Animal studies to prove Att.

• Konrad Lorenz conducted research on imprinting, where hatchling geese would follow the first moving thing they saw until eventually they would never leave it without becoming distressed
• Lorenz established that following is an instinctive behaviour and that there was a critical period for imprinting to take place, usually between 13-16 hours after hatching
• Lorenz's ideas about 'critical periods' for forming attachment have been carried over to human infants, through the work of developmental psychologists in areas such as language acquisition
• Guiton (1966) demonstrated that leghorn chicks, exposed to a yellow rubber gloves when feeding them in the first few weeks became imprinted on the gloves
• Geese are precocial and human infants are not, so the imprinting process does not really explain human attachments
• Harlow conducted laboratory experiments on infant rhesus monkeys, placing them in cages with a wire surrogate mother with a feeding bottle attached and a soft cloth mother without a feeding bottle
• The monkeys spent nearly all the time clinging to the cloth mothers and only approached the wire mothers to get milk, indicating that emotional comfort was more important than feeding for attachment formation
• Maternally deprived monkeys in adulthood were more aggressive and less sociable, and some female experimental monkeys had offspring but were unable to care for them, neglecting or even killing them
• Cloth mother


  Mother without a feeding bottle
• Wire mother


  Mother with a feeding bottle
• Harlow's research caused severe and long-term distress to monkeys.
• Harlow's findings and conclusions have important theoretical and practical applications.
• Learning theories are also known as 'cupboard love' theories. This is because they emphasise the importance of the attachment figure as a provider of food.