psychology: attachment

• What is an attachment? - A strong reciprocal emotional bond between an infant and a primary caregiver
• Attachments are critical for future emotional, social, and intellectual development
• Characteristics of people who have an attachment to each other include: proximity seeking, separation distress, and secure base behavior
• Proximity seeking refers to efforts to be physically close or near to the attachment figure
• Separation distress is the anxiety that occurs in the absence of the attachment figure
• Secure base behavior involves making regular contact with the attachment figure even when independent of them
• Reciprocity is a two-way process where actions are taken in turn between infant and caregiver to sustain interaction where behavior each elicits a response from the other
• Reciprocity starts around 3 months between caregiver and infant
• Interactional synchrony takes place when mother and infant interact in a way that their gestures and facial expressions mirror each other
• Meltzoff and Moore (1977) found in their study on interactional synchrony that there is an association between gestures and facial expressions of adults and actions of infants
• Evidence for caregiver-infant interaction includes studies by Abravanel and Deyoond, Isabella et al., and Tronick
• Positives of investigating caregiver-infant interactions include controlled research in a lab setting to ensure distractions are minimized
• Schaffer and Emerson studied 60 babies from Glasgow for 18 months to establish how attachment developed
• Schaffer's stages of attachment include: Pre-attachment phase, Indiscriminate attachment phase, Discriminate attachment phase, and Multiple Attachments stage
• The Pre-attachment phase starts at 0-2 months
• The Discriminate attachment phase starts at 7 months onwards
• The Multiple Attachments stage starts at 11+ months
• Schaffer and Emerson found that most infants showed separation protest when parted from the primary caregiver between 6-8 months and stranger anxiety a month later
• Schaffer and Emerson's study concluded that there is a common pattern of attachment formation in all infants, suggesting the process is biologically controlled
• Bowlby's Monotropic theory states that babies form one special relationship with the primary caregiver, usually the mother
• Grossman (2002) found in a longitudinal study that mothers' behavior and relationship quality were related to children's attachment in adolescence, suggesting that father attachment may be less important
• Geiger (1996) noted gender differences in mother/father interactions with children, suggesting fathers may have a different attachment role focused on play and stimulation
• Research into absent fathers by Bowlby showed that children who grow up without fathers may have higher levels of risk-taking and aggression, especially in boys
• Research into same-sex parents found no difference in child development, suggesting that the number of parents is more important than the presence of a father
• Research on hormones like oestrogen and oxytocin supports the idea that both mothers and fathers can take on caregiving roles
• Field (1978) and Parke found that fathers and mothers show equal interest and respond to baby's cues, indicating that men and women can both be caregivers
• Lorenz's study on imprinting with geese showed that young animals follow and form attachments to the first moving object they meet
• Guiton (1966) found that young animals don't have an innate idea to imprint on a specific object but on any moving object, supporting Lorenz's theory of imprinting
• Research has shown that imprinting is not irreversible, as demonstrated by Hoffman and Guiton's studies on reversing imprinting in animals
• Harlow's study on attachment with baby rhesus monkeys found that they preferred a cloth mother for comfort over a wire mother that dispensed milk
• Harlow's study also showed that the baby rhesus monkeys spent significantly more time with the cloth mother, seeking comfort from it
• Harlow's study aimed to test the learning theory of attachment and found that comfort and contact were more important than feeding in the formation of attachments
• In Harlow's study, the baby rhesus monkeys were reared by two wire mothers: a plain wire mother that dispensed milk and a cloth-covered mother that provided comfort
• Lorenz's study on imprinting with geese found that the critical period for imprinting is 12-17 hours after hatching, during which the young birds must be exposed to a moving object to imprint on it
• Lorenz concluded from his study that bird species attach to and follow the first moving thing they see, a process known as imprinting
• Evaluation of Lorenz's study includes Guiton's research on imprinting in Leghorn chicks and the plasticity of imprinting as shown by Hoffman's work on reversing imprinting in chickens
• Evaluation of Harlow's study includes the importance of comfort and contact over feeding in attachment formation, as well as the stress and fear responses observed in the baby rhesus monkeys
• Evaluation of Bowlby's Monotropic theory includes research on the role of fathers in attachment and the gender differences in caregiving behaviors between mothers and fathers
• Evaluation of Schaffer's stages of attachment includes the study by Schaffer and Emerson on 60 babies in Glasgow, supporting the stages of attachment development
• Evaluation of caregiver-infant interactions includes research on the role of fathers, the importance of sensitive responsiveness, and the observations of primary caregiver fathers in comparison to secondary caregiver fathers