Attachment - Bowlby's Maternal Deprivation Theory Flashcards
What is separation?
Separation means that the child is not in the presence of the primary attachment figure. Brief separations, particularly where the child is with a substitute caregiver don’t have a significant impact on development.
What is deprivation?
- Deprivation means that the child loses an element of the primary attachment figure’s emotional care. This then becomes an issue for development.
- Extended separations can lead to deprivation, which causes harm.
What is Bowlby’s Maternal Deprivation Theory?
- This theory focuses on how the effects of early experiences may interfere with the usual processes of attachment formation.
- Bowlby used the term maternal deprivation to refer to the long-term separation or loss of emotional care from the mother or mother-substitute.
- He proposed that one particular attachment, with the primary attachment figure, is of special importance to the child’s emotional development (monotropy)
- If the attachment is broken or disrupted during the critical period (around 2 ½ years) the child will suffer irreversible long-term consequences of this maternal deprivation.
- If the child is deprived of emotional care for an extended period during the critical period due to having no suitable substitute care or an appropriate primary attachment figure of a mother, the same occurs
- This risk continues until the age of five
What did Bowlby propose?
- Bowlby proposed that continuous care from a mother is essential for normal psychological development, and that prolonged separation from this adult causes serious damage to emotional and intellectual development.
- Being deprived of the mother substitutes emotional care can affect the child’s emotional development
- Bowlby identified affectionless psychopathy, which is the inability to experience guilt or strong emotion for others, preventing the person developing normal relationships and is associated with criminality
- Maternal deprivation also affects a child’s intellectual development - Bowlby believed that maternal deprivation leads to abnormally low IQ and intellectual disability (mental retardation)
How is the internal working model affected by maternal deprivation?
- The internal working model acts as a template for all future relationships because it generates expectations about what intimate, loving relationships are like
- With maternal deprivation, there may be a lack of opportunity to develop an IWM or the poor relationship from poor treatment will result in them forming poor relationships as they expect such treatment from others or treat others the same way
- This is an example of the continuity hypothesis as the children would not have been securely attached and so won’t have secure relationships as adults
What was the aim and procedure of Bowlby’s 44 thieves study?
Aim -
- To examine the links between affectionless psychopathy and maternal deprivation
Procedure -
- They used a sample of 44 criminal teenagers accused of stealing
- Participants were interviewed for signs of affectionless psychopathy; characterised as a lack of affection, lack of guilt about their actions and a lack of empathy for their victims
- Their families were also interviewed to establish if there was prolonged early separation (deprivation) from their mothers
- A control group of 44 non-criminal teenagers, with no emotional problems all assessed to see how often maternal deprivation occurred to the children who were not thieves
What were the results of Bowlby’s 44 thieves study?
Results -
- 14 out of 44 thieves were affectionless psychopaths
- 17 of the 44 had maternal separation
- 12 of the 14 that were affectionless had also experienced prolonged separation (deprivation) in the first two years of life (critical period)
- In the control group, only 2 out of the 44 had maternal separation but 0 of the 44 were categorised as affectionless psychopaths
- Bowlby found that 86% of the ‘affectionless psychopaths’ in group 1 (‘thieves) had experienced a long period of maternal separation before the age of 5 years (they had spent most of their early years in residential homes or hospitals and were not often visited by their families).
- Only 17% of the thieves not diagnosed as affectionless psychopaths had experienced maternal separation. Only 2 of the control group had experienced a prolonged separation in their first 5 years.
Conclusions:
- Bowlby concluded that maternal separation/deprivation in the child’s early life caused permanent emotional damage.
- He diagnosed this as a condition and called it Affectionless Psychopathy.
- According to Bowlby, this condition involves a lack of emotional development, characterized by a lack of concern for others, lack of guilt and inability to form meaningful and lasting relationships.
Evaluative points of Bowlby’s study
- Bowlby was using interviews that involved recall of memories - this introduces bias and inaccuracy to reports
- Bowlby designed and conducted the experiment himself, leading to possible experimenter bias, especially as he made the subjective diagnosis of affectionless psychopathy
- It concluded that maternal deprivation caused affectionless psychopathy - however, the data is correlational and does not clearly show causation
- Other external variables that were not controlled could have affected and disrupted the attachment bond - flawed conclusions
- The study was vulnerable to researcher bias, as Bowlby conducted the psychiatric evaluations himself and made the Affectionless Psychopathy diagnosis, knowing which participants were in each group - therefore, findings may have been subconsciously influenced by his own expectations, undermining validity
Evaluation of Bowlby’s Maternal Deprivation Theory - Supporting evidence
- Bowlby’s 44 thieves study results
- This supports the idea that maternal deprivation can affect children’s emotional development, and therefore suggests that the theory is valid as it may explain how affectionless psychopathy develops. - Weakness of supporting research -
Bowlby drew on a number of sources of evidence for the theory, including his 44 thieves study. However, this study has major design flaws. Most importantly was researcher bias – Bowlby himself carried out the assessments for affectionless psychopathy and the family interviews, knowing what he hoped for. Furthermore, the study was a correlation and so only a link between maternal deprivation and affectionless psychopathy was found.
- These criticisms compromise the internal validity of the study because we cannot determine cause and effect (i.e. we can’t conclude that maternal deprivation causes affectionless psychopathy).
- As such, the study cannot provide strong support for the theory.
Evaluation of Bowlby’s Maternal Deprivation Theory - Undermining Evidence
- Lewis (1954) partially replicated the 44 thieves study on a larger scale, looking at 500 young people. In her sample, a history of maternal deprivation did not predict criminality or difficulty forming close relationships.
- This is a problem for the theory because it suggests that other factors may affect the outcome of maternal deprivation and therefore that the theory may not be completely valid. - Bowlby used the term critical period because he believed that maternal deprivation inevitably caused damage if it took place within that period. However, later research has shown that this damage is not inevitable. Some cases of very severe deprivation have had good outcomes provided the child has some social interaction and good aftercare. For example, Koluchova (1976) reported the case of twin boys from Czechoslovakia who were isolated from the age of 18 months until they were seven-years-old (their step-mother locked them in a cupboard). They were dwarfed in stature, lacking speech and suffering from rickets, and were predicted to be physically and mentally handicapped for life; Subsequently, they were looked after by two loving adults and appeared to recover fully and were not intellectually damaged and have no other issues with relationships
- This compromises the validity of the study - this suggests that the period identified by Bowlby may be a sensitive one rather than a critical one; or, the critical period is later in life (also contradicts the internal working model)
- Counterargument: However, this is a case study and so the results may not be externally valid as the deprivation suffered by the twins may be qualitatively different to the deprivation of others. Therefore, we should exercise caution when using the conclusion of the study to criticise Bowlby’s theory
Evaluation of Bowlby’s Maternal Deprivation Theory - Real-World Application
- Bowlby’s study and theory had an enormous impact on post-war thinking about childrearing and also on how children were looked after in hospitals. Before Bowlby’s research, children were separated from parents when they spent time in hospital. Visiting was discouraged or even forbidden. Bowlby’s work led to a major social change in the way that children were cared for in hospital. For example, parents being able to stay overnight with their children.
- This supports the external validity of the theory as it has important implications for the NHS
Genie Case Study - Curtiss (1977)
- Genie was a child whose parents were informed she would be developmentally delayed and possibly mentally retarded, but her father reacted badly to this and subjected her to serve confinement and ritual ill-treatment in an attempt to ‘protect’ her
- Genie spent the next 12 years of her life locked in her bedroom, being tied to a child’s potty chair in diapers in the day and at night being bound in a sleeping bag and placed in an enclosed crib with a cover made of metal screening - he would beat her and also didn’t allow his wife and other child to leave the house or speak
- She was discovered at the age of 13 when her mother left and took her with her, and she was not able to stand up and had a vocabulary of around 20 words - she had the IQ of a 1 year old and in terms of social maturity; she couldn’t socialise, chew and was not toilet trained
- She later learned sign language and was able to dress herself, able to socialise and understand language - however, she had a ‘bunny’ walk and never reached any normal cognitive or emotional development
- She lives in foster homes after her mother’s death - however, she faced regression in her progress after receiving abuse at some of the foster homes
Privation
- Rutter (1972) suggested that Bowlby may have oversimplified the concept of maternal deprivation; he suggested the idea of privation, which was the failure to develop any kind of attachment whatsoever
- This is different to deprivation, which is when an attachment that has been made has been lost
- Privation occurs when there is failure to form attachment, perhaps from children having a series of different carers or family discord
- Privated children do not show distress when separated from a familiar figure, which indicates a lack of attachment
- Rutter proposed that privation would lead to clinging, dependent behaviour, attention-seeking and indiscriminate friendless, which would become an inability to keep rules, form lasting relationships or feel guilt
- It would also cause anti-social behaviour, affectionless psychopathy, language disorders, intellectual development and physical growth
- He argued these problems are not solely due to lack of attachment to the mother figure, but also because of a lack of intellectual stimulation and social experiences which social experiences provide and these problems can be overcome later in the child’s development
- Therefore, Bowlby’s 44 thieves study may be more evident of privation than deprivation
- Hodges and Tizard in 1989 carried out a longitudinal study on the effects of privation because of Rutter’s work and suggestion it was a lot more harmful to children
