Animal Studies of Attachment

• Define 'animal studies'

  Studies carried out on animals rather than humans; this could be for practical or ethical reasons. Practical reasons could be for when researchers want to look at multiple generations, and its easier to do this for animals.
• Lorenz (1952)


  - Investigated imprinting.

  - Lorenz randomly divided a clutch of goose eggs. Half were hatched with the mother goose in their natural environment, and the other half were kept in an incubator where Lorenz would be the first moving object they saw.

  - The incubator group would follow Lorenz everywhere, and the control group would do the same with the mother goose.

  - When the two groups were mixed up, the control group continued to follow the mother, and the experimental group followed Lorenz.

  - Lorenz identified this phenomenon as imprinting - bird species such as goslings are mobile from birth and attach to the first moving object they see.

  - Lorenz found a critical period in which imprinting must take place, or an attachment cannot form.

  - Lorenz also investigated sexual imprinting.

  - Using a case study, he described a peacock reared in a reptile house of a zoo where the first moving object the peacock saw were the giant tortoises.

  - As an adult, the peacock would show courtship behaviour towards giant tortoises, meaning that it had undergone sexual imprinting.
• Evaluating Lorenz (1952): Research support

  - A strength of Lorenz's (1952) research is that there is other research that supports his theory of imprinting.

  - Regolin and Vallortigara (1995) exposed chicks to simple shape combinations that moved in front of them and they followed the original most closely.

  - This supports the view that animals are born with an innate mechanism to imprint on a moving object present during the critical period, as stated by Lorenz.
• Evaluating Lorenz (1952): Generalisation to humans


  - A limitation of Lorenz's research is that it is difficult to extrapolate his findings from birds to humans.

  - The mammalian attachment system is quite different and more complex than birds' equivalent.

  - For example, in mammals, attachment is a two-way process, where the young attach to their mothers and the mothers attach to the young.

  - This means that it isn't appropriate to genralise Lorenz's findings and ideas to humans.
• Evaluating Lorenz (1952): Applications to understanding human behaviour

  - Although human attachment is very different to that of birds, there have been attempts to use the idea of imprinting to explain human behaviour.

  - For example, Seebach (2005) proposed that computer users demonstrate 'baby-duck syndrome' - they form an attachment to the first computer system they used, leading them to reject others.
• Harlow (1958)

  - Harlow wanted to investigate the importance of contact comfort in rhesus monkeys.

  - He tested the idea that a soft object acts as a 'mother'. He reared 16 baby rhesus monkeys with 2 'mothers' - a cloth mother and a wire mother.

  - In one condition, the wire mother dispensed milk, whereas in the second condition the cloth mother dispensed milk.

  - The monkeys cuddled the cloth mother in preference to the wire mother, and sought comfort from the cloth mother when frightened by a noisy mechanical teddy bear, regardless of which mother dispensed milk.

  - Harlow's findings showed that contactcomfortwasof more importance to the monkeys than food when it came to attachment behaviour.

  
  

  - Harlow also followed monkeys who had experienced early maternal deprivation, to see if it had a permanent effect. The researchers found severe consequences.

  - The monkeys reared only with the wire mother were the most dysfunctional, however, even the monkeys reared with the cloth mother still had abnormal social behaviour.

  - Maternally deprived monkeys were more aggressive and less sociable than other monkeys, and bred less as they were unskilled at mating.

  - When they became mothers, they were neglectful, and some even attacked their children, sometimes killing them.

  
  

  - Harlow also identified a critical period like Lorenz - a mother figure had to be introduced to a young monkey within 90 days for an attachment to form. After this point, attachment formation was impossible and the damage caused by early deprivation became irreversible.
• Evaluating Harlow (1958): Real-world value

  - Harlow's research has had important real-world applications.

  - For example, it has helped social workers and clinical psychologists understand that a lack of bonding experience may be a risk factor in child development, which allows them to intervene and prevent negative consequences - Howe (1998).

  - We now understand the importance of attachment figures for baby monkeys in zoos and breeding programmes.

  - This means that Harlow's research is not just theoretical, but also practical.
• Evaluating Harlow (1958): Generalisability to humans

  - A limitation is that it is difficult to extrapolate Harlow's findings to humans.

  - While rhesus monkeys are more similar to humans than goslings, the human brain and associated behaviour is still more complex than that of monkeys.

  - This means it maybe inappropriate to extrapolate Harlow's findings to humans.
• Evaluating Harlow (1958): Ethical issues


  - Harlow's research caused severe and long-term distress to monkeys.

  - However, his findings and conclusions have had importnat practical applications, therefore we could say that the benefits to society outweight the unethical harm caused to the monkeys.