03 Attachment Flashcards

Question

What is one benefit of learning approach to explaining attachment?

Answer 1

Learning theory is **plausible and scientific** as it is **founded in established theory**. It likely that association between the **provision of needs** and the **person providing those needs** can lead to **strong attachments**.

Answer 2

**Harlow (1959)** - Separated a group of infant Rhesus monkeys from their mothers and put them in cages - Provided them with a **wire-mesh surrogate mother** that gives them milk and a **soft-cloth mother** that doesn't - Found that in **dangerous and aversive** situations, they **clung to soft-cloth** mother even though it didn't provide milk **Food not required** - Schaffer and Emerson found that you don't need food to form an attachment - Found that babies often form attachments with people who play with them over those you just feed them - 39% of babies were more attached to someone else even when the mother was feeding them **Environmentally reductionist and deterministic** - Learning approach is reductionist as they reduce complex behaviours to over simplified stimulus-response associations - Many different attachment styles - Deterministic as it suggests early learning determines later attachment behaviour

Answer 3

- Infants have an **innate biological drive** to be attached to an adult - Innate behaviours have a **critical period** in which they **must occur** otherwise they never will - For attachment **critical period is 2 years** - Caregiver sensitivity determines strength of attachment - strongest attachments are where caregivers are **cooperative, responsive and available** - **Social releasers** such as crying or smiling help sustain and develop an attachment - **Monotropy** is where the infant has **one special emotional bond** with a caregiver (usually biological mother - **Secondary attachments** are required to provide an **emotional safety net** and are vital for healthy social and psychological development

Answer 4

- Infant uses the monotropic bond to create a mental view of all relationships called the **internal working model** - Secure monotropic bond means positive internal working model so all current, future and romantic adult relationships will be secure and positive - Insecure monotropic bond leads to **fear of intimacy** and **lack of commitment** in adult relationships - According to **continuity hypothesis** individuals who are securely attached in infancy continue to be **socially and emotionally competent**

Answer 5

**Multiple attachments** - Schaffer and Emerson suggest that multiple attachments are more common than monotropy. - They found that by 18 months only 13% of the infants had only one person they were attached to. **Socially sensitive to feminists** - Places a burden of **responsibility on mothers**, setting them up to take the blame for anything that goes wrong in their child’s life. - Puts pressure on mothers to **stay at home** and give up their careers. - Underestimated the role of the father – he saw father’s role as **primarily economic**. - This is an **outdated sexist view**, many families view both parents as equally responsible for childcare **Adoption past critical stage** - Tizard and Hodges (1989) found that many children who had previously never formed any attachments were able to form attachments with their new adopted parents even when they were adopted after 4 - This is past the critical period and suggests that this period is insignificant in attachment **Innate temperaments, not caregiver sensitivity** - Some infants are better suited to forming attachments then others due to their **innate characteristics** - Infants who had been judged to have signs of **behavioural instability** between one and three days old were later more likely to have an **insecure attachment.**

Answer 6

Bowlby states that if a child suffers from prolonged **emotional deprivation** due to **absence of a primary attachment figure** (usually mother) they are likely to suffer from: - **intellectual** issues (low IQ) - **social issues** (deliquency) - **emotional** issues (affectionless psychopath) - **mental health issues** e.g. depression **Continuity hypothesis** suggests that these issues are **IRREVERSIBLE** and will follow them into adulthood due to **lack of internal working model.** These negative effects will appear if the separation occurs in the **critical period** (up to 2 and a half years) and there is a risk of them if separated in the **sensitive period** (5 years)

Answer 7

- Studied 88 case studies of children who attended his clinic - All children were maladjusted - Half were thieves (44) and 14 of them were **affectionless psychopaths** - They lacked **affection, shame and sympathy** for their actions - **12 out of 14 of the affectionless psychopaths** experienced **frequent separations from their mother** compared to **5 of the 30 thieves** who weren't affectionless psychopaths - Almost none of the control group (non-thieves) experienced early separations from their mother

Answer 8

**Practical applications** - Prior to Bowlby's theory, hospitals wouldn't allow children to be visited in hospitals by their parents. - This was profoundly damaging to the child's emotional and psychological wellbeing - Now parents are actively encouraged to stay in the hospital with the child **Depression in orphanages** - Spitz (1945) examined children in a low quality orphanage in South America - Staff were underpaid, overworked and rarely gave the children attention or affection - This led to the children displaying anaclitic depression: sleeplessness, loss of appetite and sadness **IQ in institutions** - Skodak and Skeeles (1949) found that children in institutions which only provided them with physical care showed extremely low IQ scores - However, when same children were transferred to institution which also provided emotional care, IQ scores went up by around 30 points

Answer 9

**Not Irreversible** - Tizard et al (1989) - Children who had never formed attachments and were adopted after the age of four were still able to form new attachments to their adopted parents **Deprivation and Privation** - Bowlby did not distinguish between deprivation (forming attachment and being separated from them) and privation (never forming attachments in the first place - It may be the latter which causes the extreme negative effects found in studies

Answer 10

- When a child's living arrangements is outside of their family such as in a children's home, hospital or orphanage - The child could adopt the norms and rules of the institution leading to impaired functioning and loss of personal identity (deindividualisation)

Answer 11

- **162 Romanian orphans** who lived in Romanian orphanages for the majority of their life before adoption were tested for **physical, social and cognitive development** at 4, 6, 11 and 15 - Progress compared to **52 British children** adopted in the UK **before 6 months**

Answer 12

- At the time of adoption, the Romanian orphans lagged behind their British counterparts on all factors of physical, cognitive and social - However by the age of 4, four of the Romanian orphans adopted before age of 6 months were able to catch up to their British counterparts - Long-term consequences of institutionalisation are less severe than we once though BUT only if child is adopted before 6 months and receives sensitive parenting - If not adopted by age of 6 months, effects are likely to be severe

Answer 13

**1. Delayed Intellectual development:** Suffer from low IQ and poor concentration; makes it difficult to learn new behaviours and concepts in school; delayed language development **2. Disinhibited attachment:** May not know what appropriate behaviour to strangers is - may be overly affectionate and attention-seeking **3. Impaired Emotional Development:** Issues with controlling anger - tend to have more tantrums than most children **4. Lack of internal working model:** Difficulty interacting with peers and forming close relationships; continues into adulthood where they will have impaired relationships and struggle to parent their own children **5. Quasi-Autism:** Struggle to understand meaning of social contexts; can have obsessional behaviours; lower frequency of pretend play and reduced empathy **6. Delayed Physical development** Usually physically small; lack of emotional care leads to deprivation dwarfism

Answer 14

**Real life Improvements** - Enhanced our understanding of the potential negative consequences of institutional care - Led to the establishment of key workers in institutions to provide emotional care for children. **Changes of Adoption Process** - In the past mothers were encouraged to nurse their children for as long as possible before giving them up for adoption. - Today most babies are adopted within their first week of life (certainly before six months)

Answer 15

**Issues with generalisation** - The Romanian orphans were faced with much more than emotional deprivation. - The **physical conditions** were appalling, and there was a **lack of cognitive stimulation**. - It is likely that long-term damage from institutional care only occurs when there are **multiple risk factors**. **Lacks validity** - Adoption and control groups were **not randomly allocated** to conditions in studies of Romanian orphans. - **Participant variables** between the children could influence the findings in unanticipated ways. - The adopted children might have been adopted because of **personal characteristics** such as resilience or being more sociable. - These characteristics might explain why they were **less affected by institutional care**, which **lowers the validity** of the research.

Answer 16

- 8 infant Rhesus monkeys were separated from their mothers and put in a cage - Harlow created two wire mothers and one was wrapped in a soft cloth - 4 of the monkeys received milk from the exposed wire mother and the other 4 from the soft cloth mother - Observed time spent with each of two mothers and their responses when scared or exploring unfamiliar toys

Answer 17

- All 8 spent most of the time with the soft cloth mother - the four fed by the exposed wire mother only stayed with it long enough to get milk then returned to soft cloth - When frightened, they would all cling to soft cloth and when exploring new toys, they kept one foot on the soft cloth - When in new environment, they were not confident enough to explore without presence of soft cloth mother **Long term effects:** - Monkeys developed abnormally, they froze or fled when encountering other monkeys - Not showing normal mating behaviour, didn't cradle babies - They could recover but only if this happened before they were three months old

Answer 18

**ADV 1: Implications for attachment theories** - Harlow's suggestion that comfort/sensitive responsiveness is more important than food contradicts learning theory **ADV 2: Implications of early neglect** - Study highlights implications of early neglect and the long term consequences of poor attachment in childhood for future relationships - Aligns with Bowlby's Maternal deprivation theory and critical period - Humans may have more of a sensitive period rather than critical as children have been shown to recover from lack of attachments (Tizard et al) **ADV 3: Comfort over food** - Schaffer and Emerson found that you don't need food to form an attachment - Found that babies often form attachments with people who play with them over those you just feed them - 39% of babies were more attached to someone else even when the mother was feeding them **DIS 1: Ethical issues** - Monkeys were removed from their mothers, which would have been very traumatic - Also deliberately scared to see how they would react - led to long-term emotional harm, when these monkeys were older and encountered other monkeys they either froze or fled. - They also had difficulty caring for their own young as they had not been cared for themselves.

Answer 19

- He wanted to investigate imprinting - the instinct many species of animals have to attach to the first thing they see moving after they are born - Took a clutch of gosling eggs and split them into two groups - One group was left to hatch with their natural mother and the other group put in an incubator - When eggs in the incubator hatched the first moving thing they saw was Lorenz - He marked them and put them all back in one group

Answer 20

- Group quickly divided into one following the mother and other following Lorenz - Goslings in incubator showed no recognition of their natural mother - If animal is not exposed to a moving object in the critical period, it will not imprint - Imprinting is similar to attachment in that it binds an animal to a caregiver in a special relationship. - Lorenz (1935) had to teach the goslings how to swim and they would always return when he called. **Long term effects:** - Imprinting is irreversible and long-lasting - One of the geese who imprinted on him used to sleep on his bed every night - Early imprinting has an influence on later mate preferences called sexual imprinting - Animals will choose to mate with the same kind of object upon which they were imprinted

Answer 21

**ADV 1: Support from Bowlby** - The idea of imprinting has similarities to Bowlby's theory of maternal deprivation - In that there is a window of opportunity - the critical period - to imprint otherwise it will never happen **ADV 2: Similar Studies Support** - Gutton (1966) exposed chickens to yellow rubber gloves during feeding and found that they imprinted on the gloves within a few weeks of life - Supports idea that animals are born with the instinct to attach to the first moving object they see **DIS 1: Imprinting is not irreversible** - Gutton (1966) could reverse the imprinting in chickens that initially tried to mate with the yellow rubber gloves - After spending more time with their own species, they began mating normally and engage in norma sexual behaviour **DIS 2: Cannot extrapolate to humans** - Humans and geese are physiologically very different to each other - Humans have other factors like culture, society, peers and upbringing that affect attachment - Also attachment between human babies and attachment figures is more complex than that in monkeys or geese - for example, we have multiple attachment styles that vary between cultures and even subcultures - Harlow's study can be more relevant to the human experience as he uses a mammilian species

Answer 22

- Sroufe et al (2005) The Minnesota Parent-Child Project - Longitudinal study started in 1975 up to 2005 - Mothers' and children's behaviours were studied through questionnaires and observations - They would be video taped (intra-observer reliability) while playing for a period of 10-15 minutes and mother was aware of video taping (social desirability) - Two observers would analyse the recordings (inter-observer reliability)

Answer 23

- As children those who were securely attached as infants were found to be: **more socially competent, less socially isolated, more popular amongst peers, more empathetic** - An infant's early attachment style will form their **internal working model** of relationships - Those who are more securely attached as infants form a positive internal working model and are **better at forming and maintaining** a relationship with others - If infants do not have early attachment during the **critical period** they will lack an internal working model - Leads to **attachment disorder** where child has **no preferred attachment figure** - inability to interact and relate to others - Usually caused by **extreme neglect** or frequent changes in caregivers

Answer 24

**ADV 1: Reliable findings** - Similar results found in Simpson et al (2007) where they assessed the attachment style of infants aged 1 year old - Found those securely attached at infants had higher social competence as children and were closer to their friends at 16 **DIS 1: Deterministic findings** - Study claims that early experiences have a fixed effect on later relationships - So childhood who were insecurely attached as infants are doomed to experience emotionally unsatisfactory relationships - Therefore deterministic as it doesn't account for free will to make conscious decisions about behaviour **DIS 2: Tizard & Hodges (1989)** - Found that many children who had previously never formed any attachments were able to form attachments with their new adopted parents even when they were adopted after 4 - This contradicts the claim that early attachment determines affects later childhood relationships

Answer 25

- Hazan & Shaver (1987) - Placed a 'Love Quiz' in a small American newspaper asking questions about relationship with parents (early attachment style), attitudes towards love (internal working model) and current relationships (adult attachment style) - Around 600 responses - 200 from men and 400 from women

Answer 26

- **Prevalence of adult attachment styles** was similar to infant attachment styles - secure being most common, then avoidant and then resistant - Relationship between internal working model and adult attachment style - **positive IWM = securely attached adults** - Positive correlation between adult attachment style and **love experiences (trusting, happy and friendly)** - Securely attached relationships were **most enduring** - 10 years, avoidant = 6 years and resistant = 5 years on average

Answer 27

**Unreliable findings** - Other studies have failed to find the correlation between infant and adult attachment styles - Fraley (2002) conducted review of 72 samples where infants were assessed for attachment style then assessed again later (up to 20 years later) and found correlations ranging from 0.5 to 0.1 **Correlational** - Not experimental but correlational so we cannot determine a cause and effect relationship - Cannot conclude that infant attachment style causes the adult attachment style - There could be a third intervening variable e.g. innate temperament ** Lacks validity** - Relies on participant's memories about early lives to assess infant attachment styles - Recollections are likely to be flawed because our memories of the past aren't always accurate lowering the validity of the study

03 Attachment Flashcards

(51 cards)