Class notes
Explanations of Attachment
- Course
- PSYC 1010
- Institution
- York University (Ebor )
Lecture notes of 6 pages for the course PSYC 1010 at Ebor
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Explanations of AttachmentWhy do babies form attachments?
Learning Theory;
● According to behaviourists, behaviour is not innate but learned.
● Learning can be due to associations being made between different stimuli (classical
conditioning) or behaviour can be altered by patterns of reinforcement (reward) and
punishment (operant conditioning).
● Neo-behaviourists suggest that we learn by watching others (social learning theory or
SLT). Social learning of this sort is particularly powerful when we see others being
reinforced or punished for their actions.
Operant conditioning;
● Dollard and Miller (1950) suggested that the attachment was due to drive reduction.
○ Hunger and cold have a strong motivating effect on the child, driving the child to
satisfy its need by eating or seeking warmth.
○ Obtaining food or warmth results in drive reduction which in itself provides a
reward for the child.
● Hunger and cold (discomfort) are referred to as primary drives and food and warmth
are primary reinforcers.
○ The person supplying the food and warmth (usually the mother) becomes
associated with the food and warmth and acts as a secondary reinforcer.
○ The attachment occurs because the child wants the person providing the
food and warmth.
● Note: When the child is cold and hungry it cries. This is unpleasant for the mother
(punishment) who is likely to feed and cuddle the child. The child stops crying acts as a
negative reinforcer for the mother (something unpleasant has been taken away).
Negative reinforcers make the mother’s behaviour, feeding and cuddling, more likely in
future!
Classical conditioning;
● This offers a similar but simplified explanation of how food provides attachment.
● The child simply associates food and mother together, much as Pavlov’s dog’s
associated bell and foodlike.
● If you want this in technical terms:
○ Food is an unconditioned stimulus that produces an unconditioned response
(pleasure).
○ At the outset, the mother is a neutral stimulus who produces no response
(pleasure)
○ However, because she is continually paired with the unconditioned stimulus
(food) she slowly becomes associated with it until eventually, the mother alone
can produce pleasure.
, ○ Mother has now become a conditioned stimulus and the pleasure she brings is a
conditioned response.
Evaluation;
● As always the behaviourist explanation is reductionist because it takes a complex
human behaviour and tries to explain it in the simplest terms possible.
○ It does not consider any internal processes or seek to explain the emotional
nature of attachments simply how they arise as behaviours.
● The behaviourist theories of attachments (and Freud’s psychodynamic) are sometimes
referred to as cupboard love theories because of their emphasis on food and feeding.
Is food needed to create an attachment?;
● In the Glasgow babies study (Schaffer and Emerson): 39% of the babies formed their
first attachment with someone other than the person who fed them (e.g. grandparent).
● This would suggest that food is not the main requirement for forming attachments as
the behaviourists suggest.
Harlow’s monkeys (1959); ‘The origins of love.’
● Harry Harlow used rhesus monkeys in his research into learning and noticed that many
of the young monkeys kept in isolation became distressed when he cleaned out their
cages.
● It seemed that the monkeys were forming an attachment with the sanitary towels he
used to line the base of the cages.
Method;
● Harlow carried out a number of variations using sixteen young isolated monkeys.
○ Some were kept in cages with both a wire surrogate mother and a softer one
covered in Terry cloth whilst others were kept in cages with just one.
○ Sometimes the monkeys would be fed by the wire mother and other times by the
softer cuddlier mother.
● However, the important variation was the one with a monkey in a cage with a wire
mother that provided food and a Terry cloth mother that didn’t (providing the monkey
with a choice; food or comfort).
Findings;
● Harlow noticed that the monkeys would spend most time clinging to the cloth mother and
occasionally feeding on the wire mother. When the monkeys were stressed by a
mechanical toy banging a drum the monkeys would always run to the cloth mum for
safety suggesting an attachment. Also, the monkeys with only wire mothers produced
water feces which was attributed to stress.
Conclusion;
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