Animal studies

• Lorenzo- imprinting

  -Batch of goose eggs, split in half, 1 hatched with mum, 1 hatched with Lorenzo in incubator

  -incubator group followed lorenzo everywhere, control group followed mother goose. Even when groups were mixed they followed the one they’d made imprint on.

  -Bird species are mobile from birth and attach to first moving object they see.

  -identified a critical period imprinting needed to happen in, and depending on species it can be as little as a few hours, for gees it’s about 3-20 hours and if it doesn’t occur within the critical period, chicks can’t attach to mother figure.
• Harlow- importance of contact comfort

  -observed new born rhesus monkeys kept alone in bare cage often died, but survived if they had something to cuddle.

  -tested the idea that soft objects serve some of the functions of a mother, he put 16 baby monkeys in cages with 2 wire model mothers, 1 only had a bottle and was just wire, the other was just covered in cloth

  -monkeys preferred the cloth covered money over food money, and sought comfort from it when frightened 

  -shows contact comfort is more important than food for attachment 

  -critical period for attachment- 90 days
• The strength of this research is it is socially sensitive, because you can’t carry out on human babies, so animals is a better alternative, we now know comfort is more important than food and have an understanding of the critical period. However, there are still ethical issues surrounding this research as it could risk damaging the animals development and psychologically later in life.
• A limitation is its generalisability to humans, humans have complex behaviours and lots of emotional connection/interactions that characterise human attachment. Although harlow’s monkeys are more similar to humans than Lorenzo‘s birds, the human brain and behaviour is still more complex, so it may not be appropriate to generalise the findings to humans
• there is lots of supporting research for Lorenzo’s birds, chicks saw shapes immediately after hatching and then were introduced to other moving shapes, but followed the original shape. chicks were hatched in a cage with a robot duck, they followed this robot duck, supporting the idea that birds imprint on moving objects