Bowlby's Monotropic Theory Of Attachment Flashcards
What is Bowlby’s monotropic theory of attachment?
Animals and humans have an innate tendency to form attachments. This is rooted in evolutionary theory.
How are attachments adaptive?
Attachments give our species an advantage as they make us more likely to survive as the infant is kept safe, given food, kept warm etc.
Define social releasers.
Innate ‘cute’ social behaviours or characteristics which elicit attention and response from a caregiver and leads to attachment. Biologically pre-programmed.
What are the two types of social releasers and examples?
Behavioural (crying and cooing )and physical (facial features and body proportions)
What is the critical period in humans?
Babies have to form an attachment within the first 6 moths but can extend up to 2 years, otherwise their development will be damaged.
What is monotropy?
Infants form one very special emotional bond (the primary attachment relationship).
What is the internal working model?
A mental schema for our relationship with our primary caregiver. All child’s future adult relationships will be based on this template/ cognitive framework. A model of how we are likely to behave.
What is the law of continuity?
Constant and predictable care from the primary caregiver in infancy will lead to higher quality childhood and adult relationships and vice versa for poorer quality relationships.
2 Strengths for Bowlby’s monotropic theory (and 1 counter)
Support for social releasers:
Brazleton et al. (1975)- observed interactions
between mothers and babies and found presence of interactional synchrony. They then asked primary attachment figures to ignore their babies’ social releasers. The babies showed initial distress, but when the ignoring continued they responded by curling up and lying motionless.
Places emphasis on the significance of infant social
behaviour in eliciting caregiving.
Support for Internal working model:
Bailey et al. (2007)à assessed the attachment
quality of 99 mothers and their one-year-old babies.
They also measured the mothers’ attachment to their own primary attachment figures. They found that mothers with poor attachment to their own primary attachment figures were more likely to have poorly attached babies. Supports Bowlby’s idea that mother’s ability to form attachments to their babies is influenced by their internal working model. COUNTER - Zimmerman et al(2000) longitudinal study of German children. Found that the impact of life events was more important when it came to predicting attachment type later on - suggests that internal working model may only apply when serious life events have not had an impact on the child.
2 Limitations of Bowlby’s theory
Validity of monotropy challenged:
Schaffer and Emerson (1964) found that although most babies did attach to one person at first, a significant minority formed multiple attachments at the same time. In 27% of cases the father was the joint first object of attachment with mother.
Socially sensitive research:
The law of accumulated separation states that having substantial time apart from a primary attachment figure risks a poor quality attachment that will disadvantage the child in a range of ways later.
Feminist Erica Burman (1994)= this places a burden of responsibility on mothers, setting them up to take the blame for anything that goes wrong in the rest of the child’s life. It also suggests the mother should not be separated from the child and so pushes them into choosing not to go back to work when a child is born
