Stages of Attachment + Role of the Father Flashcards
(8 cards)
What’s the Asocial stage? 1
Similar responses to objects & people. Preference for faces/ eyes.
What is the indiscriminate attachment phase?
- Preference for human company.
-Ability to distinguish between people but comforted indiscriminately.
What is the specific attachment phase?
- Infants show a preference for one caregiver,
displaying separation and stranger anxiety.
-The baby looks to particular people for security, comfort and protection.
Multiple Attachment Phase
Attachment to multiple people
Describe the glasgow babies study - shcaffer + emerson
Studied development of attachments in 60 infants mainly from working class homes in
Glasgow. Observed once every 4 weeks over 1 year (mainly in their own homes).
Each mother reported infant’s response to separation in 7 situations (such as being left alone in a
room, or with other people).
The mother was then asked to describe the intensity of any protest (for instance, a full-
blooded cry or a whimper) on a 4-point scale and to whom the protest was directed.
A03 - Flawed data
-The data collected by Schaffer and Emerson may be unreliable because it was based on mothers’
reports of their infants’ behaviours.
- Some mothers might have been less sensitive to their infants’ protests and therefore were less likely to report them.
- What is particularly important is that this
would create a systematic bias which would challenge the validity of the data.
- As the creation of Shaffer and Emerson’s stages were based on this research, this challenges the support that this data offers for their stage theory of attachment.
-The research may be ethnocentric in concluding that it is ‘normal’ to form a single primary attachment first. -Psychologists identify two different kinds of cultures. -
-Individualist cultures tend to function with nuclear families, and so the infant has most contact with one main caregiver, usually the mother.
-In contrast, collectivist cultures that have extended families: female relatives tend to live and raise children together.
-So, their model may not be appropriate for all cultures.
-For example, Sagi et al. (1994) compared
attachments in infants raised in communal environments (Israeli kibbutzim) with infants raised in
family-based sleeping arrangements.
-Closeness of attachment with mothers was almost twice as common in family-based arrangements than in the communal environment. This suggests that this
stage model applies specifically to individualist cultures.
A03 - Generalisability
The participants were working-class parents from one area in Glasgow and thus the findings may
apply to that social group and not others. Second, the sample was from the 1960s. Parental care of
children has changed considerably since that time. Research shows that the number of dads who
choose to stay at home and care for their children and families has quadrupled over the past 25
years. It is likely that, if a similar study to that of Schaffer and Emerson was conducted today, the
findings might be different.
