Attachment

• Reciprocity


  Turn taking of actions between the baby and primary care giver
• Interactional synchronicity


  In unison, same action simultaneously
• Isabella (1989) study


  • 30 mothers and babies observed
  • Assessing synchronicity so that high levels = high quality attachment
• Meltzoff and Moore (1977) study


  • Recorded and observed from 2 weeks old infants
  • Adults making faces/gestures, infants recorded and give labels from independent observers
  • Found that babies showed interactional synchrony from 3 weeks
• Interactional synchronicity


  Predicts the development of good quality attachment
• Interpreting babies' behaviour


  Hard to be certain the behaviours have special meaning
• Synchrony


  An observed pattern and random so can't give the reason for them
• Schaffer's stages of attachment

  • Stage 1 - asocial (first few weeks)
  • Stage 2 - indiscriminate (2-7 months)
  • Stage 3 - specific (around 7 months)
  • Stage 4 - multiple attachments (1 year)
• Schaffer and Emerson (1964) study

  • 60 working class Glaswegian babies and mothers
  • Visited in homes every month for the first year then 18 months asking the mothers questions on stranger and separation anxiety
• External validity of Schaffer and Emerson study

  Observed by mothers, making the behaviours natural with no extra anxiety
• Limitations of Schaffer and Emerson study


  • Mothers are unlikely to pick up on some signs of anxiety
  • Asocial stage is too young, babies are uncoordinated so some behaviours could be meaningless
• Attachments to the father

  • 75% of babies formed attachments with fathers by 18 months
  • 3% father was the first attachment
  • 27% joint first with the mother
• Grossmann et al (2002) study


  • Longitudinal study of children into their teens
  • Quality of attachment with mother was related to adolescence – not father
  • Quality of father's play was related to adolescence – fathers have the role of stimulation and play less to do with emotional development
• Field (1978) study


  • 4-month babies face-to-face with PCG mothers, PCG and SCG fathers
  • PCG's smiled and held (reciprocity) the baby more than SCG
  • Proving fathers can be emotional-focused primary attachment figures with the responses for a close emotional attachment
• Families adapt if they aren't 'typical' with a mother and father


  Making the role of the father clear
• Lack of clarity of what it means for the father to be the PCG


  Fathers behave differently and can't take the 'maternal' role
• Single mothers and lesbian couples


  Have successful children, suggesting that the father's role isn't essential
• Lorenz's research (1952)


  • Looked into imprinting by dividing goose eggs to have their mother as himself (hatched in an incubator) or their biological mother (hatched in their natural environment)
  • Both groups grew up following their 'mother' and even when mixed up they still then followed their conditioned 'mother'
  • Identified the critical period for where the babies will attach to the first moving thing, they see which was the mother goose or Lorenz, if they didn't attach during this period they didn't have a mother figure
  • Looked into sexual imprinting where he hatched a peacock in a zoo where it saw a giant tortoise first, as an adult it would only show courtship towards giant tortoises
• Regaling and Vallortigara (1995) study

  Studied imprinting with chicks being exposed to moving shapes once hatched, they followed the one they saw closely
• Findings from animal studies


  Can't be generalised to humans due to the genetic differences between birds and humans
• Harlow's research (1985)


  • Used monkeys to look into the idea of importance of comfort
  • Babies that were left alone often died, so he set up 16 baby monkeys with 2 wires 'mothers' that dispensed milk, one covered in cloth
  • Found that the monkeys would cuddle the cloth 'mother' for comfort and not the wire mother regardless of the circumstances or food given showing that comfort was more important than food
  • Looked to see if early maternal deprivation would have effects in adulthood, finding that they were dysfunctional from the plain wire 'mothers', while the cloth 'mothers' made them abnormal in social situations
• Real-world application of Harlow's research


  Helping social workers and clinical psychologists understand the impacts of a lack of bonding, able to prevent damage
• Limitations of Harlow's research


  • Not generalisable due to the difference in species due to their brains being different from humans, making human's behaviour more complex, even though we're closely related
  • Ethics since his experiment has caused long term damage to the monkeys
• Classical conditioning


  2 stimuli that are associated together to receive the same reaction
• Operant conditioning


  Due to the consequences given – positive response encourages the behaviour to happen again, bad consequence deters the behaviour
• Secondary drive


  Attachment is a secondary drive, while food is a primary drive as its innate and a biological motivator
• Elements of conditioning


  Help with attachment (comfort with a specific CG influencing who is the PCG)
• Limitations of learning theory


  • Lack of support from animal studies (Harlow and Lorenz showing that there are other factors (not food) that are used in attachment)
  • Lack of support from human studies (Schaffer and Emerson show that the mother was the PCG regardless of she fed them) making food not the main factor in forming relationships
  • Babies are only responding to the association with comfort/reward, not any aspect of attachment (Feldman and Edelman)
  • Ethical issues due to testing on babies
• Monotropy


  The idea that there is 1 CG that has a stronger relationship than the others, often the mother
• Law of continuity


  The more constant and predictable a child's care is the better quality of the attachment
• Law of accumulated separation


  Every separation with the mother adds up, meaning that no separation is best
• Validity of Bowlby's monotropy


  Lacks validity (Schaffer and Emerson found that a lot of babies formed attachments with many people not just 1, but 1 is stronger than the rest)
• Social releases


  Babies have cute innate behaviours (smiling, cooing) due to their purpose being to get an adult's attention and attachment reciprocity
• Critical period


  Around 6 months when the infants attachment system is active, making the child sensitive till around 2 years old, if an attachment isn't formed in this time the child will find it harder to form one later
• Importance of social releasers


  Support for the role of social releasers (Brazelton states that the innate behaviours are to get the adults attention, when not received they get upset) are important
• Internal working model


  • Relationship with their primary attachment figure serves as a model for what relationships are like
  • A loving and reliable relationship with CG makes the child tend to form expectations of this in all relationships, while bringing them also
  • Poor treatment will tend to form poorer relationships, where they expect and give poor treatment to others
  • Parenting abilities come from how they were parented, explaining why someone from a functional family tend to bring up a functional family
• Support for internal working model


  Bailey supports the IWM with the 99 mothers experiment, measuring the attachment to their own mothers and between the baby (1yr) and mother finding that the relationship was the same
• Limitations of internal working model

  Other things impact social development like genetics
• Ainsworth's 'Strange Situation' (1978)


  • Controlled observation to measure the security of the relationship between child and caregiver
  • Lavatory experiment with a 2-way mirror with cameras for psychologists to observe with
  • Looking for proximity seeking, Stranger anxiety, separation anxiety, response to reunion and exploration due to a secure-base attachment
• Poor treatment


  Tends to form poorer relationships, where they expect and give poor treatment to others