AO3

• Strength is that there is face validity. There are plenty of opportunities for an influence to associate a caregiver with food and be positively being reinforced by the caregivers presence. For instance, Dollard and Miller estimated that the mother feeds their infant more than 2000 times within the first year, whilst also seeing to its other needs such as making sure the infant is warm enough and hydrated. Dollard and Miller argued that this is strong evidence that the conditions are in place for an attachment to form.
• A limitation is that the theory is reductionist and ignores other important behaviours. Research into early infant-caregiver interaction suggests that the quality of attachment is associated with reciprocity—which is when the caregiver responds to the infant’s signals—and interactional synchrony—which is when they respond in time with the infant’s signals. These findings contradict the concept of cupboard love, which claims that affection is given because of a reward. If attachment developed solely due to feeding, there would be no purpose for the above interactions. This suggests that learning theory is not a valid explanation of why attachment occurs, as it ignores other factors that influence attachment and only focuses on the role of food.
• A limitation of the classical conditioning part of the theory is that it does not explain why babies who are brought up in extreme poverty are still attached to their parents. In such situations, there would be no opportunity to associate the caregiver with food, yet attachments are still formed. This indicates that this theory is reductionist, offering an explanation of attachment that is too narrow to be able to explain all family circumstances.
• A limitation is that there is contradictory evidence. Harlow found that baby monkeys spent more time with a soft towelling monkey, despite whether it provided food in comparison to a wire monkey. They also went to the cloth monkey when they were scared. This suggests that attachment is due to contact comfort rather than the need of food for survival. This goes against the learning theory of attachment, which suggests that children attach on the basis of an association formed between the mother and food. Learning theorists believe that findings of animal studies could be applied to humans, therefore should take this evidence into account when explaining attachment.