Attachment

Attachment

Caregiver - infant interactions:

• Reciprocity - responding to each other's actions.E.g. smiling at each other.
• Interactional synchrony - mirroring each other's behaviour. E.g. caregiver tilts head and so does infant.

Stages of attachment:

• Stage 1, asocial, 0 to 8 weeks - infant recognising and forming bonds. However it is similar between non-humans and humans. Show some preference for familiar adults.
• Stage 2, indiscriminate attachment, 2 to 7 months - prefer people over inanimate objects. Prefer familiar adults. Don't really shiw separation or stranger anxiety.
• Stage 3, specific attachment, 7 to 12 months - start to display stranger anxiety. Become attached to one particular adult (mother 65% of time) called primary attachment figure. Is the person who responds best to the baby's signals.
• Stage 4, multiple attachments, 1 year onwards - attachmetn extends to multiple adults. Called secondary attachments.
• Role of the father - Bowlby says fathers can fill a motherly role but don't tend to do so. The father tends to be the play companion. Supported by Grossman who had the same conclusion. However, fathers as primary caretakers smiled and imitated more with the infant.
• Schaffer and Emerson - studied 60 babies. Visited tehm monthly until 18 months in their own homes. Interactions with carers was observed and carers were interviewed. Mother kept a diary to record stranger anxiety, separation anxiety and social referencing.

Animal studies - Harlow:

• Aim - to investigate the factors influencing the development of attachment of infants to the mother in Rhesus monkeys.
• Procedure - 8 infant monkeys separated from mothers at birth. Monkeys reared in cage with two mothers. Wire mesh mothers in shape of real monkeys, only one is covered. A bottle is added to one mother. Half the babies were in cages where the wire mother had teh milk and the other half where the cloth mother had the milk. They then made a loud noise to scare the monkey to see which mother it would go to for comfort.
• Results - regardless of which mother had the nourishment the infant monkeys spent more time with the cloth mother and went to it for comfort. By three weeks they spent 15+ hours with the cloth mother a day. Harlow concluded that contact comfort was more important than feeding when it came to attachments.
• Strengths - human and monkey brains are biologically very similar so a comparison can be made. Helped improve childcare as he found out that children need to be looked after emotionally as well as physically.
• Weaknesses - results can't be generalised to humans as human behaviour is more complex. It is unethical as the monkeys were not functional as adults as they became timid, unpredictable, had difficulty mating and the demales were inadequate mothers.

Animal studies - Lorenz:

• Aim - to investigate the mechanisms of imprinting.
• Procedure - split goose eggs into two groups. One hatched naturally with the mother, the other in an incubator saw Lorenz as the first moving object. The goslings' behaviour was recorded. The goslings…