animal studies

• Lorenz - aim


  to investigate imprinting
• imprinting 


  -an innate readiness to develop a strong bond with the mother

  -takes place during a specific time (critical period) in development
• Lorenz-procedure 


  took a clutch of gosling eggs and dived them into two groups

  1-left with their biological mother 2-eggs were placed in an incubator

  when incubator eggs hatched first living/moving thing they saw was Lorenz - they started following him around. to test further he marked the 2 groups and placed them together and exposed them to him and biological mother
• Lorenz - findings

  goslings he looked after still followed him and showed no recognition of their biological mother

  Lorenz noted the process of imprinting was limited by a critical period

  the early imprinting had an effect on mate preference = sexual imprinting
• sexual imprinting 


  animals (especially birds) will choose to mate with the same kind of object that imprinted them
• Lorenz - conclusion

  study supports the theory of imprinting and the idea of a critical period
• Lorenz - evaluation

  cannot generalise to human attachment be can be a useful pointer in understanding human behaviour
• support for imprinting - rubber gloves


  Guiton - leghorn chicks fed by someone wearing yellow gloves during their first few weeks - imprinted on the gloves and tried to mate with the gloves later on
• Harlow - aim

  to investigate whether attachment is based on comfort or feeding
• Harlow's - procedure

  8 infant Rhesus monkeys were studied for a period of 165 days

  created two artificial monkey mothers

  one made out of wire and other covered in soft cloth , both fed monkey with bottle

  also cloth and wire versions that had no feeder bottles
• Harlow's - procedure 2

  each monkey put in a cage with both wire and cloth 'mothers'

  4 of the monkeys the milk was on cloth mother and other 4 on wire mother

  amount of time each monkey spent with the 2 mothers was measured and observations made of monkeys responses when scared by a mechanical teddy bear
• Harlow's - findings

  all 8 monkeys spent most of their time with the cloth mother whether or not it had the feeding bottle

  when frightened all monkeys clung yo the cloth covered mother
• Harlow's - conclusion 


  findings suggest infants do not develop an attachment yo the person who feeds them but to the person offering comfort
• Harlow's lasting effects

  motherless monkeys developed abnormally - froze or fled when approached by other monkeys and were sexually abnormal - didn't show normal mating behaviour or cradle their own babies
• Harlow's - evaluation

  wire monkeys varied - may act as a confounding variable
• Harlow's - evaluation 


  ethics - no protection from psychological harm , created long lasting emotional harm

  could be argued that animal experiments are necessary as they could not be conducted on humans - instead have to rely on rare cases of neglect