Key terms

• Attachment - a close emotional relationship with someone with a desire to be around them.
• Classical conditioning - associating stimuli with natural reflexes
• Operant conditioning - learning based on consequences, focusing on reward and punishment.
• Critical period - a timeframe where an infant must form an attachment.
• Deprivation - an attachment being removed from a child’s life
• Privation - a child forming no attachment at all
• Insecure avoidant - avoiding interactions and intimacy. Low separation and stranger anxiety
• Insecure resistant - having an inconsistent and unpredictable caregiver causes children to have high stranger and separation anxiety
• Institutionalisation - living in and institute such as an orphanage
• Internal working model - a mental template for all future relationships, based on the relationship with the primary attachment
• Monotropy - one main, unique attachment, all other attachments are placed below it in a hierarchy.
• Separation anxiety - distress caused by separation from an attachment figure
• Social releasers - actions to communicate with or promote a reaction from a caregiver
• Caregiver - someone that provides care to an infant
• Imprinting - a phenomenon where animals form a close bond or attachment with the first thing they see, usually their mother
• Interactional synchrony - synchrony between actions by a caregiver and infant
• Learning theory - behaviour can be learnt through not only direct experience but also by observing one’s and others behaviours