early attachment on later relationships

• maternal deprivation: the idea that there is prolonged separation between a child and their PCG

  • separation of care can result in infant being deprived of emotional care - lead to affectionless pyschopath
• affectionless psychopath:

  • disregards the law and has a lack of guilt or empathy - likely to turn to crime and find it difficult to form personal relationships
• Bowlby's 44 thieves: studied on 44 criminal teenagers who were accused of theft, personally interviewed each participants and their families to find signs of being an affectionless psychopath

  • 14/44 were affectionless psychopaths - 12/14 had prolonged separation

  suggests their is a link between maternal deprivation and affectionless psychopaths
• 44 thieves evaluation:

  strength:

  • demonstrates a link between deprivation and psychopathy - good evidence to support
  • control group to compare the experimental group with - helps to determine if changes to IV have made any difference

  weakness:

  • conducted in 1944, may have been external factors such as emotional disturbance - temporal validity
• Romanian orphan studies (2011): Rutter studied 165 Romanian orphans who had been adopted by families in the UK.

  • control group = 52 children from the UK also adopted from the UK

  results: half of the children had delayed intellectual development and showed different levels of recovery dependent on the age that they were adopted

  concluding: effects on development are long-term as babies adopted outside of critical period have a low IQ
• Roman orphanages evaluation:

  strength:

  • improved psychologists understanding of the effects of early institutional care and how to prevent this - institutional care made it so a child has one or two 'key' workers

  weakness:

  • cannot be generalised to other types of institutionalised care - extreme situation where care was very poor - unusual situational variables that may have impacted the validity of results
  • confounding variable - Rutter didnt have control over who was adopted, they could be more sociable
• institutionalisation: long-term effects of living in an institution for a continuous amount of time

  • institution: organised structure for social purpose- school, prison, orphanage
• effects of institutionalisation:

  • impact attachment through impacting internal working model - element of privation - never form an attachment with anyone
  • deprivation dwarfism: physical development of a child is limited
• Kerns (1994) suggested that securely attached children form the best quality attachments, those with insecure avoidant attachments have friendship difficulties
• Myron-Wilson and Smith (1998): used self-report questionnaires to assess attachment types

  • found that securely attached children were least likely to be involved in bullying and insecure avoidant to be victims of bullying.

  concluding: attachment types in children can determine if they are involved in bullying
• McCarthy: assessed 40 women whos attachment had previously been assessed when they were infants - studied the effect of their early attachments on friendship and romanic relationships

  • women with secure attachment had positive romantic relationship
  • women with insecure avoidant and resistant had problems in their relationships
• Hazen and Shaver (1987) Love quiz:

  looked at association between attachment in adult relationships and printed a love quiz into a local newspaper and analysed the replies

  • over half had secure attachments

  concluding: attachment styles in childhood was similar to attachment type in adulthood - suggested internal working model has a life-long effect
• early attachment evaluation:

  strength:

  • Hazen and shaver was not artificial as they collected real data through a self-report questionnaire

  weakness:

  • responses may not have been accurate as there could be an element of social desirability
  • determinsitic research: internal working model suggests that attachment styles are fixed