learning theory of attachment

• who proposed the learning theory of attachement?

  Dollard and Miller (1950)
• learning theory suggests all behaviour is learned through experience and reinforcement
• food (UCS) produces pleasure (UCR). The child associates food and the mother together. The mother becomes the conditioned stimulus, and happiness becomes the conditioned response forming attachment
• The secondary drive hypothesis explains how primary drives essential for survival, such as eating when hungry, become associated with secondary drives, such as emotional closeness
• Analysis:

  • counter evidence from animal studies
  • counter evidence from schaffer and emerson
  • some elements of conditioning may be involved
• Harlow's research

  • Monkeys became attached to the soft-surrogate mother rather than the one who fed it
  • Goes against the learning theory of attachment
• Lorenz's research

  • Goslings imprinted on the first moving object they saw
  • Suggests attachment is innate and not learned
• Reliability of the learning theory

  Questioned as it is based on animal research
• Behaviorists believe that humans are similar to animals in how they learn
• The structure of the stimulus and response behavioral traits are similar in humans and animals
• Making it legitimate to generalize the findings from an animal to humans
• These behaviors can be explained through conditioned behavior
• But not all behaviors, such as attachment, can be explained through conditioned behavior
• counter evidence from human evidence:

  Schaffer and Emerson found less than half of infants had a primary attachment to the person who usually fed them and primary attachment was mainly to mother despite who fed them = factor not related to feeding
• some conditioning involved in aspects of attachment:

  • it seems unlikely that association with food plays a central role in attachment but may play a role in conditioning
  • e.g association of feeling warm and comfortable with a presence of particular adult and this may influence the babys choice of their main attachment figure
  • this means learning theory may still be useful in understanding developments in attachment
• learning theory is reductionist - focuses on basic processes too simplistic to explain complex attachment behaviors, ignores the role of social contexts