Attachment

• Interactional Synchrony is behavior that is finely synchronised and the adult and baby are perfectly in time with one another
• Reciprocity is when behaviour or communication is mutual and interaction flows both ways
• Opreant conditioning is when rewarded behaviors are repeated. Punished behaviors are not repeated. A baby receives food as a reward after crying. It will cry whenever it wants food as behavior has been reinforced. Food is the primary reinforcer and the caregiver is the secondary.
• Classical conditioning can be defined as ASSOCIATION WITH FOOD. Baby loves food naturally. Baby is neutral towards caregiver. Caregiver and food come together and baby is happy. Baby becomes happy around mother because of association with food. Supported by research on Pavlovs dogs.
• Discuss the internal and ecological validity of melzoff and Moores study

  -high internal due to lab based setting because of control over iv and evs.-low ecological validity because of artificial environment. However babies too young to know they are being observed.
• Bowlby's monotropic theory:Attachment is biologically pre-programmed into children to aid survival. It can be summarised by:

  A - adaptiveness. This enables us to survive better

  S - social releasers. These are cues from a baby that a caregiver may respond to, e.g. crying

  C - critical period. Attachments must be formed within a specific window (2.5 years in humans

  M - monotropy. Infants only form an attachment with one main person

  I - internal working model. Our early attachments form a template for our future ones
• Shaffer and Emerson's research: They studied 60 babies at monthly intervals for 18 months by interviewing mothers and observing behaviour. They observed separation anxiety at around 7 months. By 10 months most babies had several attachments. Attachments were most likely to form with carers who were most sensitive to the babies signals. This supports SENSITIVE RESPONSIVENESS.
• Melzoff and Moore did research to investigate the imitation of gestures in infants. They studied 12 infants aged 16-21 days, 6 male and 6 female. They were shown both a mouth opening and tongue protrusion gesture (repeated measures and counterbalancing used) and it was found they were able to imitate all gestures.
• The stages of attachment: Asocial: age 0-6 weeks. Similar response to all people. Preference for humans.

  Indiscriminate attachments: 6 weeks - 6 months. Ability to distinguish between people but comforted by all.

  Discriminate attachment: 7-10 months. One primary attachment figure, shows separation anxiety.

  Multiple attachments: 10 months+. Attachment with primary grows, other ones form.
• Tronick's research into caregiver infant interaction: The aim was to discover if infants deliberately attempt to illicit a response from their caregivers. The mothers interacted with their children, then stopped and made a straight face. The children made deliberate attempts to regain mothers attention then cried after failing to. Supports aim.
• Harlow separated 8 monkeys from their mothers immediately after birth and placed them in cages. They had two surrogate mother's, one that was wire and gave food, another that was cloth. The monkeys spent 18 hours a day on the cloth mother as opposed to 1 hour a day on the wire monkey. This shows that emotional and physical comfort are greater factors in forming attachments than the receival of food.
• Lorenz took goose eggs that were about to hatch. Half of them were placed under a goose mother and he kept the other half. When they hatched he was the first thing they saw. The geese regarded him as their mother and followed him around. He then mixed up all the geese. They all went back to their respective mothers. The findings were that geese have an innate instinct to imprint on the first moving object they see within 12-17 hours after hatching.
• Sensitive responsiveness is supported by Shaffer and Emerson’s research because they found that sensitivity to babies needs led to stronger attachments being formed. This means that parents need to respond appropriately to their child’s needs otherwise they may not develop secure attachments.
• Key points for evaluating learning theory: Is the research valid?Are there any ethical issues?Can the research be extrapolated to humans?
• Reductionism: When a theory reduces complex human behavior down to its most simple, basic cause.
• Schaffer proposed a model of multiple attachments of equal importance, which contradicts Bowlby's model of monotropy. This is supported by Shaffer and Emerson's research which found that most babies form multiple attachments by the age of 10 months.
• Bowlby's theory is socially sensitive as it promotes the idea that only women are suitable for raising children. This is damaging to women as it limits their career prospects and also to men as it suggests they cannot form strong or emotional bonds with their children.
• The role of the father is typically seen as minor in terms of parenting, and Bowlby claims they do not have a legitimate role in their child's attachment. However, society is changing and fathers are becoming more involved in their children's lives. In 2013, 10% of stay at home parents were men.
• Evaluation of the Role of the Father:

  • Fathers cannot play a nurturing role due to hormones. However not all men are the same and it could be due to nurture not nature.
  • Fathers become more nurturing when the need to.
  • Evidence suggests the role of the father is less crucial than role of mother
  • Individual differences in children and parents
• Ainsworth's 'Strange Situation' measured 4 behaviours. Willingness to explore, Separation Anxiety, Stranger Anxiety, Reunion Behaviour.
• The 'Strange Situation' observation was covert, and used time sampling. Multiple observers noted down the behaviour displayed every 15 seconds through 8 episodes and rated them on a scale from 1-7. The children were aged 12-18 months.
• The results of Ainsworth's study were that 70% of babies had a secure attachment meaning they experienced some distress at separation, wary of stranger, greets mother enthusiastically and uses their caregiver as a secure base for exploration. 15% were insecure avoidant, meaning they showed no sign of distress and were confident on their own. 15% were insecure resistant meaning they showed intense distress, were very wary of the stranger and approached mother for comfort but pushed her away.
• Evaluation of Ainsworth's study:

  • link between parental sensitivity and attachment type is weak (Wolff and Van Ijzendoorn conducted a meta-analysis and found a correlation of 0.24)
  • issues with ecological validity
  • the research has high inter-rater reliability (0.94)
  • over-simplification of categories
• Ethnocentrism is using one's own culture as the benchmark to judge the behaviour of other cultures. Imposed etic is a term used to describe the act of using methods developed in one culture to test another where the method may not actually be relevant, useful or valid.
• Van Ijzendoorn and Kroonenbergs Meta-analysis study summarised findings from 8 countries which all used the same procedure. All countires had secure as their most common attachment type with UK as the highest (75%) and China as the lowest (50%). The other attachment types vary in frequency. UK has least resistant (3%) and Japan most (27%). Japan had least avoidant (5%) and Germany most (35%).
• The conclusion of the Meta-analysis is that there are some universal characteristics in caregiver-infant interaction. However, cultural differences have a great effect, especially within the insecure attachment types.
• Evaluation of Van Ijzendoorn and Kroonenberg's study:

  • The research isn't globally representative
  • The findings are misleading (18 studies were in USA and only 1 in China)
  • Limitations of Meta-analysis (uses secondary data)
• Takahashi did a study to see if the Strange Situation was an appropriate measure of attachment in Japanese children. He used 60 middle class 1 year olds and their mothers. 68% were observed to have a secure attachment and 32% were insecure resistant. There were no insecure avoidant. This could be because Japanese children experience less alone time.
• Deprivation is when an attachment has been broken or lost by the absence of a parent. This could be shorter term due to hospitalisation or permanent in the case of death. Privation is when a child never forms an attachment due to extreme neglect.
• Bowlby placed great importance on the monotropic relationship between mother and child and believed that all future relationships rely on it due to the internal working model. Therefore, if this bond is missing, a child will be subject to major developmental issues. He called this the 'maternal deprivation hypothesis'.
• Some of the possible consequences of maternal deprivation that bowlby theorised about are: delinquency, low IQ, social maladjustment, psychopathy, depression, agression.
• Research evidence for maternal deprivation:

  44 juvenile thieves in the 1940s were interviewed in Bowlby's clinic. He did IQ and emotion tests on them. He compared their results with 44 non-delinquent children. 17 of them had experienced long term deprivation > 6 months whereas only 2 of the control had. 12 were classified as affectionless psychopaths.
• Harlow's extended research on monkeys also provides some support for the maternal deprivation hypothesis. When the monkeys were placed with other monkeys they struggled with socialiasation and were bullied by other monkeys. Those who faced more than 90 days of deprivation were permanently affected which also supports the critical period.
• Institutionalisation is when a child is raised outside of a home/family and does not develop a monotropic attachment within the critical period. This can lead to low IQ, quasi-autism, impaired adult relationships and other consequences.
• In Romania in the 1980s, families were encouraged to have more children by preventing the use of abortion and birth control. This meant many families could not support all of their children and were forced to give them up to live in orphanages where they received hardly any care or attention.
• Rutter did a longitudinal study on 165 Romanian orphans who were adopted into British families in the 1990s before the age of 3.5. By age 4, most of the children who were adopted before 6 months caught up with the control group. Some of those adopted after 6 months had serious delays in development that continued into early adulthood.
• Zeanah et al did a ranomised control trial of foster care as an intervention for some of the Romanian orphans. 136 children were entered into specialised foster care at an average age of 22 months. They compared their development with institutionalised children and children in families. Those placed in foster care were able to recover in most areas whereas those who stayed institutionalised had many deficits by age 16. The critical period was found to be 2 years.
• The continuity hypothesis states that a persons relationships will reflect their attachments formed in early childhood. Therefore someone with a negative early attachment is more likely to seek out a dysfunctional relationship.
• Myron-Wilson and Smith found that bullying behaviour can be predicted by attachment type. They used questionnaires on around 200 children aged 7-11 in London and found that secure children were unlikely to be involved in bullying. Insecure-avoidant children were most likely to be victims and insecure-resistant were more likely to be bullies.
• Hazan and Shaver carried out a study in the 80s where they asked people to answer questionnaires based around their relationship with their parents in childhood and currently, and their relationship experiences. Those who were secure had the lowest rate of divorce, and those who were avoidant had the highest.