Attachment: Animal studies Flashcards
What is ‘imprinting’
an innate readiness to develop a strong bond with the mother which takes place during a specific time in development, probably after the first few hours after birth/hatching.
Outline the procedure for Lorenz’s study
Randomly divided some Goose eggs in 2.
He put half in an incubator and half with the mother.
When the eggs hatched, they baby ducks followed the first thing which they saw. This meant that the ones in the incubator followed Lorenz and the ones with the mother goose followed her.
Lorenz was the first thing they saw and started to follow him around, the other hatched ducks were with the mother duck and would follow her.
Outline the findings of Lorenz’s study
Process of imprinting occurs at a specific time during an animal’s life.
‘critical period’- If an animal isn’t exposed to moving stimuli in the first two days it won’t imprint at all.
Similar to attachment, imprinting is a process that binds a young animal to a caregiver in a special relationship.
Imprinting is long lasting and irreversible. He also found that imprinting had an effect on later mate preferences.
Outline the procedure of Harlow’s animal study
He created 2 wired ‘mothers’ one with and one without cloth wrapped around it. They had different heads.
8 infant monkeys were studied for a period of 165 days, with 4 of the monkeys the milk bottle was placed on the cloth wired mother and on the plain wire mother for the other 4 monkeys.
Measurements were made of the amount of time each money spent with their ‘mothers’ as well as their responses when frightened by something.
Outline the findings of Harlow’s study
All 8 monkeys spent most of their time with the cloth covered mother despite whether or not this mother had the feeding bottle.
The monkeys who fed from the wire mother only spent a short amount of time getting milk and then returned to the cloth covered mother.
When frightened, all the monkey went to the cloth covered mother, and when playing with new objects they often kept one foot on the cloth covered mother for reassurance.
What does Harlow’s animal study suggest about attachment?
It suggests that infants do not develop an attachment to the person who feeds them but to the person who offers the most contact comfort.
This is because the monkey kept going back to the cloth ‘mother’.
Outline the long lasting effects of Harlow’s test
The ‘motherless’ monkeys in the study developed abnormally. They were socially abnormal, freezing and fleeing when approached by other monkeys.
Didn’t demonstrate normal mating behaviour and didn’t cradle their young.
Evaluation of Lorenz’s study (1)
Multiple research studies shows support for Lorenz’s research.
E.g Guilton (1966) leghorn chicks when exposed to yellow rubber gloves when they were being fed for a few weeks became imprinted on them.
This supports the view that young animals are not born with a predisposition to imprint on a specific type of object but on anything which is there in the critical period. This is further backed by the fact the male chicks when grown up tried to mate with the gloves.
Evaluation of Harlow’s study (1)
The ethical issues in his study raised questions about whether or not it should have been done on animals. This is because the monkeys suffered a lot due to his research.
He used monkeys as they are the animals most similar to humans which allowed the findings to be generalised. As a result of this it leads to belief that the animals would have suffered similarly to how humans would.
Harlow himself even referred to the ‘mothers’ as “iron maidens” which were a medieval torture device, further supporting the idea that his study was ethically wrong.
Evaluation of Lorenz’s study (2)
It may be hard to generalise the findings from Lorenz’s study to humans as it was done with birds.
Research has shown that there are differences in mammalian attachment and those in birds. Mammalian mothers seem to show more emotional attachment to young than birds.
Mammals are also able to develop attachment to form attachments at any point in their life.
This suggests that it isn’t generalisable to humans.
