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Animal studies in attachment
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-Animal studies of attachment:-Lorenz: imprinting on greylag geese:
Imprinting- when animals such as birds will strongly attach to the first object they encounter
(usually the mother). The infant animal will then follow this object.
Research (1935)- Lorenz Imprinting:
Procedure- half of a Greylag Gooses eggs were hatched in an incubator by Lorenz. The other
half were hatched normally by the mother.
Findings- the goslings who had been hatched by Lorenz followed him rather than the mother
Goose, the goslings that hatched naturally imprinted on the mother and followed her. Even
if the goslings were placed together, the half that had imprinted on Lorenz continued to
follow him.
Suggests- imprinting is a strong evolutionary/biological feature of attachment in certain birds
and imprinting is with the first large object, not other potential cues (smell/sound).
Lorenz noted that there was a critical period of around 32 hours, if a gosling did not see a
large moving object to imprint on in these first few hours it will not imprint at all.
-Harlow: wire and cloth mothers with infant Rhesus monkeys:
Contact comfort- geese are evolutionary very different to humans compared to monkeys,
Harlow tested “cupboard love”, babies love their mother because she feeds them.
Research (1958)- Harlow Contact Comfort:
Procedure- attachment behaviour was studied in sixteen newborn Rhesus Macaque
monkeys. They were removed from their biological mothers and placed in cages with
surrogate mothers. These were a range of conditions that included a combination of wire
and/or cloth monkeys. The surrogates either provided milk or did not.
Findings- the monkeys with access to the cloth mother always preferred its company, even if
the wire monkey provided milk. Monkeys with access to cloth mothers also demonstrated
additional confidence in novel situations and returned to it when frightened. However,
monkeys without a cloth mother showed signs of stress related illnesses.
Suggests- Rhesus macaques and potentially other primates such as humans have a biological
need for physical contact and will attach to whichever provides comfort, rather than food,
going against the cupboard love theory of attachment.
Harlow also found in follow up studies with his monkeys that the maternal deprivation his
studies had caused resulted in long term and permanent social disorders including difficulty
in mating behaviour and raising their own offspring.
-Evaluation:
There are serious ethical concerns about the level of suffering the primates endured in
Harlow's experiments, experiments that intentionally orphaned infants and subjected them
to high levels of stress. Some of Harlow’s other experiments were more extreme and lead in
part to a negative view of psychology as a field or research, but also changes in ethical
standards.
There are problems with generalising these findings to attachment in human infants, while
monkeys are genetically similar to humans, there is still significant differences in both
biology and cultural/social environments.
Knowledge gained from Harlow’s studies has been applied to early childcare issues. For
example, contact between mother and baby in the first few hours of birth, social service
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