Disruption of Attachment

Question 1

What are the three types of disruption?

Answer 1

• Short-term seperation.
• Long-term deprivation.
• Privation.

Question 2

What is short-term seperation?

Answer 2

• Brief and temporary.
• The child will display behaviours such as: crying, lashing out, screaming and clinging.
• The child internalises their anger and responds little to offers of comfort.
• The child instead opts to comfort themself.

Question 3

What is the PDD model?

Answer 3

Protest, Despair, Detachment.

Question 4

What behaviour does an infant display in the detachment stage?

Answer 4

• They resume their response to other people but treats them warily.
• They might reject the caregiver on return and continue to display signs of anger.

Question 5

What did Barrett (1997) argue?

Answer 5

Infants who are securely attached and more mature may cope better with seperation.

Question 6

What happened in Robertson and Robertson (1971)?

Answer 6

• A child who had a stable relationship with his mother experienced severe distress when he spent nine days in a residential nursery following his mother’s hospitalisation.
• On his mother’s return, the child appeared confused and tried to get away from her.
• These negative effects were evident years later.
• The child appeared to have gone through the stages of the PDD model.
• Suffered serious and irreversible damage.

Question 7

How did Robertson and Robertson (1971) further support the maternal deprivation hypothesis?

Answer 7

• Took children facing short-term seperations into their own home.
• Provided them with an alternative attachment as well as routine.
• Found that by doing this they prevented any severe psychological damage.

Question 8

What are weaknesses of the PDD model?

Answer 8

• The sample is biased as Bowlby chose it himself and the majority of juveniles are not referred to children’s clinics.
• The evidence is retrospective and thus relies on accurate recall of past events.
• There’s further bias as Bowlby diagnosed affectionless psychopathology himself.
• Correlation doesn’t equal cause, thus other factors such as family problems and poverty need to be considered.
• Rutter highlighted that Bowlby failed to distinguish between deprivation and privation.

Question 9

What is long-term deprivation?

Answer 9

• A lengthy or permanent seperation from an attachment figure.
• Can happen through divorce, seperation, death or imprisonment.

Question 10

What did Rogers and Pryor (1998) find?

Answer 10

Children who experience more than two divorces have the lowest adjustment rates and the most behavioural problems.

Question 11

What did Furstenbergand Kiernan (2001) discover?

Answer 11

Children who have experienced divorce suffer not only emotionally but also in terms of academic attainment and physical health.

Question 12

What did Hetherington and Stanley-Hagen (1999) find?

Answer 12

Few children suffer long-term adjustment problems and most adapt to their change in circumstances.

Question 13

What did Richards. (1987) conclude?

Answer 13

Whilst attachment disruption through divorce is more likely to result in resentment and stress, death of an attachment figure is more likely to lead to depression.

Question 14

What is a strength of the Maternal Deprivation Theory?

Answer 14

• Research generally supports the hypothesis that long-term seperation has a greater negative impact than short-term seperation.

Question 15

What are the weaknesses of the Maternal Deprivation Theory?

Answer 15

• In some cases, divorce leads to a more positive environment and stronger bonds between children and parents.
• Research has led to the creation of strategies to help children cope with divorce.