer and Emmerson’s procedure
- 60 babies - boys and girls
- all from Glasgow
- Majority from skilled working class families
- Babies observed in their homes for the first year and again at 18 months
- Mothers asked questions about their babies behaviours when faced wsith everyday seperations in order to measure their seperation anxiety they also measured stranger anxiety
What did Shcaffer and Emmerson find about babies attachments to their fathers
- 75% were attached to their father by 18 months
What did Grossman et al. conclude about the impacts of parents on a child’s relationships in later life
- Good quality attachment with mother had a positive correlation with good quality relationships in later life
- Good quality play with father had a positive correlation with good quality relationships in adulthood
Father as a primary caregiver
A study by Feild found that father’s are able to adopt the emotional role as a primary caregiver as well as a mother can
Lorenz’s research
- Investigated imprinting in geese
- Half the geese eggs were hatched normally with their mother and the other half hatched in an incubator where the first moving object they saw was Lorenz
- The eggs hatched in the control group followed the mother and the other eggs in the experimental group followed Lorenz even after being mixed up - this is called imprinting which occurs in species of birds
- Lorenz identified a critical period which varies across bird species, if imprinting does not occur in this time then the bird will not attach to a mother figure
- Lorenz also investigated sexual imprinting and found that the species the bird imprinted on would also be the species the bird would try to mate with, he found that the ducks who had imprinted on him only tried to mate with humans.
Lorenz evaluation
- Another study found that they were able to imprint birds to a moving object rather than even an animal
- His study can not be applied to humans as attachments in humans are 2 way
- unethical - costs outweigh benefits as results can’t be generalised to humans
Harlow’s research
- Tested the idea that monkeys seeked comfort over food when it came to attachment
- He split 16 monkeys into two groups
- Both groups had two wire monkeys with one covered in cloth, in one condition the wire monkey dispensed milk and in the other the cloth monkey dispensed milk
- The experiment found that even if the cloth monkey did not dispense milk the monkeys would still attach to that monkey and move to that monkey when scared, they would also hold onto the cloth monkey while feeding
- The researchers followed the monkeys into adulthood finding that their maternal deprivation had permanent effects, and led to an inability to develop normal social behaviour, these monkeys mated less often with some even killing their own young
- Harlow concluded that the critical period for a monkey to form an attachment with a mother figure was 90 days after birth
Harlow evaluation
Real world application
- helps social workers to understand that a lack of bonding experience may be a risk factor in child development
- Also practically can be used to understandd the importance of monkey attachments in zoos
Generalisability
- Mammals have similar attachment behaviours
- However humans brains are more complicated then monkeys
Dollard and Miller - learning theory and attachment
Classical conditioning
- cupboard love - whoever feeds the baby is who the baby attaches to
- Food - unconditioned stimulus, pleasure - unconditioned response and caregiver - conditioned stimulus
- So baby starts to react to the caregiver even without the food because of the association
- Sears et al. refers to attachment as a secondary drive, the primary drive is hunger and attachment comes from the association between caregiver and the satisfaction of the primary drive
Operant conditioning
- Baby crying - 2 way
- When baby cries and mother responds this is positive reinforcement for the baby to cry when in distress
- it is also negative reinforcement for the mother to comfort the baby as by comforting the baby the mother is avoiding something unpleasant by getting the baby to stop crying
Evaluation of learning theory as an explanation for attachment
Contradicting studies on animals
- Lorenz found that geese imprinted on the first moving object they saw rather than the one that fed them
- Harlow found that monkeys attached to the cloth monkey even if the wire one was feeding it, monkeys chose comfort over food when attaching to a mother figure
Contradicting studies on humans
- Isabella et al. found that high levels of interactional synchrony resulted in better quality attachments
- Schaffer and Emmerson found that most babies formed attachment to their mothers regardless of who fed them the most often
Support
- Some conditioning may be present in forming attachments, for example a child may associate comfort with a particular adult
- However conditioning suggest that babies play a passive role in attachment which has been disproven by research into interactional synchrony and reciprocity