Attachment Evaluation Flashcards
Caregiver-infant interactions evaluation.
Problems with testing infant behaviour.
Infants mouth are in constant motion and the expressions that are tested occur frequently e.g. tongue sticking out. This makes it difficult to distinguish between general activity and specific imitated behaviours. To overcome these problems M+M measured infant responses by filming infants and asking an observer to judge the infants behaviour. This increases the internal validity.
Failure to replicate.
Other studies have failed to replicate the findings. Koepke et al failed to replicate their findings but M+M claimed this was because it was less carefully controlled.
Marian et al replicated the study by Murray and Trevarthen and found that infants couldn’t distinguish live from videotaped interactions with their mother. This suggests that the infants are actually not responding to the adult. However their may have been problems with their procedure.
Individual differences.
Isabella et al found that The most strongly attached an infant is to the caregiver the greater the interactional synchrony. An important feature of interactional synchrony is that there is variation between infants.
The development of attachment evaluation
Unreliable data.
The data collected by S+E may be unreliable because it was based on the mothers reports of their infants. Some mothers might have been less sensitive to their infants protests and therefore were less likely to report them. This could have created a systematic bias which would challenge the validity of the data.
Biased sample. The sample was biased in a number of ways. It was from a working class population and thus the findings might apply to that social group and not to others. It was also a sample from the 1960s and parental care has changed considerably since that time. Research shows that the number of dad to choose to stay at home and care for the children has quadrupled over the past 25 years. It is likely that if a similar study was conducted today the findings would be different.
Stage theories.
Developmental psychologists often use stage theories to describe how children’s behaviour changes as they age. One difficulty with such theories is they suggest development is inflexible. In the case of the stage theory of attachment it suggests that normally single attachments must come before multiple attachments. However in some situations and cultures multiple attachments may come first. The problem is that this becomes a standard by which families are judged and may be classed as abnormal.
Animal studies of attachment evaluation.
Research support for imprinting
Guiton demonstrated that Leghorn chicks, exposed to yellow rubber gloves for feeding them during the first few weeks, imprinted on the gloves.this supports the view that young animals are not born with a predisposition to imprint on a specific type of object but any moving thing during the critical period. Guiton also found that male chickens later try to mate with the gloves showing that early imprinting is linked to reproductive behaviour.
Criticisms of imprinting.
Guiton found that he could reverse the imprinting in chickens you had initially tried to mate with rubber gloves. He found that later after spending time with their own species they were able to engage in normal sexual behaviour with other chickens. This provides proof that imprinting may be fairly reversible and it may not be very different from any other kind of learning.
Confounding variable - monkeys heads were different. One head may have been more attractive so this would act as a confounding variable, and lower the internal validity.
Generalising animal studies to humans.
Ethics of Harlow’s studies. Created lasting emotional harm to the monkeys.
Explanations of attachment: learning theory. Evaluation.
Learning theory is based on research with animals. Behaviourists believe that humans are actually no different from other animals in terms of how they learn. Our behaviour patterns are constructed from the same basic building blocks of stimulus and response and therefore they argue that it is legitimate to generalise from animal studies to human behaviour. Non-behaviourists argue that attachment involved innate predispositions and mental activity that could not be explained in terms of conditioning. Therefore the behaviourist explanation may be oversimplified as an explanation of human behaviour.
Contact comfort is more important than food. The main limitation of learning theory as an explanation for attachment is that it suggests that food is the key element in the formation of attachment. However Harlow’s study showed that the infant rhesus monkeys were more attached to the wire mother that provided contact comfort not food. Although Harlow’s study was with animals it is supported by Schaffer and Emerson’s research.
Learning theory has some explanatory power. Infants do learn through association and reinforcement but food may not be the main reinforcer. It may be that attention and responsiveness from my caregiver are important rewards that assist in the formation of attachment, such reinforces were not part of the learning theory account.
Bowlby’s theory seems to be a better theory to explain attachment than learning theory. It explains why, how and explanations of the advantages of attachment.
Explanations of attachment: Bowlby. Evaluation.
Attachment is clearly important in emotional development but it may be less critical for survival. Bowlby suggested that attachments develop when the infant is older than three months. This is very late as a mechanism to protect infants. However the age of attachment is linked to features of a species life, human infants don’t need to cling on, mothers can carry their babies. However when human infants start crawling attachment is vital and that is when attachments develop in humans supporting the view that it is adaptive.
Researchers now prefer to use the term sensitive period instead of critical period. This is to reflect the fact that the developmental window is one where children are maximally receptive to the formation of certain characteristics or behaviour, but nevertheless such developments can take place outside this window. It is less likely that attachment will form outside this period, but it is not impossible.
According to Bowlby’s theory one outcome of attachment is the effect it has on subsequent relationships. This has been tested by the Minnesota parent – child study. This study followed participants from infancy to late adolescence and found continuity between early attachment and later emotional/social behaviour. This supports the continuity hypothesis which is the idea that emotionally secure infants go on to be emotionally secure, trusting and socially confident adults.
Ainsworth’s strange situation: types of attachment. Evaluation.
Subsequent research has found that Ainsworth et al’s analysis overlooked a fourth type of attachment. Main and Solomon analysed over 200 strange situation videotapes and proposed the insecure – disorganised attachment type, which is characterised by a lack of consistent patterns of social behaviour. This is further supported by other meta analysis of the strange situation.
One issue with Ainsworth strange situation is that it may have merely been measuring the quality of a particular relationship. Main et al. found that children behaved differently depending on which parent they were with. This suggests that the classification of an attachment type may not be valid because what we are measuring is one relationship rather than a personal characteristic lodged in the individual. However Bowlby’s view of monotropy states the fact that an infant responds differently with someone other than their primary attachment figure tells us something about the relationship, but the attachment type is largely related to the one special relationship.
Ainsworth suggested that secure attachment was linked to maternal sensitivity. However, some studies have actually found rather low correlation between measures of maternal sensitivity and the strength of attachment. Slade et al found a greater role for maternal reflective functioning, which is the ability to understand what someone else is thinking and feeling. He believed that it was this rather than sensitivity that was the central mechanism in establishing attachment type.
Cultural variations in attachment evaluation.
The meta analysis drew conclusions about cultural differences yet they actually were not comparing cultures but countries. For example, they compare Japan with the US. Within each country there are many different subcultures each of which were different childcare practices. An example of this is studies of attachment in Japan, in Tokyo they found similar distributions of attachment types to the western studies however in the more rural areas there was an over representation of insecure resistant individuals. Therefore caution should be taken in assuming that an individual sample is representative of a particular culture.
There may be a culture bias using the strange situation to assign attachment types. Rothbaum et al argued that it isn’t just the methods used in attachment research that are not relevant to other cultures, but it is the theory because it’s so rooted in American culture. For example the continuity hypothesis does not have the same meaning in both cultures. Bowlby and Ainsworth proposed the infant to more securely attached go on to develop into more socially and emotionally competent children and adults. However, this competence is defined in terms of individuation. In Japan the opposite is true, competence is represented by the inhibition of emotional expression and being group orientated rather than self orientated.
According to Bowlby’s theory of attachment the reason for universal similarities is because attachment is an innate mechanism, unchanged by culture. VI+K suggest that at least some cultural similarities might be explained by the effects of mass media which spread ideas about parenting so as a result children all over the world is exposed to similar influences. This means that cultural similarities may not be due to our innate biological drives but because of our increasingly global culture.
Bowlby’s theory of maternal deprivation evaluation.
When discussing deprivation, people assume that it is physical separation but it may also be psychological. Being depressed would mean that even though a mother is physically present she may be unable to provide suitable emotional care, thus depriving her child of that care. One study which looked at mothers who were severely depressed found 55% of the children were insecurely attached. This shows that psychological separation can also lead to deprivation.
One strength of Bowlby’s study and theory is that they had an enormous impact on postwar 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. So his work led to a major social change in the way that children are cared for in hospitals.
Rutter criticised Bowlby’s View of deprivation because it did not make clear whether the childs attachment bond had formed but been broken, or had never formed in the first place. Rutters view of deprivation was that the latter would have potentially far more serious consequences for the child then a loss of an attachment bond. He therefore used the term privation to refer to situations where the child fails to develop an attachment bond with the caregiver and deprivation to refer to situations where upon does developed but through prolonged or traumatic separation is disrupted or lost.
Effects of institutionalisation evaluation.
One limitation of Romanian orphans studies is that deprivation was only one factor. The physical conditions were appalling, which impacted their health. The lack of cognitive stimulation would also affect their development. It is more likely that damage only occurs when there are multiple risk factors. It is also the case that for many institutionalised children poor care in infancy is followed by poor subsequent care such as difficulty living in poverty.
The importance of the studies looking at institutionalisation is that they followed the lives of children over many years. These longitudinal studies take a lot of time but the benefits are large. Without such studies we may mistakenly conclude that there are major affects due to early institutional care, whereas some of the studies show that the effects may disappear after sufficient time and with suitable high-quality care.
One major strength of the study is that has the real world application. The current research with Romanian orphans points specifically to the importance of early adoption. In the past, mothers who were going to give the baby up for adoption where encouraged to nurse the baby for a significant period of time. By the time the baby was adopted the sensitive period may have passed, making it difficult to form secure attachments. Today most babies are adopted within the first week of birth and research shows that adoptive mothers and children are just as securely attached as non-adoptive families.
The influence of early attachment evaluation.
One limitation of research into the influence of early attachment is that it is retrospective. Such recollections are likely to be flawed because our memories of the past are not always accurate, but longitudinal studies also support Hazen and Shaver’s findings.
Another limitation of this theory is that it is overly determinist as it suggests that very early experiences have a fixed effect on later adult relationships. However this is not the case, many researchers have found plenty of instances where ppts were experiencing happy adult relationships despite not having been securely attached infants. This means that an individual’s past does not unalterably determine the future course of their relationships.
Feeney argues that adult attachment patterns maybe properties of the relationship rather than the individual. An alternative explanation would be that adult relationships are guided by a self verification process as you tend to seek others who confirm your expectations of a relationship. Therefore it is the adult secure relationship that is causing the adult attachment type, rather than vice versa.
