Introduction to attachment

Question 1

What are alert phases

Answer 1

• babies have them periodically, signals are shown that they are ready for interaction,

Question 2

Who found that mothers typically pick up on these alert phases this 2/3 of the time

Answer 2

• Feldman and Eidelman

Question 3

Outline reciprocity

Answer 3

• When mother and infant interaction is reciprocal in that both of them respond to each others signals and each elicits a response from the other

Question 4

What did Brazleton et al describe reciprocity as

Answer 4

• a dance because each partner responds to each others’ moves

Question 5

What did Feldman describe interactional synchrony as

Answer 5

• ‘the temporal co-ordination of micro-level social behaviour’

Question 6

Outline Meltzoff and Moore’s observation

Answer 6

• they observed the beginnings of interactional synchrony in infants as young as two weeks old, an adult displayed 1/3 facial expressions or 1/3 distinctive gestures, child’s response was filmed and identified by independent observers
• an association was found with the mothers’ action and infants reaction

Question 7

What did Schaffer and Emerson find in relation to parent-infant attachment

Answer 7

• that the majority of babies did become attached to their mothers first and within a few weeks or moths formed secondary attachments to other family members
• 75% of infants studied an attachment was formed with the father by the age of 18 months

Question 8

Outline Grossman’s studied and the findings collected

Answer 8

• carried out a longitudinal study looking at parents’ behaviour and its relationship to the quality of attachments into the child’s teens
• quality of mother-infant attachment had a bigger impact on children’s attachment in adolescence
• however the quality of fathers play with infants was related to the quality of adolescent attachments, showing fathers have a different role in attachment

Question 9

Outline Tiffany Fields study on fathers as primary caregivers

Answer 9

• filmed 4 month old babies in face-to-face interaction with pcm, scf and pcf
• primary caregiver fathers spent more time smiling, holding infants than the scf
• this shows that the attachment relationship depends more on the responsiveness to the baby rather than the gender of the parent

Question 10

Give a limitation of obsservstional studies such as Meltzoff and Moore’s

Answer 10

• hard to know what is happening from the infants’ perspective based on these observations, for example is the infants’ response conscious/deliberate?

Question 11

Give a strength of controlled observations

Answer 11

• they capture fine detail
• observations often filmed from multiple angles
• babies don’t know/care that they are being observed so no demand characteristics
• strength as it means research has good validity

Question 12

give a limitation on the findings of the role of the father

Answer 12

• different researchers are interested in answering different questions and finding out different things
• means psychologists cannot easily use findings to answer simple questions as the aims of the studies are all different

Question 13

give a limitation f Grossman’s study

Answer 13

• other studies have found that children growing up single or same sex parent families do not develop any differently from those in two-parent hetro families
• this suggests that the fathers role as a secondary attachment figure is not important

Question 14

Why may fathers generally not become primary attachments

Answer 14

• may just be due to gender roles
• may be due to hormones, females have oestrogen which creates higher levels of nurturing and therefore women may be biologically pre-disposed to be the primary attachment figure