Attachment

• Ainsworth strange situations


  Laboratory experiment that tests infants for two types of anxiety: separation anxiety and stranger anxiety
• Secure attachment (Type B)


  • Children explore happily but regularly go back to their caregiver
  • Show moderate separation distress and moderate stranger anxiety
  • Require and accept comfort 60-75% of toddlers
• Insecure-avoidant attachment (Type A)


  • Children explore freely but do not seek proximity or show secure base behaviour
  • Show little or no reaction when their caregiver leaves and they make little effort to make contact when the caregiver returns
  • Show little stranger anxiety
  • Do not require comfort at the reunion stage
  • 20-25% of toddlers
• Insecure-resistant attachment (Type C)


  • Children seek greater proximity than others and so explore less
  • Show huge stranger and separation distress
  • Resist comfort when reunited with their carer
  • 3% of toddlers
• Ainsworth strange situation AO3:

  • Strength: good inter-rater reliability because different observers watched the same children and agreed on the attachment type to classify them with
  • Limitation: unethical- potential for psychological harm to infants who are exposed to the strange situation study
• The role of the father:

  Grossman carried out a longitudinal study looking at both parents behaviour and its relationship to the quality of attachment in teens.

  Found that fathers have a different role in attachment- one that is more to do with play and stimulation and less to do with nurturing
• Fathers as primary carers

  Tiffany Field filmed 4-month-old babies in face-to-face interaction with primary caregiver mothers, secondary caregiver fathers and primary caregiver fathers. Primary caregiver fathers, like mothers, spent more time smiling, imitating and holding infants than the secondary caregiver fathers. This behaviour appears to be important in building an attachment with the infant. So it seems that fathers can be the more nurturing attachment figure. The key to the attachment relationship is the level of responsiveness not the gender of the parent.
• Parent- infant interactions:

  Schaffer and Emerson

  found that the majority of babies did become attached to their mother first (around 7 months) and within a few weeks or months formed secondary attachments to other family members, including the father. In 75% of the infants studied an attachment was formed with the father by the age of 18 months. This was determined by the fact that the infants protested when their father walked away - a sign of attachment.
• Cultural variations


  Differences in attachment types within and across cultures
• Van Ijzendoorn study


  • Looked at proportions of secure, insecure-avoidant and insecure-resistant attachments across a range of countries
  • Looked at differences within the same countries to get an idea of variations within a culture
• Procedure


  1. Researchers located 32 studies of attachment where the Strange Situation had been used

  2. Investigated the proportions of infants with different attachment types

  3. Studies were conducted in eight countries, 15 in the USA

  4. Data for the 32 studies were meta-analysed, results being combined and weighted for sample size
• Cultural variations: AO3

  strength: large sample- because large samples increase internal validity by reducing the impact of anomalous results caused by bad methodology or very unusual participants.