attachment - aqa a level psychology

• attachment


  an emotional bond between two people. it is a two way process that endures over time. it leads to certain behaviours such as clinging and proximity - seeking, and serves the function of protecting the infant
• caregiver


  any person who is providing care for a child, such as a parent, grandparent, sibling, other family member, childminder and so on
• interactional synchrony


  when two people interact they tend to mirror what the other is doing in terms of their facial and body movements. this includes imitating emotions as well as behaviours.
• reciprocity


  responding to the action of another with a similar action, where the actions of one partner elicit a response from the other partner. the responses are not necessarily similar as with interactional synchrony
• meltzoff and moore (1977) findings


  infants as young as two or three weeks old imitated specific facial and hand gestures
• evaluation of caregiver - infant interactions

  + important as it forms the basis of social development

  - difficult to reliably test infant behaviour

  - failure to replicate

  - individual differences
• stages of attachment


  1. asocial stage

  2. presocial stage

  3. specific attachment

  4. multiple attachments
• asocial stage


  from birth till about two months, infants produce similar responses to all objects, animate or inanimate
• presocial stage


  at the age of two months infants become more social. they prefer human company to inanimate objects. they do not yet show anxiety with strangers
• specific attachment


  at about seven months old, most infants begin to show an attachment to a primary caregiver, and display separation and stranger anxiety.
• multiple attachments


  soon after the main attachment is formed, the infant also develops a wider circle of multiple attachments, depending on how many consistent relationships he/she has
• primary attachment figure


  the person who has formed the closest bond with the child, demonstrated by the intensity of the relationships. this is usually the child's biological mother, but other people can fulfil the role
• separation anxiety


  the distress shown by the infant when separated by his/her caregiver
• stranger anxiety


  distress shown by the infant when approached or picked up by someone who is unfamiliar
• evaluation of stages of attachment

  - data collected by schaffer and emerson may be unreliable

  - biased sample

  - cultural variations

  - suggests development is unflexible
• harlow (1959) procedure


  - created two wire mothers each with a different 'head'. one was made of wire and the other a soft cloth

  - eight infant rhesus monkeys were studied for a period of 165 days

  - for four of the monkeys the milk bottle was on the cloth covered mother, and for the other four it was on the wire

  - time measurements were made of the amount of time each infant spent with each mother

  - observations were also made of the infants responses when frightened by a mechanical teddy bear
• harlow (1959) findings


  - all eight monkeys spent most of their time with the cloth covered mother, whether or not this mother had a feeding bottle

  - the monkeys who were fed from the wire mother only spent a short time with them whilst getting milk and then returned to the cloth one

  - when frightened, they all clung to the cloth mother, and when playing with new objects they used it for re assurance

  - this findings show that infants do not just develop an attachment to the person who feeds them, but the person offering comfort
• long lasting effects of harlow's study

  - monkeys developed socially abnormally, they froze or fled when approached by other monkeys

  - they did not show normal mating behaviour and did not cradle their own babies

  - the monkeys who spent time with monkey 'peers' before they were three months old seemed to recover, but having more than six months with only a wire mother was not something they could recover from
• evaluation of harlow's research

  - confounding variables, the heads of the monkeys were different

  - generalising animal studies to human behaviour, humans differ in important ways

  - ethics of the study
• imprinting


  an innate readiness to develop a strong bond with the mother which takes place during a specific time in development, probably the first few hours after birth/hatching. if it does not happen during this time it will probably not happen
• lorenz (1935) procedure


  - took a clutch of gosling eggs and divided them into two groups. one group left with their natural mother while the other eggs were placed in an incubator

  - when the incubator eggs hatched, the first things they saw were him, and they soon started following him around

  - he marked the two groups and placed them together, with both him and the natural mother present
• lorenz (1935) findings


  - the goslings quickly divided themselves up, one following their natural mother and the others following lorenz, and showed no recognition of their natural mother

  - the goslings were found to have imprinted on him during the critical period of their first two days

  - they could imprint on any moving object within this time, but if they are not exposed to one, they will not imprint at all

  - some animals do not imprint to humans, eg. curlews were found not to
• long lasting effects of lorenz's research

  - the process is irreversible and long lasting

  - had an affect on late mate preferences (sexual imprinting). animals, especially birds, will chose to mate with the same kind of object upon which they were imprinted
• evaluation of lorenz's research

  + research support for imprinting

  - imprinting could be reversible, and may not be too different to any other kind of learning
• learning theory


  the group of explanations which explain behaviour in terms of learning rather than any inborn tendencies or higher order thinking
• processes in the learning theory

  1. classical conditioning

  2. operant conditioning

  3. social learning theory
• classical conditioning


  food is an unconditioned stimulus (UCS)

  pleasure is an unconditioned response (UCR)

  the infant begins to associate the things present whilst being fed with food (eg. the infant's mother, the chair she sits on to feed them etc.) these are neutral stimuluses (NS)

  if the NS is regularly associated with the UCS it will begin to form the same response

  now the NS becomes the conditioned stimulus (CS) and produces a conditioned response (CR)

  the person who feeds the infant becomes a CS, and the infant associates them with pleasure
• operant conditioning


  when the infant is fed, this produces a feeling of pleasure (negative reinforcement, removing something unpleasant, in this case, hunger)

  food becomes a primary reinforcer

  attachment occurs because the child seeks a person who can supply the reward
• social learning theory


  children observe or model their parent's affectionate behaviours and imitate this. parents would also deliberately instruct their children on how to behave in relationships and reward appropriate attachment behaviours
• evaluation of learning theory

  + can explain some aspects of attachment, as infants do learn through association and reinforcement

  - based on animal studies

  - attachment is not necessarily based on food

  - rejected due to a better theory (bowlby's theory)
• continuity hypothesis


  the idea that emotionally secure infants go on to be emotionally secure, trusting and socially confident adults
• critical period


  a biologically determined period of time, during which certain characteristics can develop. outside of this time window such development will not be possible
• internal working model


  a mental model of the world which enables individuals to predict and control their environment. in the case of attachment, the model relates to the person's experiences about relationships
• monotropy


  the idea that the one relationship that the infant has with his/her primary attachment figure is of special significance in emotional development
• social releaser


  a social behaviour or characteristic that elicits caregiving and leads to attachment
• evaluation of bowlby's theory

  + view is adaptive

  + multiple attachment model supports bowlby's concept of monotropy

  + the continuity hypothesis is supported by research

  - some research would suggest a 'sensitive' period rather than critical
• strange situation


  a controlled observation designed to test attachment security
• ainsworth et al. (1971, 1978) procedure

  - research room is a novel environment, often marked off into 16 square to observe the infant's movement

  - contains eight episodes, each designed to highlight certain behaviours

  - the caregiver and stranger alternately stay with the infant or leave

  - this enables them to test separation anxiety, reunion behaviour, stranger anxiety and the concept of their secure base

  - data is collected by a group of observers using a video recorder
• ainsworth et al. (1971, 1978) findings


  - combined the data of several studies and found evidence for different ways infants behave

  - there seemed to be clusters of behaviours which added up to three types of attachment
• types of attachment


  1. secure attachment

  2. insecure avoidant

  3. insecure resistant