Learning Theory

• Cupboard Love Theory


  Dollard and Miller (1950) suggested that the reason children become attached to their caregiver is because they learn that the caregivers provide food and meet their other physiological needs
• Conditioning

  1. Classical conditioning
  2. Operant conditioning
• Classical Conditioning

  • This is learning by association
  • mother (neutral stimulus) who feeds the infant food (unconditioned stimulus) becomes associated with pleasure unconditioned response through satisfying the primary drive of hunger
  • so the mother becomes the conditioned stimulus and pleasure becomes the conditioned response
  • pleasure and security is generalised whenever the caregiver is present
• Operant Conditioning


  • This is learning through the consequences of trial and error, so through patterns of reinforcement
  • Pleasurable consequences for crying such as receiving food act as positive reinforcement, making crying behaviour when hungry more likely to happen
  • Also stopping crying (removing the negative stimulus) by providing food works as negative reinforcement for parents, making it more likely that parents will provide food the next time the baby cries
• primary drive

  the desire to complete an action which are instinctive as they are based on a biological need such as feeding and sleeping
• secondary drives

  desires to complete actions that develop due to a learned process in which they are associated with satisfying a primary drive
• Define innate

  natural, from birth
• What drive would attachment be classed as?

  This would class attachment as a secondary drive as it is learnt by the baby through access to food
• Strength: learning theory has face validity


  • It ‘makes sense’ that babies would cry more if they learnt that it would gain them attention.
  • Learning theory is a clear and believable explanation for attachment , and the underlying theories on which it is based are backed up by significant amounts of well-controlled research
• Limitation: learning theory is environmentally reductionist


  Learning theories applied to human feelings of attachment can be seen as environmentally reductionist in explaining the complex interactions between primary caregivers and their infants as a result of simplistic processes such as stimulus-response links and patterns of reinforcement
• Limitation: animal study rejects the cupboard love theory

  Harlow’s research on monkeys showed that infant monkeys did not attach to the surrogate wire monkey that provided milk, but attached to the cloth mother that did not provide milk but instead provided some level of contact comfort that whilst not necessary for its survival, did seem to fulfill some other innate need