Developmental Psychology: Attachment and Temperament

Vocabulary flashcards covering Harry Harlow's surrogate mother experiments, Mary Ainsworth's attachment styles, secure base behavior, and Thomas and Chess's temperament classifications.

Harry Harlow

A mid-twentieth-century psychologist who demonstrated through surrogate mother experiments with monkeys that infant attachment is driven by contact comfort and emotional security rather than simple feeding rewards.

Behaviorism

A dominant mid-twentieth-century school of thought in psychology asserting that complex human behavior can be reduced to conditioning, external contingencies, rewards, and punishments.

Contact Comfort

Harlow's measurable variable denoting the physical soothing provided by soft touch, which proved powerful enough to overshadow biological drivers such as hunger and thirst in establishing attachment.

Wire Mother

A bare wire surrogate apparatus equipped with a nursing bottle in Harlow's study; infant monkeys spent less than $1\,\text{hour}$ per day on it, using it strictly for nourishment.

Cloth Mother

A soft terrycloth surrogate apparatus providing no food on which infant monkeys spent $17\text{ to }18\,\text{hours}$ daily to satisfy their need for security, comfort, and emotional regulation.

Secure Base Behavior

A two-part process in which an infant retreats to an attachment figure for comfort and emotional co-regulation, and subsequently feels secure enough to venture out and explore the environment.

Mary Ainsworth

A developmental psychologist and student of John Bowlby who identified individual differences in infant attachment styles through observational separation and reunion experiments.

Attachment Reunion

The key diagnostic event in attachment experiments where the caregiver returns to the room; the child's response to this return defines their specific attachment style.

Secure Attachment

An attachment style wherein an infant is distressed by separation but is readily calmed, soothed, and reassured upon the caregiver's return, swiftly resuming play and exploration.

Avoidant Attachment

An insecure attachment style in which the infant ignores, slumps away from, or fails to engage the caregiver upon reunion, despite experiencing internal physiological stress such as elevated cortisol.

Resistant Attachment

An insecure attachment style (also called ambivalent) where an infant seeks contact upon reunion but angrily rejects comforting gestures, such as slapping toys away, typically linked to inconsistent parental availability.

Disorganized / Disoriented Attachment

A fourth attachment style marked by confused, non-effective, and contradictory behaviors (such as approaching while flinching or freezing), observed in roughly $10\%\text{ to }15\%$ of families and linked to abuse or extreme domestic turmoil.

Fear Without Resolution

The core phrase defining disorganized/disoriented attachment, describing a child trapped in a dilemma where the caregiver is simultaneously a source of fear and the necessary source of comfort.

Attachment Dyad

The principle that attachment style is a property of a specific relationship between an infant and a particular caregiver, meaning an infant can exhibit different attachment styles with different parents.

Temperament

Individual differences in emotion, reactivity, and behavior observed in infants and toddlers, functioning as the foundational core of later adult personality.

Easy Baby

A temperament classification identified by Thomas and Chess describing infants who feed and sleep on regular schedules, soothe easily, adapt smoothly to changes, and display frequent positive affect.

Difficult Baby

A temperament classification identified by Thomas and Chess characterized by colicky behavior, irregular sleep and feeding patterns, high emotional reactivity, distress with strangers, and predominant negative affect.