Attachment Theory: Early childhood attachment and its influence on adult romantic relationships

Running head: CHILDHOOD ATTACHMENT AND ROMANTIC RELATIONSHIPS Attachment Theory: Early childhood attachment and its influence on adult romantic relationships Abstract Bowlby (1988) proposed attachment theory as a model for exploring human tendencies for forming early infant / caregiver emotional bonds. Studies by Harlow (1965) highlighted the long term dysfunctional effects on infant monkeys when primary care givers were absent. This raised the likelihood of an evolutionary basis for forming attachments in species including humans. Lorenz also recognized the tendencies of animals to formulate early bonds of attachment during critical developmental periods. Bowlby established a theory where the normative goal was one of security attachment. This was later expanded upon by other theorists who recognised the existence of three primary attachment styles. Others found that similar styles are evident in adult individuals. The question is posed whether they are in fact interrelated and dependent or mutually exclusive. This essay argues in support of recent research where longitudinal studies indicate a strong correlation between infant attachment and adult romantic relationship styles. Attachment Theory: Early childhood attachment and its influence on adult romantic relationships According to Bowlby (1988), attachment theory is a suitable model for exploring the human

  • Word count: 2050
  • Level: University Degree
  • Subject: Biological Sciences
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Television and its Negative Conditioning on Children.

Television and its Negative Conditioning on Children "I believe television is going to be the test of the modern world, and that in this new opportunity to see beyond the range of our vision we shall discover either a new and unbearable disturbance of the general peace or a saving radiance in the sky. We shall stand or fall by television." -E.B. White The flickering blue box, once invented to bring information into the homes of Americans, has defeated its purpose. Our children are now getting too much information at too early an age. On an average night of viewing, children as young as six see violent images, explicit sexual acts, and the luring power of commercials. Television represents one of the most important and underrecognized influences on children's health and behavior. In this essay, I'll be examining the negative conditioning of television on children, including content, commercialism, messages, and health. Some of the most important and crucial teachings of a person's life happen in childhood. What is done to introduce a child into our complex and enigmatic world affects a person for life. Childhood is a time when people are forming their beliefs about the world. When children are taught not by their guardians and environment but by television, they may become susceptible to the misleading teachings of this medium. Conditioning should be done by

  • Word count: 1014
  • Level: University Degree
  • Subject: Biological Sciences
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Investigation of the Effect of Bystander Behaviour on Helping Behaviour in a Non-Emergency Situation

Investigation of the Effect of Bystander Behaviour on Helping Behaviour in a Non-Emergency Situation Abstract One model explaining whether people offer assistance in emergency situations is diffusion of responsibility: the greater the number of bystanders present, the less personal responsibility is felt by each bystander. A second model, the normative theory, suggests that people comply with social norms, being more likely to help if an appropriate helping response is modelled by others. To investigate which model best accounts for helping behaviour, a naturalistic study was conducted in which participants were able to offer help in a minor emergency. The participants were 1122 undergraduates from Monash University. Most helping was demonstrated when no bystanders were present. The results supported the diffusion of responsibility theory more than the normative theory. In 1964, a New York city woman Kitty Genovese was brutally stabbed to death outside her apartment block. Of the 38 witnesses, none offered assistance, not even the simple act of notifying the police (Latane & Nida, 1981). This failure to help stimulated research into understanding why bystanders often fail to give assistance in emergency situations. Latane and Darley (1970) wondered why people were unwilling to offer assistance in emergencies when they were quite happy to help in non-emergencies. They

  • Word count: 2396
  • Level: University Degree
  • Subject: Biological Sciences
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symbolic interactionism and deviance

Symbolic interactionists posit that no act or behaviour is inherently deviant. Drawing upon other major sociological theories of social deviance explains how symbolic interactionists justify this claim. Social deviance is defined as 'Differing from a norm or from the accepted standards of a society' (dictionary.com). A deviant is one that differs from a norm, especially a person whose behavior and attitudes differ from accepted social standards. Generally, explanations for deviance have one of two focal points. The first is the individual where the causes of deviance are held to reside in the biological or psychological make up of particular types of people or in the kinds of choices that individuals freely make. While focus on individual behaviour is thought to be effective, there is good evidence to suggest 'the causes of crime cannot be satisfactorily derived by reference to biology, psychology or wilful action alone (Winter and Lemert and Lemert 2000, p.12). This has led to the development of a second focal point for the explanations of deviant behaviour - the nature of social relations, or more simply, society. Given the importance of the impact of deviance on society, many approaches have been used to attempt to understand why people engage in deviant behaviour. Symbolic interactionists argue that deviance is "relative". That is, what might be considered in one group

  • Word count: 1199
  • Level: University Degree
  • Subject: Biological Sciences
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The Mertonian Principles Revised: Can the Normative Structure of SciencePrevent Fraud?

IN THE PAST, SCIENCE HAS been commonly associated with the pursuit of truth in a controlled and honest manner. For this reason, the existence of fraud within the scientific craft has been largely ignored, partly owing to its assumed non-existence, but also because it was traditionally maintained that the normative structure of science possessed inherent mechanisms to prevent deviant acts in scientific inquiry. The present essay calls this assumption into question and investigates the extent to which the structure of science averts scientific misconduct. To achieve this goal, the study starts by defining scientific fraud and then scrutinizes the idealistic conceptualizations of the normative structure of science in order to determine whether these are presently applicable or not. Finally, the paper addresses several potential motivational factors leading scientists to commit fraud and demonstrates that certain aspects of the scientific structure rather than the individual make such acts possible or even likely. Although a precise definition is lacking, by scientific fraud we understand an act of deception whereby one's work or the work of others is consciously and intentionally misrepresented. It belongs to the wider category of scientific misconduct, defined as deviation from accepted ethical practices for proposing, conducting, and reporting research.1 Scientific fraud may

  • Word count: 3935
  • Level: University Degree
  • Subject: Biological Sciences
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Paper review - Social cognition & the human brain.

Paper reviewed by Melanie Darwood as part of the requirement for Cognitive Anthropology module, BSc Cognitive Science. Paper Title: Social Cognition & the Human Brain, Written by Ralph Adolphs, from Trends in Cognitive Sciences. Humans are extremely social animals, but the neural foundations of social cognition & behaviour aren't well understood. Studies have highlighted structures that have a key role in guiding social behaviour, including the amygdale, ventromedial frontal cortices & right somatosensory-related cortex. They appear to act as a go-between between perceptual representations & retrieval of knowledge. Social cognition refers to processes that subserve behaviour in response to conspecifics (that is, other individuals of the same species) particularly those concerned with the varied & flexible social behaviours found in primates. It is suggested that humans' unique cognitive skills can be traced to development in an environment in which there was a reward for social skills. To support this there is correlation between group size & the ratio of neo-cortex volume to the rest of the brain among numerous primate species, also for other mammals that have a complex social structure. Another suggestion is that brain size correlates with other factors, such as tool use, longevity or dietary foraging strategy, but brain size could be a partial result of primates

  • Word count: 976
  • Level: University Degree
  • Subject: Biological Sciences
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Strategies to Address Bullying.

Strategies to Address Bullying * Class Brainstorming - Define - Different types of bullying - Some examples of these * Our Definition * Types of bullying and examples * Why some children bully * How to recognise a bully- seven elements * How to recognise a victim- signs of a bullied child * Group work- Scenarios * Strategies to support bullies- how to prevent bullying * Strategies to support victims * Why children with special needs may be bullied * Effects of bullying * Group work- Creative tasks * Conclusion OUR DEFINITION Bullying involves the psychological, emotional, social or physical harassment of one or more person by another individual or group. It includes behaviours and actions that are verbal, physical and/or antisocial. Different types of bullying There are four main categories that types of bullying come under. These being: psychological, emotional, social and physical harassment. Some examples of different types of bullying Emotional and Psychological- This can include: name calling, intimidation, verbal teasing, and gestures that imply later violence Verbal- This can include: laughing, giggling, whispering, yelling, verbal threats, spreading rumours, name calling, Social- This can include: exclusion, name calling, teasing, ignoring, mimicking, nasty notes, pointing, staring, making faces, spreading rumours, demanding money or

  • Word count: 2484
  • Level: University Degree
  • Subject: Biological Sciences
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Why do different approaches in social psychology use different methods to study social phenomena?

Why do different approaches in social psychology use different methods to study social phenomena? Allport, 1935, (Hogg et al., 2005, pp.4) has defined social psychology as 'the scientific investigation of how the thoughts, feelings and behaviours of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined or implied presence of others'. Many believe that all social psychology is experimental social psychology, however social psychology is split into two: the experimental and the constructionist. The experimental approach is often referred to as the nomothetic tradition, as it aims to develop general laws of social psychology. In contrast the social constructionist approach grows out of the hermeneutic tradition, where it seeks the meanings of behaviour, and seeks to interpret the significance of action in relation to the contexts of behaviour. Social psychology therefore employs numerous methods of scientific investigation, depending on the approach to study social phenomena. The choice of an appropriate method is determined by a range of factors to do with the nature of the hypothesis under investigation, and resources available for doing the research (e.g. time, money, participants) and the ethics of the method. A popular method to studying social phenomena is the experimental approach, as it allows the experimenter to make casual interferences. It answers casual questions,

  • Word count: 1659
  • Level: University Degree
  • Subject: Biological Sciences
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Discuss the nature, causes and consequences of bullying in schools.

Discuss the nature, causes and consequences of bullying in schools. Aggression is an intentional behaviour that causes or threatens to harm another or others and its' key element is intent. There are numerous different theories of aggression, which include developmental continuity (Loeber & Loeber, 1998), the theory applied by Lorenz (1969) which states that aggression is instinctive, the discharge model by Paul Kenyon and one of the most widely known, the Social Learning Theory of Albert Bandura (1973). All of the above theories can be applied to aggression and they contribute different concepts and intervention philosophies. 'A student is being bullied or victimised when he or she is exposed repeatedly over time to negative action on the part of one or more other students.' (Olweus, D., 1993, pg. 9). It is necessary to distinguish between direct and indirect bullying. Direct bullying is when a person more or less opens attack on another child. Indirect is when a child will deliberately isolate or exclude another child from areas such as social groups or games. As indirect bullying is less visible due to it being less physical, it is very important that it is not ignored. One half of all violence against teenagers occurs in schools (NIDR, 1999, as cited in Weinhold & Weinhold, 2000) and it is thought that 80 to 90 percent of adolescents report some form of

  • Word count: 2631
  • Level: University Degree
  • Subject: Biological Sciences
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According to attribution theorists the laypersons judgments of others are biased

Social Psychology 1PSY514 According to attribution theorists the layperson's judgments of others are biased. Discuss the evidence for supposing that these biases are inevitable. Attribution theory is a social psychology theory developed by Fritz Heider in 1958 who was the first to propose this psychological theory, he saw people as lay psychologists that are trying to establish causal explanations noting that there are two consequences of the attribution process, the internal and external attribution. Internal assumes that the cause of behaviour is within the person and the external that the cause of behaviour is outside of the person , for example other people or other factors within the environment. Attribution theory is concerned with how individuals understand events and how this relates to their behavior , stating that people try to determine why other individuals do what they do by giving causal explanations. A person that seeks to understand the reason why another person did something may attribute more than one causes to that behavior. During attribution there are three stages a person must undergo in order to finalize their explanation, firstly the person must observe the behavior, secondly the person must be sure that the event that took place was intentionally performed and then the person have to end to a conclusion if the other person was forced to

  • Word count: 1942
  • Level: University Degree
  • Subject: Biological Sciences
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