Attachment

• Attachment


  A two way enduring emotional bond that develops between the infant and the caregiver early in the infant's life
• Attachment development


  1. Two-way communication

  2. Responding to each other

  3. Builds emotional bonds

  4. Infant shows distress when separated from caregiver
• Interactional synchrony


  • Infant and caregiver reflect each other's actions and emotions in a coordinated manner
• Reciprocity


  Interaction wherein the adult and infant continuously respond to each others actions and can initiate or respond to communication
• Imitation


  Interaction where the infant mimics/copies the adult's behaviour exactly
• Sensitive responsiveness


  When the adult pays close attention to the infant's communication and responds in an appropriate manner
• Caregiverese


  Where adults modulate their voice, slowing it down and raising the pitch to make it almost song-like
• Bodily contact


  Physical contact, often skin-to-skin, seen as important in bonding, particularly in the first few hours of life
• Meltzoff and Moore (1977) found that infants between 12 and 21 days old imitated facial and manual gestures of an experimenter
• Papousek et al (1991) showed that the tendency to produce caregiverese is common across American, Chinese, and German mothers
• Modern techniques of studying attachment use multiple observers, video cameras, and systems of inter-rater reliability to reduce bias
• Findings on infant-caregiver interaction depend on inferences about internal mental states based on observations of infant behaviour, which is subjective and can suffer from observer bias
• Researchers are unable to claim intentionality as imitation behaviour may be an unconscious automatic response
• Social sensitivity is a concern when investigating child rearing techniques as some parents may find their life choices criticised
• Asocial (pre-attachment) stage


  0-6 weeks, babies respond to objects similarly to humans but prefer familiar individuals
• Indiscriminate (diffuse attachment) stage

  6 weeks to 7 months, babies can be handled by strangers without distress but prefer familiar adults, no separation or stranger anxiety
• Specific (discriminate attachment) stage


  1. 9 months, babies experience separation and stranger anxiety, prefer one primary caregiver
• Multiple stage


  After 9 months, babies attached to more than one individual, fear of strangers decreases
• Schaffer found primary attachment was to mother 65% of time, to mother and someone else 30%, to father only 3%
• Roles of mothers and fathers have changed in Western cultures since 1960s, with fathers more involved in childcare
• Bowlby reasoned that if attachment patterns are a product of how the mother treats the infant, the pattern with the father is a product of how the father treats them
• Field (1978) found primary caretaker fathers engaged in more smiling, imitative grimaces, and imitative vocalizations compared to secondary caretaker fathers
• Verissimo et al (2011) found strong attachment to the father was the biggest predictor of ability to make friends at nursery
• Findings on infant-caregiver interaction depend on inferences about internal mental states based on observations, which is subjective and can suffer from observer bias
• The monkeys who were left with the surrogate mothers for more than 90 days exhibited the following behaviors: they wouldn't stand up for themselves, they had difficulty with mating, and the females were inadequate mothers
• For the monkeys left less than 90 days, the effects could be reversed if placed in a normal environment where they could form attachments
• Contact comfort


  (provided by the cloth mother) was more important than food in the formation of attachment
• Contact comfort is preferable to food but not sufficient for healthy development
• Early maternal deprivation


  Leads to emotional damage, but its impact could be reversed in monkeys if an attachment was made before the end of the critical period
• If maternal deprivation lasted after the end of the critical period, then no amount of exposure to mothers or peers could alter the emotional damage that had already occurred
• Social deprivation


  Rather than maternal deprivation, was what the young monkeys were suffering from
• When Harlow brought some other infant monkeys up on their own, but with 20 minutes a day in a playroom with three other monkeys, he found they grew up to be quite normal emotionally and socially
• This study suggests that Rhesus macaques and potentially other primates such as humans have a biological (nature) need for physical contact and will attach to whatever provides comfort rather than food, going against the behaviourist theory of attachment
• Ethical concerns about Harlow's experiments

  • Intentionally orphaned infants
  • Subjected them to high levels of stress
• Lorenz's experiment had a permanent and irreversible negative effect on the geese, which was very unethical
• There are problems with generalising findings on attachment from animal studies to human infants, as geese are very different in evolutionary terms, and whilst monkeys are similar genetically to humans, there are still significant differences in both biology and cultural/social environments
• Knowledge gained from Harlow's studies has been applied effectively to the early childcare of human infants, such as encouraging contact between mothers and babies in the first few hours after birth to promote attachment, and investigating cases of infant neglect
• It has been argued that the long-term benefit to millions of human infants resulting from Harlow's research justifies the studies in terms of cost-benefit analysis
• Cupboard love theory


  The reason children become attached to their caregiver is because they learn that the caregivers provide food and meet their other physiological needs
• Classical conditioning


  Learning by association, where two stimuli are presented multiple times and the feeling of pleasure becomes associated with the second stimulus