Stages of Attachment + Role of the Father Flashcards
What’s the Asocial stage? 1
Similar responses to objects & people. Preference for faces/ eyes.
What is the indiscriminate attachment phase?
- Preference for human company.
-Ability to distinguish between people but comforted indiscriminately.
What is the specific attachment phase?
- Infants show a preference for one caregiver,
displaying separation and stranger anxiety.
-The baby looks to particular people for security, comfort and protection.
Multiple Attachment Phase
Attachment to multiple people
What were Schaffer and Emersons findings from role of the father?
Schaffer and Emerson’s study showed how babies form multiple attachments around the age of 10 to 11 months.
-In the follow-up at 18 months, only 13% of babies had a single attachment whilst 31% had five or more attachments to grandparents, siblings and significant others.
- Secondary attachments seem to meet different needs for an infant or child.
What are the characteristics of a father behaviour?
Fathers’ are more consistently involved in play than caretaking behaviours, and their play tends to be more stimulating and unpredictable than mothers, who tend towards comforting.
-Paquette (2004) found that fathers are more likely to encourage toddlers to take risks and to be brave during physical play than mothers.
- Fathers commonly structure talk around active play,
whereas a mother’s talk is primarily emotional, to soothe and reassure the infant.
What are the consequences of father attachment?
-The quality of attachment to the father may have significant consequences for an infant’s social development.
- Verissimo et al. (2011) found that the quality of the relationship between fathers and toddlers significantly correlated with the number of friends at preschool, and appeared to be more important than the attachment between a toddler and their mother in
subsequent childhood friendships.
-Perhaps the father’s attachment is not inferior but has a
different effect than an infant’s attachment to their mother.
A03 - Oestrogen - Hardy
-It is possible that most men are just not psychologically/biologically equipped to form an intense attachment, for instance, the female hormone oestrogen underlies caring behaviour so women,
generally, are more oriented towards interpersonal goals than men. -
- Hrdy (1999) found that fathers were less able to detect low levels of infant distress, in comparison to mothers.
- These results appear to support the biological explanations highlighted above; the lack of oestrogen in men means that fathers are not biologically equipped to form the same close attachments
as mothers do with their children.
A03 - Interactional Syrnchony in fathers
= Mendonga et al. (2011) found that, when only one parent was present, fathers had similar levels of interactional synchrony to mothers in their interactions with their infants.
-However, fathers interacted with their child dropped significantly when the mother present.
- Whereas the presence
of the father reduced the mother’s interactional synchrony only slightly.
-This may be because fathers see the mother as the main caregiver.
A03 - Culture Bias - Roopnarine
Furthermore, much research into fathers’ behaviour has been are based on Western families. Roopnarine et al (1993) points out that the tendency for fathers to be much more involved in
physical play is not true across all cultures.
- For example, father do not show this tendency in middle-class Indian families.
-This suggests that culture (rather than biology) plays a strong role
in fathers’ behaviour. Hence, the studies and theories based upon western society are likely to have very little relevance and lack generalisability to other cultures.
