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Summary Year 1 Psychology - Attachment notes
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Notes on year 1 attachment psychology
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PSYCHOLOGY - ATTACHMENT NOTESCaregiver Infant Attachment:
• Attachment is defined as a lasting psychological connectedness between human beings (Bowlby,
1969)
• Bowlby describes this as Attachment transactions.
• The primary caregiver is the mother.
• The secondary caregiver is the father.
• Reciprocity - an interaction is reciprocal when each person responds to other and elicits and
response from them.
• Feldman and Eidelman ( 2007) says babies have periodic alert phases which signal that they are
ready for interaction. Mothers typically pick up on and despond to infant alertness around 2/3 of
the time.
• Feldman (2007) says from around 3 months old this interaction becomes more frequent and
involves copying attention to each other verbal and facial expressions.
• Brazelton et al (1975) says both mother and child can initiate interactions and they appear to take
turns in doing so.
• Interaction synchrony can be defined as the temporal co-ordination of micro level social
behaviour. (Feldman, 2007)
• It takes place when mother and infant interact in such a way that their actions and emotions mirror
each other.
Meltzoff and Moore (1977)
• They observed the beginnings of interactions synchrony in infants as young as 2 weeks old.
• When an adult displayed one of three farcical expressions or one of three distinctive gestures. The
child’s response was filmed and identified by independent observers.
• An association was found between the expression or gesture the adult has displayed and the
actions of the babies.
Isabella et al (1989):
• She observed 30 mothers no infants together and assessed the degree of synchrony. The
researchers also assessed the quality of mother-infant attachment.
• They found that high levels of synchrony were associated with better quality mother-infant
attachment.
Schaffer and Emerson (1964):
• They found that the majority of babies become attached to their mother first (at around 7 months)
and 75% of infants were within a few weeks or months formed secondary attachment with the
farther by 18 months.
Grossman (2002):
• They carried out a longitudinal study looking at both parents’ behaviour and how it relates to the
quality of children’s attachments into their teens.
• Quality of infant attchement with mothers was related to children’s attachment in adolescence
suggesting that father attachment was less important.
• However, the quality of fathers play with infants was related to the quality of adolescent
attachments. This suggests fathers have a different role in attachment - one that is more to do
with play and stimulation and less to do with nurturing.
, Animal Studies of Attachment:
Lorenz’s Research (1935): Imprinting
• Konrad Lorenz first observed the phenomenon of imprinting when he was a child and a neighbour
gave him a newly hatched duckling that started to follow him around.
• Procedures: During his classic research study, Lorenz set up an experiment in which he randomly
divided a clutch of goose eggs. half of the eggs were hatched with their mother in their natural
habitat and the other half of the eggs were hatched in an incubator where the first ,owing object
they saw was Lorenz.
• Findings: the incubator group followed Lorenz everywhere whereas the control group hatched in
the presence of their mother, followed her. When the two groups were mixed, the control group
continued to follow the mother and the experimental group followed Lorenz
• Imprinting- whereby bird species that are mobile from birth attach to following the first moving
object they see.
• Lorenz also investigated the relationship between imprinting and adult mate presences. He
observed that birds that imprinted on a human would often later display courtship behaviour
towards humans.
Sexual Imprinting case study: Lorenz (1952)
• He desecrated a peacock that had been reared in the reptile house of a zoo where the first moving
thing the peacock saw after hatching was giant tortoises.
• As an adult this bird would only direct courtship behaviour towards giant tortoises.
• Lorenz concluded that this meant he had undergone sexual imprinting.
Harlow’s Research (1958):
• Harlow carried one of the most important animal research in terms of informing our understanding
of attachment. Harlow worked with rhesus monkeys, which are much more similar to humans than
Lorenz’s birds.
• The importance of contact comfort : Harlow observed that newborns kept alone in a bare cage
usually died but that they tended to survive if given something soft like a cloth to cuddle.
Harlows research (1958): the wire mother experiment
• Harlow (1958) tested the idea that a soft object serves some of the functions of a mother.
• Procedure: to test this Harlow reared 16 baby monkeys with two wire model ‘mothers’. In one
condition, milk was dispensed by a plain wire mother. In the second condition the milk was
dispensed by a cloth covered wire mother.
• Findings: it was found that the baby monkeys cuddled the soft object in the preference to the wire
one and sought comfort from the cloth one when frightened regardless of which dispensed milk.
This showed that ‘contact comfort’ was more important to the monkeys than food when it came to
attachment behaviour.
Learning Theory as an Explanation of Attachment:
Learning theory: Cupboard Love Theory
• Learning theorists Dollard and Miller (1950) proposed that caregiver-infant attachment can be
explained by learning theories which argue that attachment is a learned behaviour that is acquired
through both classical and opponent conditioning.
• The approach is sometimes called ‘the cupboard love theory’ because it emphasises the
importance of the caregiver as a provider of food. Put simply they proposed that children learn to
love whoever feeds them.
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