Animal studies on attachment

• Imprinting= Lorenz found that geese automatically attach to the first moving thing they see after hatching,

  and follow it everywhere. This is called imprinting.
• He randomly divided a clutch of goose eggs into two groups. One group was left with the mother

  and the others were incubated with lorenz. Lorenz found that the goslings from the incubator

  eggs followed him around in exactly the same way that the goslings from the other eggs would

  follow their mother
• To test this he put both sets of goslings together with both the mother and lorenz present. He observed that when they were released, the two groups quickly reformed as they went off in search of their respective ‘mothers’. He concluded that i.e the goslings had imprinted on the first moving thing they saw.
• After further experiments, Lorenz identified a critical period in which imprinting was likely to

  occur.
• This is similar to human attachment, in the form of a critical period between 3-6 months

  proposed by bowlby. However this was changed to a ‘sensitive period’ as despite this being the period in which children are maximally receptive to the formation of an attachment, they can still be formed outside of this window
• A negative is= Imprinting is unlikely to occur in humans as our attachments take longer to develop and we

  don't automatically attach to particular things - quality caring seems more important in human

  attachment formation.
• Animal studies have provided valuable information for attachment that couldn't have been

  ethically conducted on humans e.g. Harlow's study where young monkeys were separated from

  their mothers. However it is still unethical to inflict suffering on animals e.g many animals used

  in attachment studies have had issues in adult life due to poor emotional development.
• Harlow created two wire monkeys both with different heads and one wrapped in soft cloth. 8

  infant rhesus monkeys were studied for 165 days. For 4 of the monkeys the milk bottle was on

  the cloth covered monkey and for the other 4 it was on the wire monkey. Measurements were

  made to determine the amount of time each infant spent with the two mothers. Observations

  were also made of the monkeys' responses when frightened e.g. by a mechanical teddy
• All 8 monkeys spent most of their time with the cloth mother whether or not it had the feeding

  bottle. With the monkeys who fed from the wire monkey only spending short amounts of time

  getting milk and returning to the cloth mother. When frightened all monkeys clung to the cloth

  monkey.
• These findings suggest that infant monkeys formed more of an attachment with the figure that

  provided comfort and protection not just to who feeded them. Growing up also negatively

  affected their development. Challenges social learning theory.
• It is difficult to generalise findings of animal studies to human behaviour because humans differ

  in significant ways. E.g. much more of human behaviour is governed by conscious decisions.

  Nevertheless many studies have found that the observations made on animal attachment are

  mirrored in studies of humans. E.g the idea that infants are not the most attached to the person

  who fed them is supported by Shaffer and Emerson.
• harlow's study may have confounding variables

  One criticism is that the suffragette mothers differed in more ways than being cloth covered or

  not. The two heads were different, which may act as a confounding variable making it difficult to

  assume cause and effect. I.e it is possible that the reason the monkeys preferred one mother to

  the other was because the cloth covered monkey had a more attractive head. Therefore the

  conclusions may lack internal validity