Attachment Flashcards
Define: Attachment
A special reciprocal bond between two people that doesn’t deteriorate over time.
What are MACCOBY’s 4 INDICATORS OF ATTACHMENT (1980)?
- Seeking proximity in order to spend time together
- Distress upon separation
- Pleasure when reunited
- General orientation of behaviour towards the primary caregiver (awareness of where person is)
Define: infancy
The period in a child’s life before speech begins.
MAIN FEATURES:
- Reliant on others (attachment is important)
- Communication is limited (eg to crying)
- Physically helpless
State the communication stages of infants.
- 1-4 weeks: communication is baby-led and based on crying (used to signal a necessity to caregiver).
- 1 month: baby begins to communicate through smiling and starts to respond to caregivers behaviour by matching their actions.
- 5 months: baby shows clear cycle of attention and non-attention.
What is the importance of caregiver-infant interactions?
Attachments between caregiver and infant are formed through two-way communications/interactions.
This helps to develop, strengthen and maintain the bond.
What is interactional synchrony?
When infants move their body in tune with the rhythm of carers’ spoken language, or mirrors their actions to create an almost two-way vocal conversation.
Give an example of interactional synchrony
Carer speaks and baby makes sounds/noises/movements using the same rhythm as carer.
What is reciprocity?
When the infant responds to the action of the caregiver with a similar action, the actions of one individual elicit a response from the other partner.
Allows the carer to anticipate the child’s responses and respond appropriately.
Give an example of reciprocity
Smiling by the parent results in smiling by the baby.
Outline one study of infant-caregiver interactions
The study by Meltzoff and Moore was a controlled observation where they selected 4 different stimuli (3 different faces plus a hand gesture) and observed the behaviour of infants in response.
An independent observer watched video tapes of the infants behaviour in real time, slow motion, and frame by frame and then judged the infants movements using behavioural categories. Mouth opening/termination of mouth opening/tongue protrusion/termination of tongue protrusion.
Evaluate the problems with testing infant interactions (Meltzoff and Moore)
- Lacks validity - Infants’ mouths are fairly in constant motion and the expressions that are tested occur frequently. This makes it difficult to distinguish between general activity and specific imitated behaviours. Lacks internal validity.
- Failure to replicate - E.g Koepe et al (1983) failed to replicate Meltzoff and Moore’s findings, and when mothers were videotaped infants still imitated.
- Behaviour may be intentional, infants do not just imitate anything they see, it is a special social response to other humans (operant conditioning, seeing caregiver smile is rewarding to them).
- Individual differences - the stronger the attachment, the greater the interactional synchrony.
Explain the development of attachment (Schaffer and Emerson, 1964).
Longitudinal study using observations and interviews, conducted on 60 babies living in the working class area of Glasgow. The study lasted for a year, and then resumed again for another 18 months. Fathers were also shown to be the first joint attachment figure in 1/3 of the infants.
They researched the development of attachment and found 4 stages:
- Indiscriminate attachment
- Beginning of attachment
- Discriminate attachment
- Multiple attachments
Define: Separation anxiety
Distress experienced by infants when separated from someone who they share an emotional attachment with (caregiver).
Define: stranger anxiety
Distress that infants experience when exposed to people unfamiliar to them.
Symptoms may include: getting quiet and staring at the stranger, verbally protesting by cries or other vocalizations, and hiding behind a parent.
Describe the characteristics of indiscriminate attachment
Age: birth - 2 months.
Infant produces similar responses to all objects (animate/inanimate). Towards the 2 month mark, infants prefer social stimuli e.g. Smiley face.
Reciprocity and interactional synchrony are key in establishing attachment.
Describe the characteristics at the beginning of attachment
Age: 4 months - 7 months
Infant becomes more social and prefers human company. Infant begins to discriminate between familiar and unfamiliar people but doesn’t display stranger anxiety.
Describe the characteristics of discriminate attachment
Age: 7 months - 1 year (approx.)
Infant forms attachment with primary attachment figure and displays both separation and stranger anxiety. 65% of infants are attached to their mother at this stage.
Describe the characteristics of multiple attachments
Age: 1 year
Within 1 month of first attachment, 29% of infants attached themselves to someone else (secondary caregiver). Within 6 months this has risen to 78%.
Evaluate the development of attachment
- High in ecological validity (happened in everyday environments - homes), able to generalise stages of attachment.
- Unreliable data (based on mothers self-report), social desirability
- May not apply to everyone as the study was not carried out across different cultures - cultural variation (collectivist/individualist).
- Also only 60 working class cases - lacks population validity. Also lacks temporal validity as social class features have changed and so has role of the father.
How has the role of fatherhood changed over the past 50 years?
No longer the main breadwinners
Discipline less
More involved in child’s life (paternity leave, domestic work)
Offer more emotional support
Outline the role of the father in the development of attachment
- Fathers are exciting playmates (Geiger 1996)
- Encourage toddlers to take risks/be brave during physical play.
- Secondary attachment figures.
- Not psychologically/physically equipped to be primary caregiver? (Due to biological and social factors, e.g. Lack of oestrogen)
- Single father families
Outline the Brown et al study (2010) - fatherhood
Assessed attachment in families with infants aged 12-13 months. Found that high levels of supportive co-parenting were related to secure attachment types between infants and fathers.
Outline the Hedy study (1999) - fatherhood
Found that fathers are less likely or aware of when their infants behaviour is changing (e.g. In distress). Perhaps shows that they are less suitable to be the primary caregiver.
Outline the Bennier and Miljkotitch case study (2009) - fatherhood
Found that single parents’ father attachments with infants were similar to the fathers own.
Define: imprinting
A form of attachment where offspring follow the first large moving object, because there is an innate readiness to develop a strong bond with the mother. Usually takes place within the first few hours after birth/hatching.
Define: critical period
When imprinting/attachment is restricted to a very definite period of a young animals life.
Describe Harry Harlow’s study of imprinting (1959)
8 rhesus monkeys were studied for 165 days.
Harlow created 2 wire mothers with different ‘heads’, with one mother wrapped additionally in soft cloth.
The monkeys were split equally into two groups and one milk bottle was placed on either the ‘plain’ mother or the cloth mother at separate times.
During that time measurements were made of the amount of time each infant spent with the two different mothers. Other observations were also made, e.g which mother it went to when frightened. Overall they found that all monkeys preferred the cloth mother (whether or not it had the milk).
Long lasting effects were that they grew up to be socially and sexually abnormal.
Describe Lorenz’s study of imprinting (1935).
A clutch of gosling eggs were split into 2 groups and marked differently to distinct between the groups. One group was left to hatch with their natural mother and the other eggs were left to hatch in an incubator.
When the incubator eggs hatched the first living moving thing they saw was Lorenz and they soon started following him around, showing no recognition of their natural mother. The other group followed their natural mother.
The long lasting effect of this was that the process was irreversible, it also affected the mating of the birds (sexual imprinting).
Evaluate animal studies - Lorenz/Harlow
- Cannot generalise animal studies to human behaviour, as humans have conscious decision/free will which can govern behaviour.
- Useful pointer in understanding human behaviour - imprinting theory is reinforced by Bowlbys critical period concept and Harlow’s research supports Schaffer and Emersons findings that infants are not most attached to the person who fed them.
- Ethical issues (no consent/distress/long lasting effects,irreversible/affects sexual imprinting).
- In Harlow’s study the mothers also had different heads (confounding variable), therefore lacks internal validity.
Define: classical conditioning.
Give an example study
Learning though association.
Pavlov (1972): studied the digestive system of dogs by measuring saliva. Suggested that dogs were associating the technician who bought the food in with food. Predicted that dogs can associate other things with food (e.g. A bell).
Define: operant conditioning.
Give an example study.
Learning though reinforcements/consequences of behaviour (e.g. sanctions).
Skinner’s boxes (1948).
Skinner places hungry rats in cages to explore their surroundings.
When the rat accidentally pressed a lever which supplied a pellet of food, it quickly learnt to repeat the behaviour to gain the reward (food).
Define: social learning.
Give an example study.
Learning through imitation/observations.
Bandura et al (1961): Two groups of children observed aggressive or non-aggressive adult models who played with the bobo doll. The aggressive models displayed physically aggressive acts towards the doll such as striking it. Afterwards children were then taken to a room where among other toys there was a doll.
Children who observed the non-aggressive model exhibited virtually no aggression where as about one third of the children who observed that aggressive model repeated their actions.
The closest imitation was when the adult was the same sex as the child.