Animal studies of attachment

• who are the two psychologists associated with this research?

  Lorenz and harlow.
• what did Lorenz do a study into?

  goslings and the way they imprint.
• what did Harlow do a study into?

  monkeys and the importance of contact comfort.
• procedure of Lorenz: imprinting

  • randomly divided 12 goose eggs, half hatched with the mother goose in their natural environment and the other half hatched in an incubator where the first moving object they saw was lorenz
  • mixed all goslings together to see who they would follow
  • Lorenz also observed birds and their later courtship behaviour
• findings & conclusions of Lorenz: imprinting

  • incubator groups followed Lorenz, control group followed the mother
  • Loren identified a critical period in which imprinting ends to take place, e.g. few hours after hatching. if imprinting didn't occur within that time, chicks didn't attach themselves to the mother figure
  • sexual imprinting also occurs whereby the birds acquire a template of the desirable characteristics in a mate.
• procedure of Harlow: importance of contact comfort

  • reared 16 rhesus monkeys with two wire model mothers- (1) milk dispensed by the plain wire 'mother' (2) milk dispensed by the cloth-covered 'mothers'. monkey's preferences measured
  • further measure- reactions of monkeys to frightening situations observed, e.g. Harlow placed monkeys into novel situations with novel objects & also added a noise-making teddy to the environment
  • harlow & colleagues also continued to study the monkeys who had been deprived of their 'real' mother into adulthood.
• findings & conclusions of Harlow: importance of contact comfort

  • baby monkeys cuddled the soft object in preference to wire one regardless of which dispensed milk- suggests that contact comfort was of more importance than food when it came to attachment behaviour
  • monkeys sought comfort from cloth wire mother when frightened
  • as adults, the monkeys that were deprived of their real mothers suffered severe consequences- more aggressive, less sociable and less skilled in mating than other monkeys. they also neglected and sometimes killed their own offspring.
• strength of Lorenz: support for concept of imprinting

  guiton found that chicks imprinted on yellow washing up gloves would try to mate with them as adults. this suggests that young animals are born with an innate mechanism to imprint on a moving object present in the critical window of development.
• limitation of Lorenz


  guiton found that chickens imprinted on yellow washing-up gloves tried to mate with them as adults. but with experience they learned to mate with their own kind. this study suggests that the effects of imprinting are not as long-lasting as Lorenz believed.
• strength of Harlow: important practical applications

  it has helped social workers understand risk factors in child abuse an so intervene to prevent it. we also now understand the importance of attachment figures for baby monkeys in zoos and breeding programmes in the wild. the usefulness of harlow's research increases its value.
• ethical issues associated with harlow's research

  rhesus monkeys are similar enough to humans for us to generalise findings, which means their suffering was presumably human-like. Harlow himself was aware of the suffering caused. he referred to the wire mothers as 'iron maidens', named after a medieval torture device. the counter-argument is that harlow's research was sufficiently important enough to justify the procedures.
• limitation of Harlow: generalising from monkeys to humans

  although monkeys are clearly more similar to humans than Lorenz's geese, they are not humans. for example, human babies develop speech-like communication ('babbling'). this may influence the formation of attachments. psychologists disagree on the extent to which studies of non-human primates can be generalised to humans.