animal studies

• Lorenz (1935) Imprinting with geese
• Imprinting is when an animal will strongly attach to the first object (usually the mother) they encounter. The infant animal will then follow this object.
• Half of a goose's eggs were taken to be hatched by Lorenz using an incubator. The other half were hatched normally by the mother.
• Goslings who had been hatched by Lorenz followed him rather than the mother Goose
• The goslings that hatched naturally, imprinted on the mother and followed her
• Even if the goslings were placed together the half that had imprinted on Lorenz continued to follow him
• Imprinting is a strong evolutionary/ biological feature of attachment in certain birds
• Imprinting is with the first large object, not other potential cues (ie smell/sound)
• A critical period of around 32 hours
• If a gosling did not see a large moving object to imprint on in these first few hours it will not imprint at all (this influenced later theorists such as Bowlby)
• Harlow investigated contact comfort in 1958 with wire and cloth mothers with Rhesus monkeys
• Attachment behaviour was studied in 16 newborn Rhesus monkeys
• Monkeys were removed from their biological mothers and placed in cages with surrogate mothers
• These were a range of conditions that included a combination of wire and/or cloth mothers. The surrogates either provided milk or did not.
• The monkeys with access to the cloth mother always preferred its company even if the wire mother provided milk.
• Monkeys with access to cloth monkeys also demonstrated additional confidence in unfamiliar situations, and returned to it when frightened
• However monkeys without access to a cloth mother showed signs of stress related illness
• Monkeys, and potentially other primates such as humans have a biological (nature) need for physical contact 
• Attach to whatever provides comfort rather than food, going against the cupboard love theory of attachment
• Harlow found in follow up studies that the maternal deprivation his studies had caused resulted in long term and permanent social disorders including difficulty in mating behaviour and raising their own offspring
• Attachment-like behaviour is common to a range of species and so animal studies can help us understand attachment in humans
• Animal studies are studies carried out on non-human animal species rather than on humans, either for ethical or practical reasons - practical because animals breed faster and researchers are interested in seeing results across more than one generation of animals