Animal studies

• What is the focus of animal studies of attachment?

  Animal studies of attachment focus on understanding the nature of attachment behaviors in animals.
• Describe the procedure - Lorenz

  He took a clutch of gosling eggs and split them into 2. One group was left with their mother, and one lived in an incubator. When those in the incubator hatched, the first moving thing they saw was Lorenz, they soon started following him around. They marked the two groups and placed them together with both Lorenz and the mother present.
• describe the findings - Lorenz

  the goslings quickly divided up and went to Lorenz or the mother. Lorenz’s brood showed no recognition of their birth mother. animals can imprint on any moving object as long as it is within the critical period.
• long lasting effects - Lorenz

  Lorenz noticed that the process is irreversible and long lasting. one of the geese called Martina used to sleep in his bed every night. imprinting also had an effect on later mate preferences (sexual imprinting). animals choose to mate with the object in which they imprinted on.
• What does imprinting mean?

  An innate readiness to develop a strong bond with the mother which takes place during the critical period.
• Describe the procedure - Harlow

  2 wire mother monkeys that had a different head. 1 wire mother was wrapped in a soft cloth. 8 infant rhesus monkeys were studied for over 165 days to see how they reacted with the wire mothers when raised in isolation. For 4 of the monkeys, the milk bottle was placed on the wire cloth, and the other 4 were just a wire monkey. They were observed for how long they spent with each wire monkey as well as how they responded to being frightened, eg to a mechanical teddy.
• Describe the findings - harlow

  All the monkeys spent most of their time with the cloth covered monkey despite whether it had the food or not. Those who fed from the wire mother quickly returned to the cloth monkey. When scared the monkeys clung to the cloth mother and when playing with a new toy the stayed by the cloth mother for reassurance.
• Conclusion - Harlow

  Infants do not develop an attachment to those who feed you, but those that offer comfort
• Describe the long lasting effects - Harlow

  Harlow noted that the motherless monkeys developed abnormally. They froze or fled when approached by another monkey. They also did not show normal mating behaviour and didn’t cradle their babies. However, there was a critical period for these effects to occur in. If before three months they spent time with their ‘peers’ they were able to recover, but after 6 months this wasn’t possible.
• Support for Lorenz

  Guiton supported Lorenz with a study involving rubber gloves. The chicks were exposed to yellow rubber gloves when being fed and imprinted upon them. This supports the idea that chicks aren’t born with a predisposition to imprint on a specific object, but anything that they see move, during the critical period. The male chicks later tried to mate with the glove.
• Criticism for Lorenz

  Originally it was thought that imprinting was inflexible and irreversible. However, Guiton showed how it can be reversed by allowing the chicks in his study to spend time with their own species and soon they tried to mate with them rather than the rubber gloves.

  It also lacks generalisability to humans.
• Criticism for Harlow

  The 2 wire monkeys varied in more than one way – the cloth and the head. This is a confounding variable as it may be that the monkeys preferred one head over the other regardless of the cloth being on it. This study, therefore, lacks internal validity.
• Ethical issues of Harlows study

  The study created long lasting emotional harm on the monkeys as they later struggled to form relationships. However, the research was significant in out understanding of human behaviour and has been used to offer better care for humans and infants. Therefore it can be argued that the benefit outweigh the costs to the animals involved.
• limitation with using animals

  Humans differ in many ways to animals, in that much of our behaviour is governed by conscious decisions. Lots of results involving animals is mirrored in human studies, eg Harlow and Schaffer and Emerson. Therefore, animal studies can be a useful pointer, but we should always seek confirmation from research involving humans.