Animal studies of attachment: Harlow and Lorenz

Lorenz`s Research:

Reesearch into the study of infant anima-mother studies have informed psychologists understanding of mother-infant attachment in humans.

Imprinting:

Procedure - Lorenz set up a classic experiment in which he randomly divided a clutch of goose eggs. half the eggs were hatched with the mother goose in their natural environment. the other half were hatched in an incubator where the first moving thing they saw was Lorenz

Findings: the incubator group followed Lorenz everywhere while the control group followed the mother. when the two groups were mixed the control group still followed the mother and the experimental group followed Lorenz. this is known as imprinting where bird species attach to and follow the first moving object they see - Lorenz identified a critical period in which imprinting needs to take place (as brief as a few hours from birth). if this does not occur within that time Lorenz found chicks did not attach themselves to a mother figure.

Sexual Imprinting: Lorenz also investigated the relationship and adult mate preferences - found that birds that imprinted on a human would later display courtship behaviour towards humans.

 Lorenz Evaluation:

Generalisability to humans - also some of his findings have influenced our understanding of human development, there have been issues generalising from birds to humans. For example, mammal mothers show greater attachment to young than birds, and mammals may be able to form attachments at any time. This means that its not appropriate to generalise any of Lorenz`s ideas to humans

Some of Lorenz`s observations have been questioned - later researchers have questioned some of Lorenz`s conclusions - for example, the idea that imprinting has a permanent effect on mating behaviour.Guiton et al found that chickens that imprinted on yellow rubber gloves would try to mate with them as adults, but wold eventually learn to prefer other chickens. This suggests that the impact of mating behaviour is not as permanent as Lorenz…