Psychology - Attachment

Strength of Lorenz’s research

Strength of Lorenz’s research

• Research support

• Regolin and Vallortigara (1995) supports Lorenz’s idea of imprinting

• Chicks followed the starting shape in a shape combination showed the most closely

• Supports the view that young animals are born with an innate mechanism to imprint on a moving object present in the critical window of development - as predicted by Lorenz

Limitation of Lorenz’s research

• Generalisability to humans

• Had to generalise findings and conclusions from birds to humans

• Due to the mammalian attachment system being different to and more complex to that in birds

• Mammal attachment is also a two-way process and not just the young who get attached - showing an emotional attachment between them

• This means that it is probably not appropriate to generalise Lorenz’s ideas to humans

Strength of Harlow’s research

• Important real-world value and application

• Has helped social workers and clinical psychologists understand that a lack of bonding experience may be a risk factor in child development - allowing them to intervene to prevent poor outcomes (Howe 1998)

• Also helps in the understanding of importance of attachment figures for baby monkeys in zoos and breeding programs in the wild

• Means the value of Harlow’s research is both theoretical and practical

Limitation of Harlow’s research

• Generalisability to humans

• Hard to generalise findings and conclusions from monkeys to humans

• Although rhesus monkeys are more similar to humans than Lorenz’s birds, and are also mammals, the human brain and human behaviour is still more complex than that of monkeys

• Means it may be inappropriate to generalise his findings to monkeys

• Ethical issues - Harlow’s research also caused severe and long-term distress to the monkeys

Animal studies

• Studies carried out on non-human animal species rather than on humans

• Either for ethical or practical reasons

Lorenz’s research

• Ethologist (1592) first observed the phenomenon of imprinting as a child when an newly hatched duckling followed him around

Lorenz - imprinting procedure and findings

Procedure:

• Classic experiment - randomly divided a large clutch of goose eggs - half placed with mother goose in natural environment - other half placed in an incubator and first moving object they saw was Lorenz

Findings:

• Incubator group followed Lorenz around everywhere - when the two groups mixed the experimental group followed Lorenz - control group (natural environment) followed the mother goose

• Lorenz called this imprinting - where a critical period tales place where imprinting needs to take place (attaching to the first thing they see) - period time can vary depending on species

• If imprinting doesn’t occur in this period then the chicks couldn’t attach themselves to a mother figure

Lorenz - sexual imprinting

• Lorenz also investigated the relationship between adult mate preferences in a case study

• A peacock had been reared in the reptile house of a zoo where the first moving object the peacock saw were giant tortoises

• As an adult the bird would only direct mating behaviour towards giant tortoises

• Lorenz concluded that this meant the peacock had undergone sexual imprinting

Harlow’s research

• Research on rhesus monkeys - more similar to humans than Lorenz’s birds

• Harlow observed that newborns kept alone in a bare cage often died but that they usually survived if given something soft like a cloth to cuddle

Harlow - importance of contact comfort procedure and findings

Procedure:

• Reared 16 baby monkeys with two wire model ‘mothers’

• One condition milk was dispensed by the wire mother and in other milk dispensed by the cloth mother

Findings:

• Baby monkeys cuddled the cloth mother in preference to the plain wire mother and sought comfort from it when frightened - all regardless of which mother dispensed milk

• This showed that contact comfort was more important to monkeys than food when it came to attachment behaviour

Harlow - maternally deprived monkeys as adults

• The monkeys in adulthood had severe consequences of maternal deprivation of an early age

• Monkeys that got reared with the wire mothers were worse

• However monkeys reared with the cloth mother didn’t develop normal social behaviour

• Deprived monkeys were more aggressive and less sociable than other monkeys, bred less and were unskilled at mating

• If they became mothers, some neglected their young, attacked them and sometimes even killing their children

Harlow - the critical period for normal development

• Like Lorenz - Harlow concluded that there was a critical period for attachment formation

• A mother had to be introduced to a young monkey within 90 days for an attachment to form

• After this time attachment was impossible and the damage done by an early deprivation became irreversible

Confusion over research questions

• Limitation of research

• Lack of clarity over the question being asked

• ‘What is the role of the father in attachment’ gets answered differently by different psychologists

• Some answer the question as understanding secondary attachment figures, some try to apply them to primary attachment figures, each with different answers

• This makes it difficult to offer a simple answer as to the ‘role of the father’ - depends on what role specifically is being discussed

Conflicting evidence

• Further limitation

• Findings may vary depending on the methodology used

• Longitudinal studies (Grossmann) suggest fathers as secondary attachment figures have a distinct role in children’s development

• However if fathers’ roles are important we would expect children growing up in households without a paternal figure would turn out different

• However studies (McCallum and Golombok 2004) found these children don’t develop any differently to children in ‘regular’ households

• Means that the question to whether fathers specifically have a distinct role remains unanswered

Counterpoint to conflicting evidence

• Father’s vs households without paternal figures may not be conflicting research

• As households without a father figure (single mother or lesbian-parent) may simply adapt to accommodate the father’s role

• Suggests that fathers do play a distinctive role - but families can adapt to not having a father

Real-world application

• Strength

• Can be used to offer advice to parents

• Research into the role of the father can be used to offer reassuring advice to parents of what role each one should take (i.e taking the secondary role of quality of play if a parent is pressured from workload)

• Means that parental anxiety about the role of the fathers can be reduced

Bias in research

• Stereotypes of fathers being not primary caregivers, or being stricter may cause unintentional observer bias whereby observers ‘see’ what they expect to see during stereotypes

Filmed observations

• Strength of research of caregiver-infant observations

• Usually filmed in a lab setting

• Means that other activity that can distract the baby can be controlled

• Use of filming - means observations can be recorded and analysed later

• Means it’s unlikely key behaviours will be missed

• Filmed interactions - more than one observer can can record data and establish inter-rater reliability of observation

• Babies don’t know they’re being observed - their behaviour won’t change in response to observation

• Therefore data collected in this research would have good reliability and validity

Difficulty observing babies

• Limitation - hard to interpret a baby’s behaviour

• Young babies lack co-ordination and much of their bodies are almost immobile

• Movements being observed are small hand movements or small changes in expression

• Difficult to tell which expression is which and to determine what is taking place from a baby’s perspective

• We cannot know whether a movement like a hand twitch is random or tiggered by the caregiver

• Means we cannot be certain that the behaviours seen in caregiver-infant interactions have a special meaning

Developmental importance

• Limitation - simply observing a behaviour does not tell us its developmental importance

• Ruth Feldman (2012) suggests ideas like synchrony simply give names to patterns of observable caregiver and baby interactions

• Can be observed - but may not be particularly useful in understanding child development as it does not tell us the purpose of these behaviours

• Cannot be certain from observational research alone that reciprocity and synchrony are important for a child’s development

Counterpoint to developmental importance

• Evidence from other lines of reearch to suggest early interactions are important

• Isabella et al (1989) found that achievement of interactional synchrony predicted the development of a good quality attachment

• Means that, on balance, caregiver-infant interaction is probably important in development

Stages of attachment

• A sequence of qualitatively different behaviours linked to specific ages

• In attachment - qualitatively different infant behaviours are linked to specific ages - and all babies go through them in the same order

Schaffer and Emerson’s study

• Studied the attachment behaviours in babies

• Their findings led them to develop an account of how attachment behaviours change as a baby gets older

• Proposed that there were four identifiable stages of attachment, a sequence which is observed in all babies

Stage 1 - Asocial stage

• First few weeks

• Babies show a preference for the company of familiar people and more easily comforted by them

• At this stage the baby is forming bonds with certain people and these form the basis of later attachment

Stage 2 - Indiscriminate attachment

• 2-7 months

• Babies start to show more obvious and observable social behaviours

• Show clear preference for being with other humans than inanimate objects

• Recognise and prefer company of familiar people

• Accept comfort from any person (indiscriminate)

• Don’t usually show separation anxiety when caregivers leave their presence or stranger anxiety with unfamiliar people

Stage 3 - Specific attachment

• From 7 moths

• Starting to display classic signs of attachment towards one particular person

• Stranger anxiety develops - especially when attachment figure is absent and separation anxiety

• Baby is said to have formed a specific attachment - the one the attachment is formed with is now the primary attachment figure

• Primary attachment figure - responds to babies signals with most skill and spends the most time with them - 65%of the time is the mother

Stage 4 - Multiple attachment

• Shortly after babies start to show attachment behaviour towards one person they usually extend this behaviour to multiple attachments with other people

• Called secondary attachments

• Schaffer and Emerson observed that 29% of children formed secondary attachment within a month of forming a primary attachment

• By the age of one year the majority of babies have developed multiple attachments

Schaffer and Emerson’s procedure

• Observational study

• 60 babies from Glasgow in mainly working-class families

• Researchers visited babies in homes every month for a year than at 18 months old

• Researchers asked mothers questions about the babies protest showed in everyday separations to measure the babies’ attachmetn and stranger anxiety

Schaffer and Emerson’s findings

• Led to the identification of infant attachment behaviour, making up their stage theory

• Stage 1 - Asocial stage

• Stage 2 - Indiscriminate attachment

• Stage 3 - Specific attachment

• Stage 4 - Multiple attachments

Caregiver-infant interactions definition

• Attachment begins with the interactions between babies and their caregivers

• It is the responsiveness of the caregiver to the infant that has profound effects

Reciprocity definition

• Caregiver-infant interaction is reciprocal in that both caregiver and baby respond to each other’s signals and each elicits a response from the other

• Also called ‘turn-taking’

• I.e a caregiver might respond to their baby’s smile by saying something and then this in turn elicits a response from the baby

Reciprocity - alert phases

• Infants / babies have alert phases in which they signal that they are ready for a period of interaction

• Mothers typically pick up on and respond to their baby’s alertness 2/3 of the time (Felderman + Eidelman 2007)

• However this varies according to skill of mother and external factors i.e stress

• From around 3 months this interaction increases and involves both mother and baby paying close attention to each other’s verbal signals and facial expressions

Reciprocity - active involvement

• Traditional views of childhood have portrayed babies in a passive role, receiving care from an adult

• However seems that babies as well as caregivers take quite an active role

• Both caregiver and baby can initiate interactions and they appear to take turns in this

• Brazelton et al (1975) described this as a dance where they respond to each other’s moves

Interactional synchrony definition

• Caregiver and baby reflect both the actions and emotions of the other and do this in a co-ordinated (synchronised) way

Beginning of interactional synchrony

• Meltzoff and Moore (1977) observed beginnings of interactional synchrony in babies as young as two weeks old

• An adult displayed one of three facial expressions or one of three distinctive gestures

• Baby’s response was filmed and labelled by independend observers

• Babies’ expression and gestures were more likely to mire those of adults more than predicting it - i.e there was a significant association

Interactional synchrony’s importance for attachment

• Believed that interactional synchrony is important for the development of caregiver-infant attachment

• Isabella et al (1989) observed 30 mothers and babies together + assessed the degree of synchrony

• Researchers also assessed the quality of mother-baby attachment

• They found that high levels of synchrony were associated with better quality mother-baby attachment

Attachment definition

• A close-two way emotional bond between two individuals in which an individual sees the other as essential for their own emotional security

Good external validity

• Strength

• Most of the observations (apart from stranger anxiety) were made by parents during ordinary activities and reported to researchers

• Meaning babies weren’t distracted from researchers reporting live observations

• Means that it is highly likely that the participants behaved naturally whilst being observed

Counterpoint to external validity

• Issues surrounding the mothers being ‘observers’

• They were unlikely to be objective observers

• Might have been biased in what they noticed / reported

• I.e not noticing when their baby was showing anxiety

• Means that even if babies behaved naturally their behaviour may not have been accurately recorded

Poor evidence for the asocial stage

• Limitation

• Lack of validity in the measuring of attachment in the asocial stage

• Young babies have poor co-ordination and are fairly immobile

• Babies less than two months old may be displaying subtle anxiety or hard to observe

• Made it difficult for mothers to observe and report on signs of anxiety / attachment in this age group

• Means that the babies may actually be quite social but because of flawed methods, appear to be asocial

Real-world application

• Strength

• Practical application in day care

• In asocial and discriminate attachment stages day care is likely to be straightforward and can be comforted by anyone

• However, Schaffer and Emerson’s research tells us day care may be problematic during the specific attachment stage

• This means that parents’ use of day care can be planned using the stages of attachment

Generalisability

• Only looked at one sample which had unique features in social and historical context (1960s working-class Glasgow)

• Hard to generalise as in other cultures, such as collectivist cultures, multiple attachments form from a very early (van Ijzendoorm 1993)

Father in attachment

• Refers to anyone who takes on the role of the main male caregiver

• Doesn’t necessarily need to be the biological father

Attachment to fathers

• Evidence suggests that fathers are much less likely to become the babies ‘first attachment figure in comparison to mothers

• Schaffer and Emerson (1964) found majority of babies first become attached to the mother - only 3% of their cases the father was the first sole object of attachment

Distinctive role for fathers

• Grossmann et al (2002) carried out a longitudinal study where babies’ attachments were studied until their teens - looked at both parents’ behaviour and later attachments in other people

• Quality of a baby’s attachment with mothers but not fathers were related to adolescence

• Suggests attachment to fathers is less important

• However Grossmann also found that quality of father’s play with babies was related to the quality of adolescent attachments

• Suggests that fathers have a different role from mothers - one that is more to do with play and simulation, and less to do with emotional development

Fathers as primary attachment figures

• A baby’s relationship with their primary attachment figure forms the basis of all later close emotional relationships

• Tiffany Field (1978) filmed 4 month babes in face to face interaction with primary caregivers, secondary caregiver fathers and primary caregiver fathers

• Primary caregiver fathers like the primary mothers spent more time imitating, smiling and holding babies than secondary caregiver fathers

• All signs of interactional synchrony and reciprocity - part of attachment formation

• Shows fathers can provide the responsiveness required for close emotional attachment - but maybe only expressed this when given the primary caregiver role

Heteronormativity

• This line of research is based on the assumption that babies have two opposite-gender parents

• Not always the case

• Although this is applied to the fathers there is no suggestion from respectable psychologists that having a single parent or two same gender parents has any negative impact on children’s development