Attachment Flashcards

Question

What is the key to attachment?

Answer 1

The level of responsiveness and not the gender of the parent

Answer 2

(1) INCONSISTENT FINDINGS ON FATHERS - research into the role of the father is confusing because different researchers want to research different questions and this means that psychologists cannot easily answer a simple question (2) WHY AREN’T CHILDREN WITHOUT FATHERS DIFFERENT - Grossman found that fathers still had an important role but other studies have found that children growing up in single or same-sex parent families do not develop any differently and therefore the fathers role cannot be that important (3) WHY DON’T FATHERS GENERALLY BECOME PRIMARY ATTACHMENTS - they may not become primary attachments as a result of traditional gender roles or the fact that female hormones create higher levels of nurturing and therefore women are more biologically suited to be the primary caregiver

Answer 3

Schaffer and Emerson

Answer 4

The study involved 60 babies (31 male and 29 female) from Glasgow and the majority were from skilled working class families

Answer 5

The mothers and babies were visited at their home every month for a year and again at 18 months and the researchers asked the mothers questions about the kind of protest their babies showed in everyday separations and they also assessed stranger anxiety

Answer 6

Between 25 and 32 weeks about 50% of the babies showed signs of separation anxiety (usually to the mother which is known as specific attachment) This attachment tended to be to the caregiver who was most interactive and sensitive to the infants signals and facial expressions By 40 weeks 80% of the babies had a specific attachment and almost 30% displayed multiple attachments

Answer 7

(1) GOOD EXTERNAL VALIDITY - the study was carried out in their own homes and most of the observation was actually done by the parents and this means that the behaviour of the babies is unlikely to be affected by the presence of an observer and therefore this increases its external validity (2) LONGITUDINAL DESIGN - this design means that the same children were followed up and observed regularly and this has better internal validity than other methods such as cross-sectional design because there is no CV of individual differences

Answer 8

(1) LIMITED SAMPLE - the fact that the families were all from Glasgow and the same social class means that the findings aren’t generalisable to the rest of the population

Answer 9

Schaffer and Emerson

Answer 10

(1) asocial stage (2) indiscriminate stage (3) specific attachment (4) multiple attachment

Answer 11

The first few weeks of the baby being born

Answer 12

From 2-7 months of age

Answer 13

At around 7 months of age

Answer 14

Around 8 months of age to a year

Answer 15

- the baby starts to recognise and form binds with its carers - they baby’s behaviour towards non-human objects and humans is quite similar - they show a preference for familiar adults

Answer 16

- they show a preference for people rather than inanimate objects, and recognise and prefer familiar adults - they accept cuddles and comfort from any adult and do not show separation or stranger anxiety

Answer 17

- they start to display stranger anxiety and separation anxiety to a particular adult - most babies have now formed a specific attachment (usually with the mother) and this adult if termed as the attachment figure

Answer 18

- they show attachment behaviour to multiple attachments with other adults and these are called secondary attachments

Answer 19

(1) PROBLEM STUDYING THE ASOCIAL STAGE - babies that are too young have poor co-ordination and pretty much immobile which therefore makes it difficult to make any judgment on their behaviour and therefore the evidence cannot be relied upon (2) CONFLICTING EVIDENCE ON MULTIPLE ATTACHMENTS - it is not clear when infants can form multiple attachments and some research indicates that most babies form specific attachments before they become capable of developing multiple attachments. However, other psychologists that work in different cultures where multiple caregivers are the norm believe that babies form multiple attachments for the outset (3) MEASURING MULTIPLE ATTACHMENT - just because a baby gets distressed when an individual leaves the room does not mean that the individual is a true attachment figure and this is a problem because Schaffer and Emerson’s observations doesn’t suggest a way to distinguish between secondary attachment figures and playmates

Answer 20

Psychological studies which are carried out on animals instead of humans

Answer 21

Lorenz and Harlow

Answer 22

Rhesus monkeys

Answer 23

An innate readiness to acquire certain behaviour during a critical or sensitive period of development

Answer 24

He randomly divided a clutch of goose eggs and half of the eggs was hatched with the mother and the other half was hatched in an incubator where the first moving object they saw was Lorenz

Answer 25

The incubator group followed Lorenz everywhere whereas the control group followed the mother and this is known as imprinting whereby bird species that are mobile from birth attach and follow the first moving thing they see

Answer 26

They do not attach themselves to a mother figure at all

Answer 27

He observed that birds that had imprinted on a human would often later display courtship behaviour towards humans

Answer 28

A peacock had been reared in a reptile house at a zoo and the first moving objects it saw were giant tortoises and as an adult bird it directed courtship behaviour towards giant tortoises

Answer 29

(1) LACK OF GENERALISABILITY - there is a problem generalising findings from birds to humans as the mammalian attachment system is quite different from that of birds and therefore it is not appropriate to generalise Lorenz’s findings to humans (2) LORENZ’S OBSERVATIONS HAVE BEEN QUESTIONED - some critics had questioned Lorenz’s conclusion that imprinting has a permanent effect on mating behaviour as Guiton found that chickens that had imprinted on yellow washing up gloves would eventually try to mate with them but with that experience they learn to prefer mating with other chickens and therefore these effects are not permanent

Answer 30

The important of contact comfort

Answer 31

In one experiment he reared 16 baby monkeys with two wire model mothers and in one condition milk was dispensed by the plain wire mother and in the second condition the milk was dispensed by the cloth-covered mother

Answer 32

He found that the baby monkeys cuddled the soft object in preference to the wire one and sought comfort from the cloth one when frightened regardless of whether it dispensed milk and therefore contact comfort was more important than food when it came to attachment behaviour

Answer 33

- they are more aggressive and less sociable than other monkeys and they often bred less as they are unskilled at mating - those who do become mothers often neglected their young and others attacked the children which sometimes resulted in death

Answer 34

Within 90 days

Answer 35

(1) THEORETICAL VALUE - his finding have had a profound effect on the understanding of human mother-infant attachment and he showed that attachment does not develop as a result of the mother feeding the child but as a result of contact comfort - this has also showed us the importance of the quality of early relationships on relationships as adults and successfully rearing children (2) PRACTICAL VALUE - his research has had important implications such as it’s helped social workers to understand the risk factors in child neglect and abuse and therefore intervene to prevent it

Answer 36

(1) ETHICAL ISSUES - the monkeys suffered hugely from Harlow’s procedures and as this species is considered similar enough to humans to generalise the findings, this also means that their suffering was human-like

Answer 37

Dollard and Miller

Answer 38

A set of theories from the behaviourist approach that emphasis the role of learning in the acquisition of behaviour

Answer 39

(1) classical | (2) operant

Answer 40

This involves learning to associate two stimuli together so that we begin to respond to one in the same way that we already respond to the other

Answer 41

Involves learning whether to repeat behaviour depending on its consequences

Answer 42

Food is an unconditioned stimulus (UCS) and the pleasure from the food is an unconditioned response (UCR) and the caregiver starts as a neutral stimulus and therefore if the caregiver provides food then the baby starts to associate the pleasure of food with the caregiver and therefore the caregiver becomes a conditioned stimulus (CS) who produces and conditioned response (CR)

Answer 43

Crying leads to a response from the caregiver and as long as the caregiver provides the correct response then the crying is reinforced and the baby then directs crying for comfort towards the caregiver, the caregiver also receives negative reinforcement because the crying stops

Answer 44

It is an innate, biological motivator

Answer 45

We are motivated to eat in order to reduce the hunger drive

Answer 46

Secondary drive

Answer 47

The caregiver provides food and therefore the primary drive of hunger becomes generalised and therefore attachment is thus a secondary drive learned by an association between the caregiver and the satisfaction of the primary drive

Answer 48

There are none

Answer 49

(1) COUNTER-EVIDENCE FROM ANIMAL RESEARCH - animal studies show that young animals do not always attach to those who feed them e.g. Lorenz’s geese imprinted before they were fed and they still maintained their attachments and therefore food does not create the attachment bond that learning theory suggests (2) COUNTER-EVIDENCE FROM HUMAN RESEARCH - in Schaffer and Emerson’s study many of the babies developed a primary attachment to their biological mother even though other carers did most of the feeding and therefore feeding is not a key element of attachment (3) IGNORES OTHER FACTORS ASSOCIATED WITH FORMING ATTACHMENTS - research into early infant-caregiver interaction suggests that the quality of attachment is associated with factors such as reciprocity and interactional synchrony and therefore is attachments developed purely because of feeding then there would be no purpose for these complex interactions

Answer 50

The mono means ‘one’ and indicates that one particular attachment is different from all others and of central importance to the child’s development

Attachment Flashcards

(76 cards)