Explanation Of attachment: Bowlby's theory Flashcards
What Bowlby’s theory of attachment all ahout? Contrast this to Dollard and Miller’s learning theory
It is an evolutionary theory where the tendency to form attachments is innate and this tendency is present in both infants and mothers, just like other animals. Ultimately this tendency gives us an adaptive advantage i.e. increases our survival likelihood. In contrast, Dollard and Miller’s learning theory of attachment suggest that infants have no innate tendency to form attachments, they learn attachments because of food
What is the acronym for remembering what is involved in Bowlby’s theory of attachment?
Adaptive Social releases Critical period Monotropy Internal working model Continuity hypothesis
Explain ‘adaptive’
Attachments are adaptive = they give our species an adaptive advantage increasing our survival likelihood. This is because, if an infant has an attachment to a caregiver they are kept safe, given food and kept warm.
Explain social releasers
Bowlby suggested that babies are born with a set of innate ‘cute’ behaviours like smiling, gripping and cooing that encourages attention from adults- social releasers. Called social releasers because their purpose is to activate
Explain critical period
Bowlby proposed there is a critical period at around 2 years old when the infant attachment system is active. In fact, Bowlby viewed this more as a sensitive period (a child is maximally sensitive to the formation of attachments up to the age of 2. Bowlby said that if this doesn’t happen the child would be damaged for life: socially, emotionally, physically and intellectually. If an attachment has not been formed in this time, a child will find it much harder to form one later
Explain monotropy
Bowlby’s theory of attachment can be described as monotropic because he placed great emphasis on an attachment to one particular caregiver and he believed that the child’s attachment to this one caregiver is different and more important than others
Explain why Bowlby said the more time spent with the mother-figure the better
Bowlby usually referred to the primary attachment figure as the ‘mother’ but was clear it didn’t need to be the biological mother. Bowlby believed that the more time a baby spent with this mother-figure (or primary attachment figure as we usually call them now the better. There were two main reasons:
- law of continuity: the more constant a child’s care, the better the quality of attachment
- law of accumulated separation: the effects of every separation add up and the safest dose is therefore a zero dose’
Explain internal working model
Through the monotropic attachment, the infant would form a mental representation of their relationship with their primary caregiver. This is a special mental schema for relationships. It serves as a model for what future relationships are like = a child whose first experience is loving with a reliable caregiver will expect all relationships are loving and reliable-the reverse is true that poor relationships will lead to negative expectation and treatment of others
Explain the continuity hypothesis
The internal working model affects the child’s later ability to be a parent themselves- people tend to base their own parenting on their own experiences of being parented. This explains why children from functional families tend to have successful families themselves
What are the evaluation points for Bowlby’s theory of attachment?
❌ critics have argued that Bowlby over-emphasised the role of attachment- an alternative explanation is that the child’s temperament (child’s genetically influenced personality) is important in the development of social behaviour. For example, temperament researchers suggest that some babies are more anxious than others and some more sociable than others as a result of their genetic makeup, and it is this that determines the quality of the attachment relationship rather than the mother’s responsiveness (Kagan)- these temperamental differences also explain later social behaviour rather than the baby’s primary attachment experiences. Temperament researchers therefore accuse Bowlby of over-emphasising the importance of a child’s experiences with their primary attachment figure on the quality of their attachment
❌ monotropy is a socially sensitive idea because of the implications for mothers’ lifestyle choices. 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 way later. Feminists such as Eria Burman have pointed out that this places a terrible burden of responsibility on mothers, setting them up to take the blame in the rest of the child’s life. It also pushes mothers into particular lifestyle choices such as not returning to work when a child is born- this was not Bowlby’s intentions. Bowlby saw himself as boosting the status of mothers by emphasising the importance of their role
❌ evidence for monotropy is mixed- monotropy is not supported by the findings of Schaffer and Emerson’s (1964) study, which found that most babies did attach to one person at first but also found a significant minority appeared to be able to form multiple attachments at the same time- this contradicts Bowlby’s assertion that babies form one attachment to a caregiver and this attachment is the most special.
✅ there is clear evidence to support the existence of social releasers- in an experiment on mother and baby interaction, Brazleton et al (1975) instructed primary attachment figures to ignore their babies’ signals (ignore their social releasers). The babies initially showed some distress but, when the attachment figures continued to ignore the baby, some responded by curling up and lying motionless. The fact that the children responded so strongly supports Bowlby’s ideas about the significance of infant social behaviour eliciting caregiver behaviour from adults and the purpose of social releases in initiating social interacting
✅ also support for the idea of an internal working model- the idea of internal working models is testable because it predicts that patterns of attachments will be passed on from one generation to the next- Bailey et al assessed 99 mothers, observing their behaviour with their infants to determine attachment type. The mothers were also interviewed about their relationship with their own parents. It was found that mothers that reported poor attachments to their own parents were more likely to have children classified as poor in the observations = supports the idea that as Bowlby said an internal model of attachment is being passed through families
