ATT 09 - Bowlby Maternal Deprivation Flashcards
(20 cards)
What is maternal deprivation?
- The emotional and intellectual consequences of separation between a child and his/her mother or mother-substitute
- Bowlby proposed that continuous care from a mother is essential for normal psychological development, and that prolonged separation from this adult causes serious damage to emotional and intellectual development
What is the difference between separation and deprivation?
- Separation is when the child is not in the presence of the primary attachment figure, which becomes a problem if the child is deprived of emotional care (extended separations leads to deprivation)
- Deprivation is the loss of something wanted or needed over an extended period, which can cause harm
What is the critical period in maternal deprivation?
- Bowlby suggested that if a child does not form an attachment before the age of two and half years (the critical period) then an attachment would never occur and psychological damage would be inevitable
- He later revised his theory and proposed a sensitive period (where an attachment can still form, although it takes longer) of up to 5 years
What areas of development does maternal deprivation affect?
- Social development
- Emotional development (develop an affectionless psychpathy)
- Intellectual development (low IQ)
How does maternal deprivation affect intellectual development?
- Bowlby believed that if children were deprived of maternal care for too long during the critical period, they would experience delayed intellectual development, characterised by abnormally low IQ. This has been demonstrated in studies of adoption
- For example, William Goldfarb (1947) found lower IQ in children who had remained in institutions as opposed to those who were fostered and thus had a higher standard of emotional care
How does maternal deprivation affect emotional development?
- Bowlby identified affectionless psychopathy as the inability to experience guilt or strong emotion towards others
- This prevents a person developing fulfilling relationships and is associated with criminality
- Affectionless psychopaths cannot appreciate the feelings of victims and so lack remorse for their actions
How is affectionless psychopathy characterised?
- A lack of affection
- A lack of guilt about their actions
- A lack of empathy for their victims
Who conducted the 44 thieves study?
John Bowlby
What was the aim of the 44 thieves study?
To study the link between affectionless psychopathy and maternal deprivation
What was the procedure of the 44 thieves study?
- The sample in this study consisted of 44 criminal teenagers accused of stealing
- All ‘thieves’ were interviewed for signs of affectionless psychopathy
- Their families were also interviewed in order to establish whether the ‘thieves’ had prolonged early separation from their mothers
- The sample was compared to a control group of 44 non-criminal but emotionally disturbed young people
What were the findings of the 44 thieves study?
- Bowlby found that 14 of the 44 thieves could be described as affectionless psychopaths and 12 od these 14 had experienced prolonged separation from their mothers in the first two years of their lives
- In contrast only five of the remaining 30 ‘thieves’ had experienced separations
- Only two participants in the control group of 44 had experienced long separations
What were the conclusions of the 44 thieves study?
- Bowlby concluded that prolonged early separation/deprivation caused affectionless psychopathy
- He found a relationship between early separation and delinquency/affectionless psychopathy, but we cannot definitively conclude that the separation was the cause
What are the strengths of the maternal deprivation theory?
- Research supporting that maternal deprivation can have long term effects
- Has practical applications
How can research supporting maternal deprivation having long term effects?
- One strength of the maternal deprivation theory is that there is research supporting that maternal deprivation can have long term effects
- A new line of research has provided some modest support for the idea that maternal deprivation can have long-term effects
- Frederic Lévy et al. (2003) showed that separating baby rats from their mother for as little as a day had a permanent effect on their social development though not other aspects of development
- This means that, although Bowlby relied on flawed evidence to support the theory of maternal deprivation, there are other sources of evidence for his ideas
How does the maternal deprivation theory have practical applications?
One strength of the maternal deprivation theory is that it has practical application and can be used to help find ways of reducing the effects of deprivation such as:
- Proving more individual care. Spitz suggests this is the reason for problems, if children are given more attention and simulating environments this could minimise the effects
- Coping with divorce. Routine should remain the same, conflict kept away from the child, older children should be given the opportunity to discuss things, contact with the absent parent should remain
- Keeping daycare to a minimum until the child is 2 years old
- Children should be allowed to take about the death of a parent and visit the grave to reduce effects of deprivation
What are the limitations of the maternal deprivation theory?
- It is based on poor quality of evidence
- There is confusion between different types of early experience
- The idea of a critical period
- Replication of 44 thieves study produced conflicting evidence
How is the maternal deprivation theory based on poor quality evidence?
- One limitation of the theory of maternal deprivation is the poor quality of the evidence it is based on
- Bowlby’s 44 thieves study is flawed because it was Bowlby himself who carried out both the family interviews and the assessments for affectionless psychopathy
- This left him open to bias because he knew in advance which teenagers he expected to show signs of psychopathy. Other sources of evidence were equally flawed
- For example, Bowlby was also influenced by the findings of Goldfarb’s (1943) research on the development of deprived children in wartime orphanages. This study has problems of confounding variables because the children in Goldfarb’s study had experienced early trauma and institutional care as well as prolonged separation from their primary caregivers
- This means that Bowlby’s original sources of evidence for maternal deprivation had serious flaws and would not be taken seriously as evidence nowadays
How is there confusion between different types of early experience in the maternal deprivation theory?
- One limitation of Bowlby’s theory of maternal deprivation is his confusion between different types of early experience
- Michael Rutter (1981) drew an important distinction between two types of early negative experience
- Deprivation strictly refers to the loss of the primary attachment figure after attachment has developed
- On the other hand privation is the failure to form any attachment in the first place - this may take place when children are brought up in institutional care
- Rutter pointed out that the severe long-term damage Bowlby associated with deprivation is actually more likely to be the result of privation
- So, the children studied by Goldfarb may actually have been ‘prived’ rather than deprived.
- Similarly, many of the children in the 44 thieves study had disrupted early lives (e.g. spells in hospital) and may never have formed strong attachments.
- This means that Bowlby may have overestimated the seriousness of the effects of deprivation in children’s development.
What is wrong with the idea of a critical period?
- One limitation of the theory is Bowlby’s idea of a critical period
- For Bowlby, damage was inevitable if a child had not formed an attachment in the first two-and-a-half years of life. Hence this is a critical period
- However, there is evidence to suggest that in many cases good quality aftercare can prevent most or all of this damage
- For example, Jarmila Koluchová (1976) reported the case of the Czech Twins
- The twins experienced very severe physical and emotional abuse from the age of 18 months up until they were seven years old
- Although they were severely damaged emotionally by their experience, they received excellent care and by their teens they had recovered fully
- This means that lasting harm is not inevitable even in cases of severe privation
- The ‘critical period’ is therefore better seen as a ‘sensitive period’
What was wrong with the replication of the 44 thieves study?
- Most attempts to replicate the 44 thieves study failed to produce similar results
- For example, Hilda Lewis (1954) looked at 500 young people and found no association between early separation and later psychopathy (criminality or relationship difficulties)
- On the other hand, more recent research (for example, Gao et al. 2010) has partially supported Bowlby by showing that poor quality maternal care was associated with high rates of psychopathy in adults
