attachment

caregiver-infant interactions

• Precocial — animals born at a fairy advanced stage of development and don’t often require an attachment to survive (although it might be benefifical)

  • E.g horse

• Altricial — animals born at a relatively early stage of development, they need attachment bonds in order to protect them

  • E.g human

Attachment — an enduring two-way emotional tie to a specific other person. AN attachment is developed when an infant shows:

• Stranger anxiety (distress at presence of unknown individuals

• Separation protest (distress at absence of specific person)

Interactions serve to develop and maintain an attachment bond between infant and caregiver.

Interactions:

• Bodily contact — physical interactions (e.g hugging)

• Interactional synchrony — infants move their bodies in tune with the rhythm of carer’s speech to create turn taking (e.g head movements)

• Reciprocity — interactions between infant and carer result in mutual behaviour, both being able to produce responses from each other (smiling back after a smile or laugh)

• Mimicking — infants have an innate ability to imitate carer’s facial expressions (copying movements)

• Caregiverese — adults who interact with infants use a modified vocal language that is high pitched, song-like, slow and repetitive

research

• Bodily contact:

•     Klaus and Kennell — compared to women who only had physical contact with their newborn babies during feeding time in 3 days after, mothers who had extended physical contact lasting several hours were shown to have greater eye contact and cuddle their babies more one month later

  • This suggests greater bodily contact leads to stronger and closer bonds

  • However, individual differences with the mothers and babies were not considered and therefore initial validity is low as we are unsure whether it is the interaction of bodily contact that led to differing attachments

• Caregiverese:

  • Papousek et al — the tendency to use a rising tone to indicate to the infant it was their turn to talk was cross cultural across the USA, China and Germany

    • This suggests that caregiverese is an innate, biological device to facilitate the formation of attachment

    • However caregiverese has been seen to be used by adults to all infants not just those they have an attachment with so it cannot be claimed to specifically help form attachments

animal studies

Lorenz:

• Aim — to investigate the mechanisms of imprinting where youngsters follow and form attachment to first large moving object they see

• Procedure — batch of fertilised eggs, experimental saw him first when they hatched and others saw mother goose

• Results — immediately started following first moving object they saw, irreversible (couldn’t make them follow another). Imprinting would occur with a brief, set time period 4-25 hours (critical period). If imprinted onto humans, when older they would try to mate with humans

• Conclusion — imprinting is a form of attachment, exhibited mainly by birds

• Evaluations: support for biological basis because imprinting is irreversible it suggests it is under biological control as learned behaviours could be modified by experience, low population validity due to being geese, ecological validity because of field experiment with naturalistic setting with real goslings

Harlow:

• Aim — to test the learning theory by comparing attachment behaviour in baby monkeys given a wire mother producing milk and a soft towelling mother producing no milk

• Procedure — 16 monkeys separated from their mothers immediately after birth, 4 in each condition. Placed in cages with access to 2 surrogate mothers, time spent with each mother and feeding was recorded, monkeys were frightened with loud noise to test for mother preference during stress

• Results — preferred contact with cloth mother

• Conclusion — rhesus monkeys have an innate unlearned need for contact comfort — suggested attachment is due to more than food

• Evaluations: ethics (putting monkeys in distress with loud noises, unable to give informed consent, taken as newborns from their mother, breaching protection from harm issue), good applicability for emotional care in early life by treatment of species in captivity and parental neglect of human infants and benefits society, low population validity due to evolutionary discontinuity, it can’t be generalised to humans