Attachment Flashcards
Describe and evaluate research into caregiver-infant interactions.
A01
Reciprocity:
babies have periodic ‘alert phases’ that signal they are ready for interaction
2/3 of the time mothers pick up and respond to these
From around 3 months this interaction increases - attention to each other’s verbal signals and facial expressions
Reciprocity - When each person responds to the other and elicits a response from them
It seems that a baby takes an active role
Both mother and infant can initiate interaction and they appear to take turns doing so
This is a dance because each partner responds to each other’s moves
Interactional synchrony:
Takes place when mother and infant interact in such a way that their actions and emotions mirror the other
Meltzoff and Moore - observed the beginnings of interactional synchrony in infants as young as 2 months
Adult displayed 1 of 3 facial expressions or gestures
response was filmed and observed
Association was found
Isabella et al - 30 mothers and infants together - degree of synchrony
High levels of synchrony was associated with better quality attachment
A02
It is hard to understand what is happening when observing infants:
many studies have shown the same pattern of interaction (Gratier)
What is being observed is merely hand movements or expressions
Difficult to be certain what is taking place from the infant’s perspective
Limitation: cannot really be certain that behaviours seen in mother-infant interaction have a special meaning
Controlled observations capture finer detail:
Mother and infant are being filmed from multiple angles
Fine details can be recorded and analysed
Babies behaviour doesn’t change when being observed as they are not aware
Strength: Research has good validity
Observations don’t tell us the purpose of synchrony and reciprocity:
Feldman - points out that synchrony and reciprocity simply describe behaviours that occur at the same time.
Good that they can be observed but this may not be particularly useful as it doesn’t tell us their purpose.
There is some evidence that reciprocal interaction and synchrony are helpful in the development of mother-infant interaction.
Helpful in stress responses and moral development.
Describe and evaluate Schaffer’s stages of attachment. Refer to Schäffer and Emerson’s research.
A01
Study:
Schäffer and Emerson - investigate the formation of early attachment and the age at which they developed.
60 babies from working class families visited every month for the first year.
Mothers were asked questions about the protest their babies made in everyday separations.
Findings:
Between 25 and 32 weeks about 50% showed signs of separation anxiety.
Attachment tended to be to the caregiver who was most interactive and sensitive to infant signals.
By 40 weeks, 80% had a specific attachment.
Stage 1: Asocial stage:
not really asocial as the baby is recognising and forming bonds with carers
First few weeks
Behaviour towards non-human objects and humans is similar
Happy in presence of humans
show preference to familiar adults - easier to calm them down
Stage 2: Indiscriminate attachment:
2-7 months babies display more observable behaviour
preference for people rather than inanimate objects
Accept comfort from any adult
Don’t show separation anxiety or stranger anxiety
Behaviour is not different towards any one person
Stage 3: Specific attachment:
7 months + start to display stranger and separation anxiety
Separation anxiety is from the mother in 65% of cases
The adult is termed the primary attachment figure
Person who offers the most interaction and responds to the baby’s signals with most skill
Stage 4: Multiple attachments:
Show attachment towards other adults with whom they spend time with
Secondary attachments
Schaffer and Emerson study - 29% had secondary attachments within a month of forming a primary attachment
A02
Longitudinal design:
Same children were followed up during a period of time.
Longitudinal designs have better internal validity than cross-sectional designs because they do not have confounding variables of individual differences between participants.
Problem studying the asocial stage:
Important interactions take place within these first few weeks
babies that are young have poor co-ordination and are generally immobile
Difficult to make judgements on them based on their behaviour
Not much observable behaviour
Does not mean the child’s feelings and cognitions are not highly social but we cannot rely on evidence
Conflicting evidence on multiple attachments:
Not clear when they develop these attachments
Some research seems to indicate that most babies form attachments to a single carer before multiple attachments
In cultural contexts, multiple attachments are the norm
Babies form multiple attachments from the outset - collectivist cultures
Families work together in child rearing and producing food
Measuring multiple attachment:
Just because a baby gets stressed when an individual leaves the room does not mean the individual is an attachment figure.
Children have playmates as well and may get distressed when they leave the room.
This is a limitation of the stages because their observation does not leave us a way to distinguish between behaviour shown to secondary attachment figures and playmates.
Describe and evaluate animal studies of attachment.
A01
Lorenz:
Randomly divided a clutch of goose eggs
1/2 with the mother
1/2 in an incubator where the first moving object was Lorenz
Incubator group followed Lorenz everywhere and control group followed the mother everywhere
When groups were mixed up the experimental group still followed Lorenz everywhere
He identified a critical period in which they need to imprint - can be as brief as a few hours after hatching
If imprinting does not happen, they do not attach themselves to a mother figure
Sexual imprinting:
Birds that imprinted on humans would later display courtship behaviours
Case study by Lorenz
Peacock reared in a reptile centre imprinted on tortoises and as an adult would direct it’s courtship towards them
A02
Generalisability to humans:
Some of his findings have influenced our understanding of human development
Problem generalising from birds to humans
The mammalian attachment system is different from that of birds
mammalian mothers show more emotional attachments
mammals may be able to form attachments at any time
Limitation: we cannot apply findings to human attachment behaviour
Some of Lorenz’s observations have been questioned:
Guiton et al
Chickens imprinted on yellow gloves and tried mating with them as adults. However, with experience they eventually learn to mate with other chickens
Limitation: suggests that the impact of imprinting is not as permanent as Lorenz believed
Discuss learning theory as an explanation of attachment.
A01
Dollard and Miller - cupboard love theory
Children learn to love whoever feeds them
Classical conditioning:
Over a period of time of the caregiver providing the infant with food the infant learns to associate the caregiver (CS) with food and so pleasure (CR)
(explain classical conditioning in higher detail)
Operant conditioning:
Can explain why babies cry for comfort.
They learn to repeat their behaviour of crying because it produces a positive consequence of comfort.
The baby is being positively reinforced and the caregiver is being negatively reinforced (stops the baby from crying - avoids the crying)
Attachment as a secondary drive:
Learning theory draws on the concept of drive reduction
Hunger = primary drive
Caregivers feed infants and so their drive is reduced
Caregivers are secondary drives
A02
Counter evidence from human/animal research:
Schaffer and Emerson - Babies developed primary attachments to biological mothers although someone else fed them
Lorenz - Geese imprinted before they were fed
Harlow - Monkeys preferred the cloth mother even when the wire mother was supplying the milk - they wanted comfort
Limitation: Shows that feeding is not the key element to attachment - no CR or drive reduction
Learning theory ignores other factors:
associated with forming attachments
Quality of attachment is associated with factors like developing reciprocity and good levels of IS
Research shows that best quality attachments are with sensitive carers that pick up infant signals and respond appropriately
Limitation: Hard to reconcile these findings with learning theory
If attachment developed primarily from feeding there would be no need to these complex interactions
There would be no relationship between those interactions and quality of attachment
A newer learning theory explained:
Hay and Vespo - proposed newer explanation based on SLT.
Based on the idea that social behaviour is acquired as a result of modelling and imitation behaviour.
Parents teach their children to love by modelling attachment behaviour e.g hugging.
Reward them when they display attachment behaviour of their own.
Describe and evaluate Bowlby’s monotropic theory of attachment.
A01
Bowlby proposed an evolutionary explanation - attachment was an innate system that gave a survival advantage
Ensure that young animals stay close to their caregivers for protection
Monotropy:
Great emphasis on the child’s attachment to one particular care giver as he believed it was different and more important
The law of continuity - more constant and predictable care = better attachment
The law of accumulated separation - effects of every separation from the mother add up
Social releasers:
Cute innate behaviour who’s purpose is to activate the adult attachment system (get attention)
Attachment is reciprocal - both mother and baby have an innate predisposition to become attached
Critical period = 2 years (more of a sensitive period)
Internal working model:
A child bases all of it’s other relationships on their first attachment due to their internal working memory
Affects a child’s later ability to be a parent later on
A02
Support for social releasers:
Clear evidence to show that cute innate behaviours are intended for social interaction
Brazleton et al- Observed mothers and babies during their interactions, reporting IS
Turned the observation to an experiment - caregivers were instructed to ignore the social releasers
At first babies were distressed but after this they curled up and lied motionless
Strength: the child responded so strongly which shows support for Bowlby’s ideas in the significance of infant social behaviour in eliciting care giving.
Support for internal working models:
Testable because it predicts that the patterns of attachment will be passed on from one generation to the next.
Bailey et al - 99 mothers with 1-year-old babies - quality of attachment using an interview and observations
Mothers who reported poor attachments to their parents were more likely to have children classified as poor
Strength: shows that an internal working model is passed through families.
Monotropy is a socially sensitive idea:
Major implications for the lifestyle choices mothers make when their children are young.
Law of accumulated separation - more separation = bad attachment.
This places a burden on mothers because it sets them up to take the blame for everything that goes wrong in the rest of the child’s life.
Pushes mothers to not return to work when child is born.
Not bowlby’s intentions - wanted to boost the status of mothers by emphasising the importance of their roles.
Describe and evaluate the strange situation.
A01
Controlled observation designed to measure the security of attachment a child displays
Proximity seeking
exploration and secure base behaviour
stranger anxiety
Separation anxiety
Response to reunion
Secure attachment (type B) - moderate stranger and separation anxiety
Insecure-avoidant attachment (type A) - do not seek proximity or show secure base behaviour. Little or no reaction when caregiver leaves and make little effort to make contact when they return
20-25% are insecure-avoidant
Insecure-resistant attachment (type C) - Huge stranger and separation anxiety but they resist when comfort when reunited with carer.
A02
Good reliability:
Inter-rater reliability - Different observers watching the same children
Researchers generally agreed on what attachment type to classify them.
Behavioural categories are easy to observe
Agreement was 94%
The attachment type does not just depend who is observing them
The test may be culture bound:
It does not have the same meaning in other countries
Cultural differences in childhood experiences are likely to mean that children respond differently to the strange situation.
Takahashi - test doesn’t work in Japan because Japanese mothers are rarely separated from their babies - high levels of separation anxiety
Child responses were hard to observe
Describe and evaluate research into cultural variations in attachment.
A01
Van Ijzendoorn
Located 32 studies of attachment where the strange situation had been used to investigate proportions of infants with different attachment types
Conducted in 8 countries
Data was meta-analysed
Wide variation between the proportions of of attachment types in different studies
Secure attachment was the most common in all countries - varied from 75%in Britain to 50% in China
Insecure resistant was the least common type - varied from 3% in Britain to 30% in Israel
Insecure avoidant were observed most in Germany and least commonly in Japan
Variation between the results of studies within the same countries were 150% greater than those between countries
Ainsworth was correct as all countries show all 3 different types of attachment
Other studies - Simonella et al and Jin et al
Conclusion: Secure attachment seems to be the norm in a wide variety of cultures, supporting Bowlby’s theory that attachment is innate and universal. However, research also shows that cultural practices have an influence on attachment type
A02
Large samples:
In Van Ijzendoorn’s study there was a total of nearly 2000 babies and their primary attachment figures
Simonella et al and Jin et al had large comparison groups from previous studies
Strength: Large samples increase internal validity by reducing the impact of anomalous results caused by bad methodology or unusual participants
Samples tend to be unrepresentative of culture:
The comparisons made were between countries not cultures
Within every country there are different cultures each with their own child-rearing practices
For example - it might over represent people living in poverty which is more stressful and so affects attachment type
Van Ijzendoorn and Sagi - found that distributions of attachment type in Tokyo were similar to the western studies, whereas a more rural sample had an over-representation of insecure-resistant individuals
Limitation: comparisons between countries may have little meaning as the particular cultural characteristics, such as child-rearing practices, need to be specified.
Alternative explanation for cultural similarity:
Bowlby’s explanation is that attachment is innate and universal and thus produces the same kind of behaviours all around the world.
Ijzendoorn and Kroonenberg suggest that’s small cross-cultural differences may reflect the efforts of the mass media.
Outline and evaluate Bowlby’s theory of maternal deprivation.
A01
Separation versus deprivation:
Separation = the child not being in the presence of the primary attachment figure
Deprivation = when the child is deprived of an element of their care
Brief separations do not cause harm but long separations can lead to deprivation
The critical period:
First 30 months of life
If a child is separated from their mother without suitable alternative care leading to emotional deprivation, damage to the child is inevitable.
Effects on development:
Intellectual development:
Goldfarb - found lower IQs in children who had remained in institutions as opposed to those who were fostered and had a higher standard of emotional care
Emotional development:
Affectionless psychopathy - inability to express guilt or strong emotions for others
Prevents a person from developing normal relationships and is associated with criminality
44 thieves study:
14/44 could be affectionless psychopaths
12/14 had experienced prolonged separation from their mothers
5/30 had experienced separation
In the control group 2/44 had experienced long separations
Conclusion: prolonged early separation/deprivation caused affectionless psychopathy
A02
Animal studies show effects of maternal deprivation:
Animal studies provide support that maternal deprivation has long-term effects.
Levy - showed that separating baby rats from their mother for as little as a day had a permanent effect on their social development though not other aspects of their development.
Harlow.
The evidence may be poor:
Bowlby used evidence from studies of orphaned children during WW2 (Goldfarb), those growing up in poor orphanages and his 44 thieves study
War-orphans were traumatised and often had poor after-care - those may have been the cause for later developmental issues
Children growing up from birth in poor institutions were deprived of many aspects of care
44 thieves had design flaws - Bowlby carried out the assessments knowing what he hoped to find
Counter-evidence:
Hilda Lewis - replicated 44 thieves study with 500 people
A history of prolonged separation from the mother did not predict criminality
Limitation: suggests that other factors may affect the outcome of early maternal deprivation
Describe and evaluate research into Romanian orphans.
A01
Rutter’s ERA:
Followed a group of 165 Romanian orphans adopted in Britain to test to what extent good care could make up for poor early experiences in institutions
Physical, cognitive and emotional development was assessed at 4,6,11 and 15
A group of British children adopted at the same time served as the control group
At first arrival into Britain many adoptees showed signs of mental retardation and undernourishment
Adopted:
6 months< = 102 IQ
6 months - 2 years = 86 IQ
>2 years = 77IQ
Adopted after 6 months showed disinhibited attachment - attention seeking, clinginess, and social behaviour directed towards all adults
The Bucharest early intervention project:
Zeannah et al - assessed 95 children aged 12-31 months
Compared to a control group of 50 children who had never lived in an institution
Attachment type was measured using strange situation
74% of control group came out as secure attached
19% of institutionalised children were securely attached - 65% were classified with disorganised attachment - 44% disinhibited attachment
Effects of institutionalisation = Mentals retardation & disinhibited attachment
A02
Real-life application:
Improvements in the way children are cared for in institutions
Less caregivers per orphan to play a central role for the development of the child and to prevent disinhibited attachment
Strength: Research has been immensely valuable in practical terms:
Fewer extraneous variables than other orphan studies:
The studies previous to the Romanian orphan studies involved children who had experienced loss or trauma
Hard to observe the effects of institutionalisation because the children were dealing with multiple factors - confounding participant variables
Strength: In Romanian studies it was possible to study the effects of institutionalisation - higher internal validity
Romanian orphanages were not typical:
Conditions were so bad that results cannot be applied to understanding the impact of better quality institutional care or any situation where a child experiences deprivation.
Poor standards of care, especially when it came to forming any relationship with the children.
Low levels of intellectual stimulation.
Limitation: unusual situational variables mean the studies often lack generalisability.
Describe and evaluate research into the influence of attachment in childhood and adult relationships. Refer to evidence in your answer.
A01
Internal working models:
The child’s first relationship with their attachment figure forms a mental representation of this relationship and acts as a template for later relationships
Relationships in later childhood:
Securely attached infants tend to go on to form the best quality childhood friendships
Rowan Myron-WIlson and Peter Smith assessed attachment type and bullying involvement
Insecure avoidant children were most likely to be victims
Insecure-resistant were most likely to be bullies
Relationships in adulthood with romantic partners:
McCarthy studied 40 adult women who had been assessed when they were children
Securely attached had the best relationships
Insecure-resistant had particular problems maintaining friendships
Insecure-avoidant struggled with intimacy in relationships
Hazan and Shaver - analysed 620 replies to a love quiz printed in an american newspaper
56% were identified as securely attached - most likely to have better long lasting relationships
25% Insecure-avoidant - revealed jealousy and fear of intimacy
19% insecure-resistant
These findings show that patterns of attachment behaviour are reflected in romantic relationships
Relationships as parents:
Tend to base their parenting style on their internal working model so attachment type tends to be passed on through generations.
Bailey - by assessing 99 mothers to their babies they find out that the majority of women had the same attachment classification both to their babies and their mothers.
A02
Most studies have issues of validity:
Most studies assess infant-parent attachment by means of interview or questionnaire
assessment relies on self-report techniques - the validity of these is limited because they depend on respondents being honest and having a realistic view of their own relationships
Retrospective nature of these creates validity issues as it relies on accurate recollections
Self-report is conscious but internal working models are not:
IWM are unconscious; we are not directly aware of their influence on us.
We would not expect to get direct evidence about them by means of interviews because people can only self report what they are aware of.
The self report will only give us indirect evidence.
Limitation: cannot assess internal working models and their effect on relationships accurately.
Association does not mean causality:
The implication is that infant attachment type causes the attachment and the features of later relationships
A third environmental factor such as parenting style might have a direct effect on both attachment and the ability to form relationships
Child’s temperament may influence this as well
Limitation: It is a counter to Bowlby’s view that the internal working model caused these later outcomes
Describe and evaluate research into attachment figures.
A01
Parent-infant attachment:
Schäffer and Emerson - found that the majority of babies did become attached to mothers first and within a few weeks formed secondary attachments to other family members.
75% of infants formed an attachment with the father within 18 months.
Determined by the fact that infants protested when father walked away.
The role of the father:
Grossman - longitudinal study looking at both parents’ behaviour and it’s relationship to the quality of children’s attachment.
Quality of infant attachment with mothers but not fathers was related to attachments in teen years.
Suggests father attachment is less important.
Quality of play with fathers was more important.
Suggests fathers have different roles - has to do with play and stimulation.
Fathers as primary carers:
Adopt behaviours kore typical of mothers when primary carers.
Field - found that in face-to-face interaction, primary carers of fathers mimicked the behaviour of mothers.
Fathers can be the more nurturing attachment figure.
A02:
Inconsistent findings on fathers:
Different researchers are interested in different research questions.
Interested in understanding the role of fathers as secondary attachment figures and others are more concerned with the father as primary attachment figure.
Limitation because it means that the question of “what role does the father play” cannot be answered easily.
Children without fathers aren’t different:
MacCallum and Golombok - found that children growing up in single or same-sex parent families don’t develop any differently from those with 2 parents.
This suggests that the father’s role as a secondary attachment figure isn’t important.
Limitation of theory.
Why aren’t fathers primary attachments?:
Could be a result of traditional gender roles.
Therefore, fathers don’t feel they should act nurturing or caring.
It could be that female hormones create higher levels of nurturing.
Therefore, women are biologically pre-disposed to be the primary attachment figure.
