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• Reciprocity


  Description of how 2 people interact. Mutual in that both caregiver and baby respond to each other's signals (turn-taking) and each elicits a response from the other
• Alert phases


  • Babies have certain 'alert phases' in which they signal that they are ready for some interaction
  • Mothers pick up on babies actions around 2/3 of the time
  • From 3 months interaction becomes more frequent
• Active involvement


  • Both adults AND babies play active role interacting
  • Both caregiver and baby can initiate interactions – and they take turns in doing so
• Interactional synchrony


  Caregiver and baby reflect actions + emotions of the other in a coordinated way. Mutual behaviour – adults and babies respond in time to sustain communication. Communication of adult/infant mirror each other
• Interactional synchrony begins at 2 weeks old
• High levels of interactional synchrony


  Associated with better quality mother-baby attachment
• Observations into caregiver-infant interactions

  • Use well-controlled procedures with both mother and infant being filmed
  • Ensuring fine details of behaviour can be recorded and later analysed
  • Babies aren't aware they're behaviour is being observed – so their behaviour doesn't change in response to controlled observations
• Schaffer's stages of attachment

  Common pattern in the development of infants' attachments, can be divided into 4 distinct stages
• Schaffer's stages of attachment

  • Asocial stage
  • Indiscriminate attachment
  • Specific attachment
  • Multiple attachments
• Schaffer and Emerson identified 4 distinct stages in the development of infant attachment behaviour
• Schaffer and Emerson research

  • High external validity as most observations were made by parents during ordinary activities and reported to the researchers
  • Issues studying asocial stage as babies have poor co-ordination skills/are immobile, making it difficult to observe subtle signs of anxiety and attachment
• Schaffer and Emerson's stages of attachment


  Can be used to plan parents' use of daycare, as different stages require different approaches
• Fathers are much less likely to become babies' first attachment figure
• Only 3% of cases was the father the first object of attachment, 27% case father was joint first object of attachment with mother
• 75% of babies formed attachment with father by 18 months
• Quality of baby's attachment with mothers


  Relayed to attachments in adolescence, suggesting attachment to fathers less important than attachment to mothers
• Quality of fathers' play with babies

  Related to the quality of adolescent attachments, suggesting fathers have a different role from mothers (more to do with play/stimulation that emotional development)
• Primary caregiver fathers spent more time smiling, imitating, holding infants compare to secondary caregiver fathers
• Key to attachment


  Level of responsiveness, NOT the gender
• Imprinting


  Attachment is formed to the first moving object an animal sees
• Lorenz's study on imprinting

  • Randomly split a large clutch of goose eggs into 2 conditions: one half hatched naturally with mother, the other half hatched in incubator with Lorenz as the first moving object they saw
  • Observed that incubator group followed Lorenz everywhere, while control group followed mother
  • Imprinting has a critical period - a brief few hours after birth. If imprinting doesn't take place within this period, the attachment will never form
• Lorenz found a peacock reared in a reptile zoo, whose first moving object after birth was a tortoise, later showed courtship behaviour towards the tortoise as an adult
• Harlow's study on contact comfort


  • Observed that newborn monkeys kept alone in a cage died, but if given a cloth mother to cuddle they survived
  • Tested the idea that soft cloth serves some of the function of a mother, and found that monkeys always preferred the cloth mother over a plain wire mother, even when the wire mother dispensed milk
• Harlow observed that monkeys reared with wire mothers were more dysfunctional, aggressive, less sociable, and less skilled at mating and parenting as adults
• Classical conditioning in attachment


  The infant forms the strongest attachment to the mother as she is the main provider of food. The infant learns through association that the mother brings pleasure
• Operant conditioning in attachment

  Babies learn that crying leads to a response from the caregiver of feeding, so crying is reinforced. Negative reinforcement also occurs, as the caregiver is reinforced for feeding the baby to avoid the unpleasant experience of the baby crying
• Unconditioned stimulus (UCS)


  Stimulus that leads to an innate feeling of pleasure, resulting in an unconditioned response (UCR)
• Neutral stimulus (NS)


  Stimulus that produces no learnt response before the learning stage
• Conditioning


  1. Neutral stimulus (NS) becomes paired with UCS

  2. Neutral stimulus then becomes a conditioned stimulus (CS)

  3. CS produces a conditioned response (CR)
• Operant conditioning


  Learning through reinforcement (positive, negative, punishment) - behaviour produces pleasant response = likely to be repeated, behaviour produces unpleasant response = less likely to be repeated
• Attachment as secondary drive

  • Hunger is primary drive - innate, motivated to eat to satisfy hunger
  • Caregivers providing food means primary drive of hunger becomes generalised to them
  • Attachment is secondary drive - learned by association between caregiver and satisfaction of primary drive
• Learning theory explains why babies cry for comfort = crying leads to response from caregiver of feeding - as long as caregiver provides correct response, crying is reinforced
• Reinforcement is a 2-way process - babies reinforced for crying, negative reinforcement for caregiver - feeds baby to avoid unpleasant response of crying
• Interplay of mutual reinforcement strengthens the attachment
• Bowlby's theory of monotropy


  • Attachment is innate and adaptive - gives species survival advantage
  • Babies have social releasers (physical and behavioural) that unlock innate tendency of adults to care for them
  • There is a critical period for attachment formation between baby and caregiver (first 2-2.5 years of life)
  • Monotropy - the relationship with the primary caregiver is highly significant in emotional development
• Internal working model (IWM)

  Mental representation of the attachment to the primary attachment figure - serves as a model for what future relationships will look like
• Children from functional families tend to have functional families later on, based on their IWM
• Children from dysfunctional families tend to have dysfunctional relationships later on, based on their IWM
• The Strange Situation


  • Controlled observation designed to test attachment security by observing 5 key attachment behaviours: proximity seeking, exploration and secure base behaviour, stranger anxiety, separation anxiety, response to reunion
• Types of attachment identified in the Strange Situation

  • Secure attachment (type B)
  • Insecure-avoidant attachment (type A)
  • Insecure-resistant attachment (type C)
  • Disorganised attachment (identified later by Main and Solomon)