Attachment

• What do the examiners look for?
• What examiners look for

  • Accurate and detailed knowledge
  • Clear, coherent and focused answers
  • Effective use of terminology (use the "technical terms")
• Difference between AS and A level answers

  The descriptions follow the same criteria; however, you must use the issues and debates effectively in your answers. "Effectively" means that it needs to be clearly linked and explained in the context of the answer.
• What are the assessment objectives for A-level psychology?

  • AO1 (Outline)
  • AO2 (Apply)
  • AO3 (Evaluate)
• Effective application to the scenario (AO2)

  You need to describe the theory and explain the scenario using the theory making the links between the two very clear. If there is more than one individual in the scenario, you must mention all the characters to get to the top band.
• Attachment


  The formation of a strong, reciprocal emotional bond between an infant and a primary caregiver
• Reciprocity


  A form of interaction between infant and caregiver involving mutual responsiveness, with both infant and mother responding to each other's signals and each elicits a response from the other
• Reciprocity


  Influences the child's physical, social and cognitive development. It becomes the basis for development of basic trust or mistrust, and shapes how the child will relate to the world, learn, and form relationships throughout life.
• Interactional synchrony


  A sensitively tuned "emotional dance". It takes place when the mother and infant behave in such a way that they mirror each other's actions and emotions.
• Interactional synchrony


  Is important in the quality of attachment as securely attached mother-infant pairs had shown more instances of interactional synchrony in first year of life. It has also been suggested that interactional synchrony plays a role in the development of the child's language ability and moral and social development.
• Observations of mother-infant interactions are generally well-controlled procedures, with both mother and infant being filmed, often from multiple angles. This ensures that very fine details of behavior can be recorded and later analysed.
• Babies don't know or care that they are being observed so their behavior does not change in response to controlled observation which is generally a problem for observational research. This is a strength of this line of research because it means the research has good validity.
• Stages of Attachment


  1. Pre-attachment: Asocial (birth – 2 months)

  2. Indiscriminate (Multiple) Attachments (2 - 7 months)

  3. Discriminate (Single) Attachment (7 - 9 months)

  4. Multiple Attachment (10 months and onwards)
• Attachments were most likely to form with those who responded accurately to the baby's signals, not the person they spent more time with. Schaffer and Emerson called this sensitive responsiveness.
• The Schaffer and Emerson study has low population validity. The infants in the study all came from Glasgow and were mostly from working-class families and an individualist culture.
• Accuracy of data collection by parents who were keeping daily diaries whilst clearly being very busy could be questioned. A diary like this is also very unreliable with demand characteristics and social desirability being major issues.
• The study lacks historical validity. It was conducted in the 1960s when gender roles were different – Now, more men stay at home to look after their children and more women go out to work so the sample is biased.
• Fathers' role


  Fathers adopt a more play-mate role than mothers. Infants prefer contact with their father when in a positive emotional state and wanting to play. In contrast, most infants prefer contact with their mother when they are distressed and need comforting.
• Factors affecting the father's role

  • Culture
  • Father's age
  • Amount of time the father spends away from home
• Field found that when fathers have the main caregiver role, they adopt behaviours more typical of mothers therefore the key to attachment is the level of responsiveness, not the gender of the parent.
• McCallum and Golombok found that children growing up in single or same sex families didn't develop differently from those in two parent families – Evidence undermines the idea of fathers having distinct roles.
• Until very recently men were expected to be breadwinners and not to have direct involvement in their children's care. However this might be a very stereotypical view rather than reflect reality as fathers might not have been directly involved in the day to day care but they were involved in factors like play, instruction and guidance.
• In the UK, fathers until last year were not given any paternal leave so the responsibility for child care was implicitly given to the mothers. This could change the attachment the children make with their fathers.
• Men seem to lack the emotional sensitivity to infant cues (Heerman, et al. 1994) that women offer spontaneously. This could be due to the fact that women produce a hormone, oestrogen which increases emotional response to other's needs.
• Factors affecting child's attachment to father

  • Age and gender
  • Temperament
• Some studies cannot be done on humans for practical reasons. For example, animals mature more quickly than humans so we can see how factors might affect them through their life span but in humans, this would take too many years.
• One strength of using animals in the study of attachment is that we can carry out procedures on animals that we could not use with humans for ethical reasons. For example, in Harlow's study the baby monkeys were taken away from their mothers soon after birth this could not be done with human infants.
• Gender


  Male children are more likely to prefer their father as an attachment figure than female children. Children are more likely to be attached to their father during their late childhood to early adolescence. Infants and young adults are less likely to seek attachment to their fathers.
• Temperament


  Fathers are less likely to be involved with their infant if the infant has a difficult temperament.
• Some studies cannot be done on humans for practical reasons. Animals mature more quickly than humans so we can see how factors might affect them through their life span but in humans, this would take too many years.
• Usefulness of animal studies

  • We can carry out procedures on animals that we could not use with humans for ethical reasons
  • It is difficult to extrapolate (generalise) the results to humans because we are cognitively and physiologically different from animals
  • However, in the case of attachment many animal species display attachment behaviour so studying the development of attachment in animals might help us understand attachment in humans.
• Harlow's study


  1. Newborn rhesus monkeys were separated from their mothers immediately after birth and placed in cages with access to two surrogate mothers, one made of wire and one covered in soft terry towelling cloth

  2. Eight of the monkeys could get milk from the wire mother

  3. Eight monkeys could get milk from the cloth mother

  4. The animals were studied for various length of time.
• Harlow's work has been criticized as unnecessarily cruel (unethical) and of limited value in attempting to understand the effects of deprivation on human infants.
• Harlow's experiment is sometimes justified as providing a valuable insight into the development of attachment and social behavior. At the time of the research there was a dominant belief that attachment was related to physical (i.e. food) rather than emotional care.
• Harlow's research has helped social workers to understand risk factors in child neglect and abuse such as a lack of comfort, and so intervene to prevent it, without separating the children from their parents.
• Lorenz's study


  1. Lorenz divided a clutch of eggs in two halves: one half was left to hatch with the mother (the control group) and the other half were hatched in an incubator, the first moving thing they saw was Lorenz

  2. Lorenz found that the control group followed their mother goose everywhere whereas the second group followed him

  3. Lorenz marked the goslings to indicate which group of eggs they had hatched from and then let them out together from an upturned box; each gosling went straight to its 'mother figure'

  4. Lorenz' goslings did not recognise their real mother.
• Imprinting


  Geese follow the first moving object they see, during a 12-17 hour critical period after hatching. This process is known as imprinting, and suggests that attachment is innate and programmed genetically.
• Imprinting has consequences, both for short term survival, and in the longer term forming internal templates for later relationships. Imprinting occurs without any feeding taking place. If no attachment has developed within 32 hours it's unlikely any attachment will ever develop.
• It could be argued that it was not attachment as it was not reciprocal. For example Guiton showed that chickens were imprinted on washing up gloves so it was not reciprocal (plastic gloves don't get attached to chickens). In mammals, the mothers show more emotional response to their young than birds, also mammals can form attachment at any time although less easily outside infancy. So we cannot generalise the results Lorenz's results to humans.
• One weakness of using animal studies is that animals are different from humans cognitively and physiologically so we cannot extrapolate the results to humans. For example, Lorenz used geese in his study, however, mother geese do not show emotional attachment to their babies in the same way as human mothers do so the way the attachment forms between a mother geese and its babies is very different from the way attachment form between a human mother and her babies.