Another explanation of attachment is the behaviourist approach or the learning approach. This was tested by Pavlov who conducted an experiment on the salivation of dogs to see if he could get an automated response. Each time he fed them, he would ring a bell before hand to see if it could form a new stimulus/response action. He found that eventually, the dogs salivated when they heard the bell and not when they saw the food because they had replaced the stimulus of food with the stimulus of the bell. Putting this into context of attachments, this experiment suggested that babies associated the person who fed them with the pleasure they were receiving from food. As a result, they eventually produced pleasure from the feeder alone, without the food, forming a conditioned stimulus (the feeder) and a conditioned response (the attachment). This agreed with Freud’s psychoanalytic theory suggesting that food was the drive for attachment and that infants will eventually become attached to the figure that provides them with their food.
But this theory, similar to the psychoanalytic approach, doesn’t allow for any other sources of attachment to be considered. Both these approaches are “cupboard love” theories, which means that they both suggest attachment relies on food alone. This is why they do not allow for any other sources of attachment to be considered, such as love or attention received. For example, according to these two theories, the PCG must always be the same person as the PAF, which isn’t always true in reality. Not only that, but the behaviourist approach reduces a complex human into a simple stimulus response pair. It assumes that the human mentality is much simpler than it is in real life.
Schaffer and Emerson conducted a study where they looked at 60 children throughout infancy and studied their development of attachments. They found that in 39% of the cases the PCG was not the PAF. More specifically, the mother was not always the one to feed the babies and yet they found that the infants were still more strongly attached to their mothers, not the feeders. They also found that it was in fact responsiveness and interaction that seemed to be key in the stronger attachments. This meant that mothers who met the demands of their children quicker and more caringly would form stronger attachments than those mothers who failed to pay their child any attention, despite whether they fed them or not. This is strong evidence to suggest that the behaviourist and psychoanalytic theories are not in fact that accurate and do not posses a strong ability to explain attachment.
These two theories of attachment can also be questioned by the experiment conducted by Harlow. He took rhesus monkeys and placed them in environments with two “surrogate mothers”. One of the mothers had a feeding bottle in which the monkeys could retrieve food and water from. The other mother was wrapped in a soft cloth but provided no food for the monkeys. Harlow found that the monkeys spent the most time with the mother in the soft cloth rather than the mother who provided them with food. This supports the suggestion that the behaviourist theory is incorrect and that food is not the only reason for attachment. It agrees with Schaffer and Emerson’s study in that food was not the key factor in forming the strongest attachments among infants. However, this experiment was conducted using monkeys and therefore has low population validity, as it cannot be generalised to all humans.
Overall, there is strong evidence to suggest that both the psychoanalytic approach and the behaviourist approach are incorrect and that they show weak ability of explaining what causes attachments in infancy. Better explanations were made by Schaffer and Emerson in their study of 60 children and their primary and multiple attachments and Harlow and his monkeys, where monkeys preferred the soft mother than the food-providing mother. These both suggest that primary attachments are in fact down to the love and attention they receive and the interaction they are provided with as oppose to who supplies them with their food.
Sarah Feehan