Dollard and miller (1950) suggested human babies go into a drive state when they’re hungry and feeling uncomfortable. This motivates baby to relieve the discomfort, so babies cry to show their hunger, and the caregiver feeds them and the behaviour is reinforced. The caregiver is associated with the food and becomes a secondary reinforcer. The infant then seeks to be with the mother to relieve discomfort because she is seen as a source of reward and the infant becomes attached.
Key study - Harlow and Harlow (1962)
Aim
To show that attachment is not based on the supply of food
Procedure
Monkeys placed in a cage with two wire mesh cylinders, acting as surrogate mothers. One cylinder supplies food to the monkey but is only made of wire. The other gives no food but is covered in very soft, fluffy material.
Findings
The monkeys spent most of their time on the comfort cylinder and would jump to it when scared. They also used it as a secure base of exploration.
Conclusion
The study indicated that simply supplying food isn’t enough for formation of attachment.
Evaluation
The comfort mother didn’t provide enough love to enable healthy psychological development. In later life the monkeys weren’t interested in other monkeys and had trouble mating. This indicated that although comfort contact is more favourable that food comfort an infant still needs a carer.
This experiment would now be considered unethical but it was critical in demonstrating that neither feeding nor comfort contact can independently explain attachment.
Bowlby’s Theory
- John Bowlby (1969) suggested that attachment is vital for survival.
- Infants are physically helpless and need adults to care for them otherwise they couldn’t survive.
- Infants are born with an innateness to form an attachment to increase their chance of survival.
Lorenz (1952) Conrad Lorenz studied behaviour of geese that tend to imprint of the first moving object they see, including short and long term benefits. When the geese hatched in the incubator, the first thing they saw was Lorenz, and they followed him everywhere, whereas geese born in natural environment followed their mother.
Innate programming
Natural selection suggests that behaviour is likely to continue in a species if it aids survival and is then passed on through generations. Meaning both infants and adults must be programmes to form attachment.
Social releasers
A social releaser is a behaviour that causes a response e.g. crying, smiling or looking appealing. These are necessary to ensure interactions take place. Bowlby suggested that these behaviours are also innate in infants, and caregiver behaviours are innate in adults. Social releasers are critical in forming attachments. Neonatal features promote caregiving.
Critical period
The concept of a critical period is biological. If development doesn’t take place within a time frame it won’t develop at all. If attachment is biological we expect a critical age of development which bowlby suggested is 2 and half years.
The continuity hypothesis
Attachment formed with one special attachment figure (monotropy) gives an infant an internal working model of relationships. Secure children get a positive working model; avoidant children have a negative working model and effects later relationships. Ambivalent children have a primary caregiver that’s inconsistent so children tend to have a negative self-image and exaggerate emotion as a way to obtain attention. The hypothesis provides one possible explanation of the fact that early patterns of attachment are related to later child characteristics.
Support – Minnesota longitudinal study (Sroufe et al 2005) followed participants from infancy to adolescence and found continuity between early attachment and later emotional & social behaviour. Those classified as secure in infancy were rated the highest for social competence, were less isolated and more popular and more empathetic.
Strengths of Bowlby’s attachment theory
- Imprinting in non-humans: Lorenz’s research supports the view that imprinting is innate, a similar process is likely to have evolved in many species as a mechanism to protect young animals and enhance chance of survival.
- Monotropy and hierarchy: infants form multiple attachments but they form a hierarchy with one attachment figure being the most important.
Weaknesses of Bowlby’s attachment theory
- Attachment may be more flexible that the critical period
- Infants form different relationships with different people rather than the idea of a template leading to formation of similar relationships
- Thomas (1998) questions Bowlby’s assumption that it’s good to form one attachment, it might be better for the child to form multiple attachments.
- Bowlby’s claim that attachment is genetical is impossible to test.