Attachments

Question 1

Describe Dollard and Miller’s cupboard love

Answer 1

Attachments formed through classical and operant conditioning
-OP–
when the baby cries it creates discomfort in PCG. PGC comforts or feeds the baby, crying stops. PCG sensitivity to needs is negatively reinforced. When baby cries it is comforted, crying/ seeking comfort is positively reinforced, so it cries when upset, child and PCG can bond.

-CC–
Food (UCS) = pleasure (UCR)
Mother (NS) becomes associated with food, so becomes a CS, and baby experiences pleasure (now a CR) when seeing the mother

Question 2

Describe Harlow’s monkeys study

Answer 2

• -controlled observation
• -DV: social interaction spent with cloth/ wire mother (food or comfort)
• -22/24 hours spent with cloth mother
• -some monkey allowed to interact with other monkeys for a short time each day, these monkeys developed better than the other monkeys who did not have this social interaction.
• -supports Bowlby’s internal working model and continuity hypothesis, as the monkeys grew up to have poor relationships and were bad parents.
• -conclusion: infant monkeys prefer comfort over food (so contradicts learning theory

Question 3

Describe Shaffer&Emerson’s study (about sensitivity to needs)

Answer 3

39% of babies weren’t attached to the person who did the physical care (feeding/ changing), but the person who played with them and were sensitive to their needs.

(61% attached to the carer who was sensitive to their needs)

Question 4

Outline Ainsworth’s research

Answer 4

–Uganda, 28 mother-child relationships for 9 months, infants aged 15 months to 2 years. Of the 28 infants she felt that 5 were insecurely attached due to less responsive and available parenting. Used naturalistic observations and interviews.

–Baltimore, studies PCG and infants relationships. Visited them for 3-4 weeks using naturalistic observations and interviews.

Found that infants used their mother as a secure base to explore, and created the 3 attachment types and categorized the infants:
Type B: 66%
Type A: 22%
Type c: 12%

Question 5

Outline and evaluate Hazan and Shaver love quiz

Answer 5

Hazan and Shaver (1987): The Love Quiz’

Procedure

The researchers asked people to volunteer to take part in the study.

They were given 2 questionnaires, one to determine their early relationships with parents, the second their later, adult romantic attachments.

Findings

Divorce rate twice as high in type As than type Bs.

Conclusion

Early attachments do affect later, romantic attachments.

Evaluation of the Love Quiz

Self selecting sample: the participants volunteered after reading an advert in the Rocky Mountain News. This is a poor way of selecting participants since you are not getting a cross section of the public. Using this sampling technique, for example, you are going to get people with an ‘axe to grind’ or with extremes of experience or opinion.

Questionnaire: People tend not to answer truthfully, particularly on issues of relationships, instead wanting to make themselves look good.

Retrospective: As we saw in memory our recollection of past events is not reliable, so it seems unlikely that people’s memory of their childhood experiences will be accurate

Cause and effect: The researchers have shown a relationship between early attachments and later ones and are assuming that the childhood experience has caused the adult experience. However, other factors could be involved. Kagan (1984) suggested the temperament hypothesis. Children with a pleasant disposition are more likely to form warm relationships with parents and later in life, assuming they maintain their ‘niceness’, will form more loving relationships

USE–support the strange situation’s predictive validity. supports Bowlby’s internal working model.

Question 6

Describe Mary Main’s research

Answer 6

Measure attachments at 18 months and 6 years
–100% of type Bs stayed the same
–75% of type As stayed the same
This suggests that type As are less stable, and that attachments types can change. High %s support strange situation.

Found a fourth attachment type, type D ‘insecure-disorganized’, child and parent often fearful of each other (e.g. in the case of teen mums)

Question 7

What did Van Ijzendoorn and Kroonenberg find in their meta analysis?

Answer 7

• -Type B was the most prevalent attachment type
• -Germany had the most type A
• -Japan and Israel had the most type C

Question 8

Describe Grossman and Grossman’s study

Answer 8

Found that German infants tend to be classified as insecurely attached. This many be die to different child-rearing practices, as German culture promotes independence and distance. This shows their are cultural variation in attachment and what the best attachment type is.

Question 9

Describe Malin’s study

Answer 9

Found Aborigine children are discouraged from exploring their environment due to threats such as snakes, so they do not use their mother as a safe base to explore. Because of this, many of them were incorrectly labelled as insecurely attached.

Question 10

Describe Kyoung’s study

Answer 10

Compared Korean and American infants. Found Korean children did not stay close to their mothers and when their mothers returned they were more likely to play with their infants. However, the Korean and American infants had similar proportion of type B attachments. Shows different child rearing practices can lead to secure attachments.

Question 11

Describe Bowlby’s 44 thieves study

Answer 11

44 Thieves Study (Bowlby, 1944)
John Bowlby believed that the relationship between the infant and its mother during the first five years of life was most crucial to socialization. He believed that disruption of this primary relationship could lead to a higher incidence of juvenile delinquency, emotional difficulties and antisocial behavior.

To test his hypothesis, he studied 44 adolescent juvenile delinquents in a child guidance clinic.

Aim: To investigate the long-term effects of maternal deprivation on people in order to see whether delinquents have suffered deprivation. According to the Maternal Deprivation Hypothesis, breaking the maternal bond with the child during the early stages of its life is likely to have serious effects on its intellectual, social and emotional development.

Procedure: Bowlby interviewed 44 adolescents who were referred to a child protection program in London because of stealing- i.e. they were thieves. Bowlby selected another group of 44 children to act as ‘controls’. N.b. controls: individuals referred to clinic because of emotional problems, but not yet committed any crimes. He interviewed the parents from both groups to state whether their children had experienced separation during the critical period and for how long.

More than half of the juvenile thieves had been separated from their mothers for longer than six months during their first five years. In the control group only two had had such a separation. He also found several of the young thieves (32%) showed ‘affectionless psychopathy’ (they were not able to care about or feel affection for others). None of the control group were affectionless psychopaths. Moreover, he found of the 32%, 86% of those infants had suffered from maternal deprivation.

Conclusion: Affectionless psychopaths show little concern for others and are unable to form relationships. Bowlby concluded that the reason for the anti-social behavior and emotional problems in the first group was due to maternal deprivation.

Evaluation: The supporting evidence that Bowlby (1944) provided was in the form of clinical interviews of, and retrospective data on, those who had and had not been separated from their primary caregiver.

This meant that Bowlby was asking the participants to look back and recall separations. These memories may not be accurate. Bowlby designed and conducted the experiment himself. This may have lead to experimenter bias. Particularly as he was responsible for making the diagnosis of affectionless psychopathy.

Question 12

Describe Robertson and Robertson’s study?

Answer 12

Protest, Despair, Detachment (PDD model)

• -17 month old John spent 9 days in residential nursery, went through the stages of the model.
• -clung to teddy and rejected mother when she returned.

Question 13

Describe Spitz and Wolfe’s research

Answer 13

–Studies infants in a South American orphanage, found many of the children had no comfort or affection, and were suffering from anaclytic depression. Shows the significance of a significant caregiver.

–123 infants for 12-18 months. Studied infants in an orphanage (cared for by nurses) and in a prison (cared for by mothers in prison). Found infants in the orphanages had higher death rates and lower development.

Question 14

What did Barrett say about the PDD model?

Answer 14

• -Said Bowlby’s and Robertson’s studies were too simplifed
• -said that securely attached children cope better than the model predicts, but insecurely attached children get the full blown PDD effect.

Question 15

Describe Koluchova’s research into check twins PM and JM

Answer 15

Czech Twins Case Study – Koluchová (1976)
Andrei and Vanya are identical twin boys born in 1960. The twins lost their mother shortly after birth, and were cared for by a social agency for a year, and then fostered by a maternal aunt for a further six months. Their development was normal.

Their father remarried, but his new wife proved to be excessively cruel to the twins, banishing them to the cellar for the next five and a half years and beating them from time to time. The father (who was quite possibly of limited intellectual ability) was for most of the time absent from home because of his job, and the economic condition of the family was far below the average low-working classes.

On discovery at the age of seven the Koluchová twins were dwarfed in stature, lacking speech, suffering from rickets and did not understand the meaning of pictures. The doctors who examined them confidently predicted permanent physical and mental handicap.

Removed from their parents, the Koluchová twins first underwent a program of physical remediation, and entered a school for children with severe learning disabilities. After some time, the boys were legally adopted by exceptionally dedicated women. Scholastically, from a state of profound disability they caught up with age peers and achieved emotional and intellectual normality.

After basic education they went on to technical school, training as typewriter mechanics, but later undertook further education, specializing in electronics. Both were drafted for national service, and later married and had children. They are said to be entirely stable, lacking abnormalities and enjoying warm relationships. One is a computer technician and the other a technical training instructor.

Question 16

Describe and evaluate Hodges and Tizard’s study

Answer 16

This is a natural experiment. It is also longitudinal. The researchers study the same group of children on a number of occasions at different stages in their development.

Hodges and Tizard (1989)

Procedure

Sixty five children in a care home were assessed over a 16 year period. The participants in the study were all aged 16 and had all been in institutional care until the age of four. During this time they had not been able to form attachments because of the high turn over of staff. By the age of two the children had on average 24 different carers each!

At the age of four:

25 of the children were returned to their biological parents
33 were adopted
7 remained in the institution with occasional fostering
The above categories (form of care) are the IV for this experiment.

Five main methods were used to collect data on all the adolescents (including those in the comparison groups):

An interview with the adolescent;
An interview with the mother (in some cases with their father present);
A self-report questionnaire concerning ‘social difficulties’;
A questionnaire completed by the participants’ school teacher about their relationships with their peers and their teachers;
Rutter ‘B’ scale which is a type of psychometric test which identifies psychiatric problems such as depression.
Findings

At 16 the majority of the adoptive mothers (17/21) felt that their child was deeply attached to them, whereas only a half of the restored children were described as deeply attached. Adopted adolescents were also more often said by their mothers to be attached to their father than the restored group.

Ex-institutional children had greater problems with siblings than a comparison group.

There were no differences regarding the number of contacts with opposite sex friends, or whether the 16 year-old currently had a boy/girl friend compared to non-institutionalised adolescents.

However, ex-institutional children had poorer relationships with peers than a comparison group. Teachers rated the ex-institutionalised group as more often quarrelsome, less often liked by other children and as bullying other children more than the comparison group.

Conclusion

Hodges and Tizard believed that their findings demonstrate that children who are deprived of close and lasting attachments to adults in their first years of life can make such attachments later, although this does depend on the adults concerned and how much they nurture such attachments. Hodges and Tizard offer an explanation for why the adopted children were more likely to overcome some of the problems of early institutional upbringing better than the restored children. The financial situation of the adoptive families was often better, they had on average fewer children to provide for, and the adoptive parents were particularly highly motivated to have a child and to develop a relationship with that child. The biological parents in Hodges and Tizard’s sample seemed to have been ‘more ambivalent about their child living with them’.

Evaluation

Being a natural experiment this is very high in ecological validity.

However, being a natural experiment the researchers would have had little control over confounding variables. For example in this study at the age of four the children were split with some returning to parents and others being adopted whilst seven stayed mostly in care. It is unlikely that this would have been a random process! It is most likely that the more personable children with the better social skills would have been fostered. The ones with the most problems are likely to have remained in care. As a result it is difficult to be certain that the resulting behaviours at the age of sixteen were down to type of care. They could have been due to temperament of the child.

Longitudinal studies can suffer from attrition. Not all participants starting the procedure see it through to the end. Families move to other areas, no longer want to take part or simply can’t be traced. In the case of Hodges and Tizard only 51 of the original 65 were questioned at the age of eight. The ones who are left may not be representative of the initial sample.

Question 17

What are some of the effects of privation and some studies to support/ contradict

Answer 17

Poor poor relations:
Support–Genie, Hodges and Tizard
Contradict–Koluchova

Deprivation Dwarfism
Support–Genie, Koluchova

Intellectually Retarded
Support–Genie
Contradict–said to have been retarded from birth

Difficulty to form later attachments
Support–Hodges and Tizard
Contradict: Koluchova

Question 18

Describe Skodak and Skeels

Answer 18

Compared two groups of mentally retarded children brought up in a institution,
One group was transferred to a home, other remained in the institution.
Found home group had an IQ improvement from 64 to 91, whereas those who remained in the institution had a drop in IQ from 87 to 61

Question 19

Describe Durkin’s study

Answer 19

Durkin reported that pre-schooler who had been in day care since infancy were more prone to aggressiveness, negative social adjustment, hyperactivity, and anxiety than those who had started day care later. This suggests that the age children enter day care is important.

Question 20

Describe Egeland and Heister’s study

Answer 20

Egeland and Heister found that insecurely attached children progressed well with day care, while securely attached children became aggressive. This implies that certain types of children are negatively affected by day care.

Question 21

Describe NICHD’s studies

Answer 21

–Found from reports from mothers that children who average 30 hours or more of childcare per week were more likely to demonstrate problem behaviours, included heightened levels of aggression. This suggests that the amount of time spent in day care is related to aggression levels.

–Found that children who spent the longest number hours in day care had the lowest levels of aggression. This suggests that day care can have a positive effect of aggression levels. An earlier NICHD study found the opposite results, but this study used the more objective observations of teachers and carers rather than relying on the mothers.

Question 22

Describe Doherty’s study

Answer 22

Doherty found that there is a less likelihood of aggression if a child attends regular day care.

Question 23

Describe Dmietrieva’s study

Answer 23

Dmietrieva found that the more children in kindergarten classes who had extensive histories and childcare, the most aggression and disobedient were all the children in the class. This suggests that heightened levels of aggression can be transmitted between children.

Question 24

Describe Hagekull and Bohlin’s study

Answer 24

Hagekull and Bohlin found that Swedish children from disadvantaged families who experienced high-quality day care had lower aggression levels than other children. Boys were found to benefit the most. This suggests that the quality of day care is important in determining aggression levels and that for some children day care has a compensatory effect on aggression levels.

Question 25

What does Hock et al say about aggression and daycare?

Answer 25

Hock et al reported that aggressive and ‘difficult’ children are more likely to be placed in day care as their parents need a break and that some parents may choose to work, as they do not have positive interaction with their children. This shows other factors, rather than day care alone, can lead to elevated aggression levels.

Question 26

What did Smith et al say about day care and aggression?

Answer 26

Smith et al believed that aggressive behaviours were confused with rough-and-tumble play and that evidence of heightened aggression in day-care is a misinterpretation of non-aggressive behaviour.

Question 27

Outline studies into day care’s effect on peer relations

Answer 27

Shea (1981) videotaped children in a day nursery and compared the behaviours of those attending for different lengths of time. (Interesting for two reasons: clear ethical issues with taping young children playing and also the very early days of video!).

He found that children who attended more regularly were more active, more sociable in that they went looking for people to talk to, and made more contact with others. This increase was greatest in those attending day care most often (every week day) suggesting a correlation between time spent in day care and sociability.

Clarke-Stewart et al (1994), already covered, found that increased time in day care seemed to speed up social development, so children who had experienced more day care learned their social skills at an earlier age.

Field found children who’d attended day care had more friends in primary school.

Question 28

What are the implications of research into attachments (6marks)

Answer 28

–Hospital visitation
in 50s and 60s infants discouraged from visiting sick parents, now children are encouraged to visit and visiting hours are much longer.

–Adoption
Parents who want to give up their child for adoption are encouraged to do it s soon as possible, so the baby can form an attachment with it’s adoptive parent before the critical period ends.

–parenting techniques
classes and books on parenting

Question 29

What are the implications of research into day care?

Answer 29

• -1:3 staff to child ratio
• -low staff turnover
• -sensitive emotional care
• -qualified nursery workers

Question 30

What did Maccoby say about aggression in daycare?

Answer 30

Maccoby found that most aggressive behaviour in day care was not actually aggression, as it concerned conflicts over possessions. Children were not trying to hurt each other but instead were removing an obstacle to something they wanted.