animal attachment

• imprinting is an innate readiness to develop a strong bond with the mother
• imprinting helps animals ensure survival at a young age
• imprinting takes place during the critical period of development, most likely to happen in the first few hours of birth/hatching
• lorenz aim?

  investigate imprinting
• lorenz procedure?

  took a clutch of gosling eggs and divided them into two groups, one left with biological mother the other in an incubator, when the incubator babies hatched lorenz made sure he was present and that he was the first thing they saw, they soon started following him around, lorenz marked the two groups to distinguish and placed them together and exposed them to lorenz and the biological mother
• lorenz findings ?

  goslings he looked after still followed him and showed no recognition of their biological mother, process of imprinting limited by critical period
• whats the critical period ?

  time frame in which attachment usually occurs, if it fails to do so it cannot readily forms, animals are unable to form later attachments if they do not imprint
• lorenz noted that this early imprinting had an effect on mate preferences called sexual imprinting ( geese tried to mate with humans )
• sexual imprinting ?

  animals will choose to mate with the same kind of object upon which they were imprinted
• lorenzo conclusion?

  supports the theory of imprinting and the idea of a critical period
• weakness of lorenz?

  animal studies cannot generalise to human attachment, humans have more complex thought and communication systems. However, neonates are born with much more helpless and incomplete with very immature brains in comparison with birds. Human bonding and attachment takes place over longer periods of time. Animal studies can be a useful pointer in understanding human behaviour but it cannot be generalised, should always seek to replicate human results
• lorenz zupporting evidence ?

  Guitton,, when fed by someone wearing yellow rubber gloves for the first few weeks of their life and imprint onto the gloves, also found that male chickens later tried to mate with the gloves, this supports imprinting in the critical period and sexual imprinting
• lorenz evaluation ?

  imprinting was seen as a rigid and irreversible process, however it is now seen as flexible and reversible, guitton found he could reverse the imprinting of the chickens that tried to mate with the glove, after spending time with own species they were able to engage in sexual activity with their own species, therefore lorenz theory is too simplistic
• harlow aim ?

  to investigate whether attachment is based on comfort of feeding
• harlow procedure ?

  created two artificial mothers, one was wire one was soft cloth and both 'mothers' fed the monkey with a feeder bottle, there were also cloth and wire versions that had no feeder bottle, included eight resus monkeys were studied for a period of 165 days.
• harlow procedure ?

  each monkey put in a cage with both a wired and clothed mother, 4 of the monkeys had milk from clothed mother for 4 others it was with wired, the amount of time each monkey spent with the two different mothers was measured, observations were also made about the monkeys feeling scared by a teddy bear
• harlow findings ?

  all 8 monkeys spent the most amount of time with cloth covered mother whether or not it was the one with the milk bottle, those monkeys with the wired mother only spent a short amount of time getting milk and then returned to the cloth mother
• harlow findings ?

  when they were frightened with mechanical teddy bear all of the monkeys ran to the cloth covered mother, when monkeys played with new objects they kept one foot on the cloth covered mother for reassurance
• harlow conclusion?

  findings suggest infants do not develop an attachment to the person who feeds them but to the person offering comfort
• lasting effects of harlow ?

  motherless monkeys developed abnormally, they could not act appropriately to other monkeys and acted with a flight or fight response when encountering other monkeys, they didn't show normal mating behaviour and did not cradle their own babies
• harlow also found monkeys had a critical period, the abnormality of motherless monkeys can be reversed if they spend time with monkey peers before three months however if they spent more than six months with the wire monkey they could not recover
• harlow critique ?

  animal studies cannot generalise to humans, we are capable of more complex thought and communication systems. However, the findings seen in animals have been observed in humans, harlow is supported by schaffer and emerson, just like monkeys they found infants were not attached to the person who fed them but most attached to the person who was more sensitive and responsive to them
• harlow critique ?

  lack of internal validity- the wired monkeys vary, two heads were different which may act as a confounding variable, the reason the infant monkeys preffered the clothed mother may be because it had more attractive head so the study may lack internal validity
• harlow critique ?

  ethics- animals cant provide consent, facing long lasting psychological harm with development with peers and sexual behaviours and distress. However, it could be argued that animal experiments are necessary as they could not be conducted on humans. Instead of humans we have to rely on rare cases of neglect like genie