Attachment - Animal Studies Lorenz & Harlow Flashcards
What are animal studies in psychology?
Studies carried out on non-human species rather than on humans, either for practical reasons (animals breed faster & researchers are interested in seeing results across more than one generation of animals) or ethical reasons
When did Lorenz first find out the subject of imprinting?
He first observed imprinting when he was a child & a neighbour gave him a newly hatched duckling that then followed him around
What was Lorenz’s procedure?
He set up an experiment where he randomly divided a clutch of goose eggs, one half was hatched with the mother goose in their natural environment & the other half were hatched in an incubator where the first moving thing they saw was Lorenz
What were the findings of lorenz’s study?
He found that the incubator group followed him everywhere whereas the control group always followed their mother even when the two groups were mixed up.
Proved imprinting (the phenomenon whereby birds that are mobile from birth attach to & follow the first moving object they see
Identified a critical period in which has to take place (1hr after hatching) if imprinting didn’t occur, he found chicks could never attach to a mother figure
What was Lorenz’s findings on sexual imprinting?
Observed that if a bird imprinted on a human, they would often display courtship behaviour towards humans
Case study- peacock imprinted on giant tortoises & would only direct courtship behaviour to other giant tortoises
What was different about Harlow’s than Lorenz’s research?
Harlow worked with rhesus monkeys which are more similar to humans than geese (Lorenz)
What was the procedure in Harlow’s study?
Tested the idea that comfort was preferred over food & that a soft object served some of the functions of a mother.
Reared 16 rhesus monkeys with 2 surrogate mothers - one was a plain wire mother, dispensing milk & the other dispensed milk but was covered in cloth
What were the findings of Harlow’s study?
Found that the baby monkeys preferred the cloth covered mother, over the wire mother & sought comfort from the cloth covered mother regardless of which dispensed food.
Showed that contact comfort was more important to the baby monkeys than food was when it comes to attachment behaviour
What did Harlow find when he followed the monkeys as adults?
He wanted to see if the early maternal deprivation has a permanent effect on the monkeys. And found it had severe consequences. He found that the monkeys reared with just the wire mother were the most dysfunctional but those reared with the soft toy didn’t develop normal social behaviour. They were more aggressive & less sociable & bred less often (were unskilled at mating)
The deprived monkeys as mothers neglected their young & others attacked their children even killing them in some cases
What did Harlow say about the critical period?
Concluded that a mother figure has to be i traduced to the monkey within 90 days for an attachment to form. After this time attachment was impossible & the damage done by early deprivation became irreversible
What are the limitations of Lorenz’s study?
Generalisability to humans - the mammalian attachment system is quite different from birds as mammals show more emotional attachment than birds & mammals may be able to form attachments at any time so it’s not appropriate to try and generalise any of Lorenz’s ideas to humans
Some of Lorenz’s observations have been questioned - the idea that imprinting has a permanent effect on mating behaviour - chicken & washing up gloves - imprinting on mating behaviour is not permanent
What are the strengths of Harlow’s study?
Theoretical value - showed that attachment doesn’t develop as a result of being fed by a mother figure but as a result of contact comfort, showed the importance of the quality of earth relationships on later social development
Practical value - study has helped social workers understand risks of child neglect & abuse, important for the care or captive monkeys
What are the limitations of Harlow’s research?
Ethics - the monkeys suffered greatly as a result of the study, if monkeys are so similar to humans than their suffering must’ve been human like
Generalisability - although the monkeys are quite similar to humans they’re not human so psychologists disagree whether the findings can be generalised to humans
