stages of attachment

• Schaffer and Emerson (1964) conducted a study to investigate the formation of early attachments. 

  • 60 babies all from Glasgow majority with working class families
  • Babies and mothers visited at their homes by researchers every month for the first year and then again at 18 months to be interviewed about the kind of protest their babies showed in everyday separations. (separation and stranger anxiety)
  • This laid the basis for the stages of attachment
• Stage 1) Asocial stage

  First few weeks. Babies' behaviour towards objects and humans is quite similar.
• Stage 2) indiscriminate stage

  2-7 months. Preference to people rather than inanimate objects. Recognise and prefer familiar adults but accept comfort from any adult. No stranger or separation anxiety
• Stage 3) specific attachment

  Around 7 months. Display stranger and separation anxiety from one particular adult (usually the mother). This adult is determined as the primary attachment figure.
• Stage 4) multiple attachments

  Shortly after. Appear to develop secondary attachments to 2 or more people once they have formed the primary attachment. This is usually to other family members
• Schaffer and Emerson’s study is that it was a field experiment so has good external validity
• Schaffer and Emerson's study was a longitudinal design, which have better internal validity than cross-sectional designs because they do not have the confounding variable of individual differences between participants.
• The sample size of 60 babies and their carers was good considering the large volume of data that was gathered on each participant. However, all the families were from the same area and social class in 1964.
• It is not yet clear when children are capable of forming multiple attachments. Bowlby suggests most babies form attachments to a single main carer before they become capable of developing multiple attachments. However, other psychologists (especially those who work in cultural contexts where multiple caregivers are normal) believe babies form multiple attachments from the outset
• there may be a problem with how psychologists have measured and assessed multiple attachments. Bowlby pointed out that children have playmates as well as attachments figures and also get distressed when a playmate leaves the room but this does not signify attachment
• Problems with the asocial stage. Poor coordination and pretty much immobile means no data to learn from. Doesn’t mean there isn’t high cognition, we just have no evidence to be relied on