Attachment

• Caregiver-infant interactions AO1:

  Interactional Synchrony - parent's speech and infant's behaviour is finely synchronised and they are perfectly in time with one another. Communication is sustained which results in co-ordination of social behaviour.
• Caregiver-infant interactions AO1:

  Reciprocity - when behaviour or communication is mutual and interaction flows both ways; behavioured may be matched or mirrored
• Learning theory of attachment AO1:

  Operant conditioning - when rewarded behaviors are repeated. Punished behaviors are not repeated. Dollard and Miller (1950) states that a baby's reward from crying from birth is food. It will cry whenever it wants food as behavior has been reinforced. Food is the primary reinforcer and the caregiver is the secondary.
• Learning theory of attachment AO1:

  Classical conditioning - ASSOCIATION WITH FOOD. Baby loves food naturally (unconditioned stimulus). Baby is neutral towards caregiver. Caregiver and food come together and baby is happy. Baby becomes happy around caregiver because of association with food. Caregiver becomes a conditioned stimulus.
• 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/schema for our future ones
• Stages of attachment AO3:

  Shaffer and Emerson's research - they studied 60 Glaswegian 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.
• Caregiver-infant interaction AO3:

  Meltzoff and Moore did research to investigate the imitation of gestures in infants. They studied 12 infants aged 12-21 days. 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. This suggests that imitation is INNATE.
• The stages of attachment (Shaffer):

  • 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.
• 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.
• 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' AO1:

  • 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.
• Ainsworth's 'strange situation' AO1:

  • 70% of babies had a secure attachment.
  • 15% were insecure avoidant.
  • 15% were insecure resistant.
• Ainsworth AO3:

  • 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 as the lab-based setting is artificial and behaviour becomes exaggerated
  • the research has high inter-rater reliability (0.94) due to standardised procedure and operationalised categories
  • over-simplification of categories ignores individual differences.
• 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.
• Cross-cultural variations AO1:

  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%).
  • UK has least resistant (3%) and Japan most (27%).
  • Japan and Israel had least avoidant (5%) and Germany most (35%).
  • Variation within cultures was 1.5x greater than variation between cultures.
• Cross-cultural variations/Van Ijzendoorn and Kroonenberg's AO3:

  • The research isn't globally representative and are mainly western oriented
  • The findings are misleading and unrepresentative (18 studies were in USA and only 1 in China) so overall findings are distorted
  • Limitations of Meta-analysis (uses secondary data)
• Cross-cultural variations extended AO1 (Takahashi): tested if 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. AO3: procedure not ecologically valid due to lack of separation irl.
• Bowlby's theory of maternal deprivation:

  • Deprivation occurs when the monotropic attachment is disrupted as it affects the continuity hypothesis
  • Some of the possible consequences of maternal deprivation that Bowlby theorised about are: delinquency, low IQ, social maladjustment, psychopathy, depression, agression.
• Maternal Deprivation AO3:

  • 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.
  • Data cannot provide cause and effect as it is mainly retrospective.
  • Positive real-life applications to child-care
• 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 AO1:

  • When a child is raised outside of a home/family and does not develop a monotropic attachment within the critical period. This leads to privation rather than deprivation (Bowlby did not distinguish)
  • This can lead to low IQ, quasi-autism, delayed language development and disinhibited attachment.
• 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.
• Caregiver-infant interactions AO3:

  • (Meltzoff and Moore) high internal validity due to lab-based research, low ecological as environment is artificial
  • application - Kenyan mothers spend little time facing their babies due to holding them on their backs however the bond between mother and child is not affected - suggests that interactional synchrony and reciprocity are not essential and stem from western ideals
• Caregiver-infant interactions AO3:

  Tronick used the still face experiment to test the importance of care-giver infant interactions for social development. A mother engaged with the child suddenly stops responding. The child shows serious distress, turns away and cries. Often they would make deliberate attempts to lure mum back into interaction. This suggests the child is an active and intentional partner in the communication. Ethical issues due to distress but controlled via informed consent.
• Learning theory of attachment AO3:

  • Research evidence - Skinner's rats learnt through conditioning via food
  • However Harlow's monkey research and Shaffer and Emerson's research on real babies contradict food-based attachments - combo of lab and real-life research provides strong basis
  • Explaination is reductionist - it attempts to explain the complex process of attachment formation in terms of simple stimulus response processes when in fact humans have many complex influences over their relationships.
• Bowlby's Monotropic theory AO1:

  Critical Period - Like Lorenz, Bowlby thought humans must develop attachments in a set time, but it was longer than the critical period of geese and not as fixed. He also called it the critical period and stated it lasts up to 2.5 years. He agreed that the attachment relationship must be formed within the set window or it never will be. If attachment is broken/not formed by the end of the critical period it is too late for a normal attachment to be formed and this will have negative consequences for development and future relationships.
• Bowlby's Monotropic theory AO1:

  Internal Working Model - early attachments form a schema for all future attachments. Bowlby stated that this would then lead to a continuity hypothesis – that all future relationships will take on the qualities of the primary attachment relationship due to the schema guiding our relationship expectations and behavioural style.
• Bowlby's Monotropic theory AO3:

  • Research evidence:
  • Lorenz - critical period in birds
  • Shaffer and Emerson - contradicts concept of monotropy and supports multiple attachment figures. However the concept of sensitive responsiveness supports ideal of social releasers
  • Hazan and Shaver - love quiz supports idea of internal working model
  • socially sensitive due to gender sterotypes.
• Stages of attachment AO3:

  • Shaffer and Emerson's reseach is ecologically valid but uses a sample that is limited geographically so lacks generalisability
  • Harlow's monkey research also provides support for primary attachments based on love (discriminate phase) rather than food. However animal research cannot be fully extrapolated to humans.
• Animal studies into attachment (Harlow) AO3:

  • Ethics - monkey's suffered emotional harm in a damaging environment. However could be seen as necessary in providing tangible evidence for the importance of emotional connections
  • Extrapolation - monkeys share similar brain and social structures to humans however humans have higher levels of cognitive functioning; research cannot be fully extrapolated but necessary to use animals for ethical reasons.
• Animal studies into attachment (Lorenz) AO3:

  • Ethics - attachment to a human could have negatively impacted the geeses' survival however Lorenz did continue to care for them and they showed no signs of distress
  • Although it shows that attachment can be biological there are many biological differences between animals and humans e.g. imprinting period of 12-17 hours vs. 7-10 months.
  • High ecological validity due to natural environment.
• Multiple attachments AO1:

  Most children form multiple attachments. The relative importance of these different attachment figures is disputed. Bowlby believed that children had one primary attachment and that ones with others were of minor importance compared to their main bond. Schaffer proposed a model of multiple attachments as of equal importance, with these combining together to form a child’s internal working model. Schaffer claimed that by 10 months babies can have multiple attachments with wider family members.
• Multiple attachments AO3:

  • Research support from Shaffer and Emerson
  • Bowlby's view of monotropy is socially sensitive - implies that only women are suitable for childcare
• Role of the Father AO1:

  • Traditionally men have played a minor role in parenting. Men typically go out to work whilst women stay at home which has led to expectations of only women being nurturing
  • Bowlby claims that the father cannot have a role in monotropic attachment - they instead take more of a role in physically active play
  • However men are playing a larger role than before. ONS (2019) found that 14% of British single parents are male
• Role of the Father AO3:

  • Fathers are not as hormonally equipped as mothers to provide a sensitive and nurturing attachment due to a lack of oestrogen. Hrdy found that fathers were less able to detect low levels of infant distress, in comparison to mothers. However there are individual differences between fathers.
  • Field found that when fathers are left as the sole primary caregiver they appear to change their behaviour and become far more nurturing. Lone parent fathers spend more time holding, cuddling, and talking to their children.
• Attachment types classified by Ainsworth:

  • Secure - some stress due to separation, wary of stranger, greets mother enthusiastically upon return
  • Insecure-Avoidant - no sign of distress, okay with stranger, shows little interest when mother returns
  • Insecure-Resistant - intense distress, very wary of stranger, approaches mother for comfort and then pushes her away.
• Methods of cross-cultural research:

  • Comparisons are made of findings from different cultures. A study may be replicated in a different location
  • Can help establish if a behaviour is due to nature/nurture
  • Can reduce ethnocentrism through diversity
  • However imposed etic can produce invalid results in other countries.
• Method of meta-analysis:

  • Results from large number of studies that have all focussed on the same hypothesis and have used the same method are combined together to create an overall conclusion/ comparison. It is a type of secondary data.
  • Strengths: it allows the identification of trends that would not be possible from individual smaller studies.
  • Weaknesses: it is often the case that in many of the studies reviewed sample sizes are small and therefore should not be considered representative.
• Institutionalisation AO1 (ERA project by Rutter):

  • Procedure: 165 Romanian orphans (suffered privation) younger than 3.5 adopted into British families in the 90s. Assessed for physical, social and cognitive development at various points. Control group of 52 non-institution adopted children.
  • Results: At the time of adoption, the Romanian children were behind in nearly all aspects. By 4, most had caught up if they were adopted before 6 months. Those adopted after 6 months suffered some extreme effects like impaired language and social skills and reduced empathy.