In this section:
- The learning theory explanation of attachment including operant conditioning – positive reinforcement & negative reinforcement)
- Classical conditioning – UCS, NS, UCR, CS, CR
- Bowlby’s evolutionary theory of attachment: SO MAGIC! Social releasers, monotropy, adaptive advantage, good quality care, IWM, critical period
- Fox (1977) – Bowlby’s theory is less ethnocentric
- Kagan (1984) temperament hypothesis
Learning Theory (Behaviourist Approach)
Classical conditioning
This offers a very simple explanation of how food provides attachment. The child simply associates food and mother together, much as Pavlov’s dogs associated bell and food together.
If you want this in technical terms:
At the outset, mother is a neutral stimulus (NS) who produces no response (pleasure)
However, because she is continually paired with the unconditioned stimulus (food) she slowly becomes associated with it until eventually mother alone can produce pleasure.
Mother has now become a conditioned stimulus (CS) and the pleasure she brings is a conditioned response (CR).
The learning / behaviourist theory of attachment suggest that attachment is a set of learned behaviours. The basis for the learning of attachments is the provision of food. An infant will initially form an attachment to whoever feeds it.
They learn to associate the feeder (usually the mother) with the comfort of being fed and through the process of classical conditioning, come to find contact with the mother comforting.
The attachment is due to a learned association between mother and the bringer of pleasure (food).
Operant conditioning
Certain behaviours (e.g. crying, smiling) bring desirable responses from others (e.g. attention, comfort), and through the process of operant conditioning learn to repeat these behaviours in order to get the things they want. For example the child is positively reinforced to cry, as the carer appears and removes something unpleasant (such as a soiled nappy) and so learns to cry again – negative reinforcement.
In addition, when the child is cold and hungry it cries. This is unpleasant for the mother (punishment) who is likely to feed and cuddle the child. The child stopping crying acts as a negative reinforcer for the mother (something unpleasant has been taken away). Negative reinforcers make the mother’s behaviour, feeding and cuddling, more likely in future!
In both classical and operant explanations the attachment is formed because the child seeks the person providing the food.
Social Learning Theory (SLT) – Note: This is an additional theory that you could learn.
This is similar in some respects to learning theory, in that both emphasise the role of reinforcement (an action that is rewarded being more likely to be repeated). However, SLT emphasises the role of imitation. We watch others and if they are rewarded for their behaviour we are likely to copy it ourselves. Hay and Vespo (1988) suggested that attachments develop because parents teach their children to love them. This can be achieved in three ways:
Modelling: children copy the affectionate behaviour that they see between their parents.
Direct instruction: parents teach their children to be affectionate.
Social facilitation: parents watch their children and encourage appropriate behaviours.
Evaluation:
Strengths:
- Research to support: Dollard & Miller (1950) argued that in their first year, babies are fed 2,000 times, generally by their main carer, which creates ample opportunity for the carer to become associated with the positive experience of being fed, a form of positive reinforcement.
- Research to support: The learning theory is plausible and scientific because it is based on an established theory that has supporting evidence. Pavlov found that when a NS – Bell was paired with UCS – food, it leads to the UCR – salivating. This can be applied to explaining attachment because the NS of the Mum, is paired with UCS – food, which leads to UCR – baby is happy. This improves the credibility of the learning theory as there is a clear application to explaining how attachments are formed.
- Usefulness: By understanding how attachments are formed, we can encourage certain behaviours. For example, making sure that fathers have an opportunity to feed the baby so that they can develop a healthy attachment with their child.
Weakness:
- Research to oppose: Schaffer & Emerson (1964) found that many of the babies developed a primary attachment to their biological mother, even when other carers did most of the feeding.
- Research to oppose: Harlow’s Monkey study – Harlow found when a baby monkey was placed with a wire monkey with food and a cloth monkey without food – the monkeys spent most of their time with cloth mother. This proves that food is not as important and contact comfort was the most important factor in the development of an attachment. Evidence to oppose – reduces the credibility of the learning approach because clearly food is not the only factor in building attachment. When frightened they always sought comfort on the cloth mum, not the one that fed them!
- Reductionist: As always the behaviourist explanation is reductionist because it takes a complex human behaviour and tries to explain it in the simplest terms possible. It does not consider any internal processes or seek to explain the emotional nature of attachments simply how they arise as behaviours. The behaviourist theories of attachments are sometimes referred to as cupboard love theories because of their emphasis on food and feeding. In the Tronick study a mother firstly engages with the child, and then pulls a still face. The baby tries to reengage the mother, and when they fail, they become upset and distressed. When the mother begins to communicate again, the baby returns to a happy state. This shows the importance of interactional synchrony in building attachment, it is not all about food. Humans more complex and factors such as social and emotional connection are clearly involved in the formations of attachment. Harlow supports this idea too.
- Alternative explanation: Bowlby’s evolutionary theory. Bowlby believed that attachments were formed in order to aid survival. Concepts such as monotropy and social releasers support this innate theory of attachment. The learning theory not only ignores the complexity of human attachment, it also ignored biological factors. You can never separate nature from nurture, so to assume that attachments are purely nurture is unlikely to provide a full explanation.
Bowlby (Biological Approach) – Why do attachments form?
Bowlby believed that children come into the world biologically pre-programmed to form attachments with others, because this will help them to survive.
Bowlby worked for many years as a child psychoanalyst and he liked the work of Lorenz on the innate nature of bonds through imprinting and combined these two very different ideas to produce his own evolutionary theory of attachments. Bowlby believed that attachment is innate and adaptive. We are all born with an inherited need to form attachments and this is to help us survive. In line with Darwin’s theory of natural selection, any behaviour that helps you survive to maturity and reproduce yourself will be maintained in the gene pool. In human terms, the newborn infant is helpless and relies on its mother for food, warmth etc. Similarly the mother inherits a genetic blueprint that predisposes her to loving behaviour towards the infant.
Adaptive Advantage:
Bowlby believed that an attachment promotes survival which in turn leads to increased chances of reproduction and passing on your genes:
- Safety: the attachment keeps mother and child close to each other. Separation results in feelings of anxiety.
- Safe base for exploration: the child is happy to wander and explore (necessary for its cognitive development) knowing it has a safe place to return to if things turn nasty. This also develops independence necessary in later life.
Bowlby’s Evolutionary Explanation – How do attachments form?
Social releasers:
He also believed that babies are born with the tendency to display certain innate behaviours (called social releasers) which help ensure proximity and contact with the mother or attachment figure. These are the cute behaviours that babies do that make us want to be close with them and look after them (e.g., crying, smiling, crawling, etc.)
It seems that adults are genetically primed to respond to these releasers by offering care and affection ‘Babies’ smiles are powerful things leaving mothers spellbound and enslaved. Who can doubt that the baby who most readily rewards his mother with a smile is the one who is best loved and best cared for?’ (Bowlby 1957).
Tronick’s still-face experiments highlight the importance of social releasers. When mum stops interacting and maintains a ‘still-face’ the child clearly shows distress and makes desperate attempts to elicit a response.
Monotropy:
Bowlby suggested that a child would initially form only one primary attachment (monotropy) and that the attachment figure acted as a secure base for exploring the world. The attachment relationship acts as a prototype for all future social relationships so disrupting it can have severe consequences.
The argument here is not as straight forward as it first appears. On the face of it the debate is between many attachments or just the one. However, Bowlby, who was in the ‘one’ camp, did not actually believe that only one attachment was formed, rather that there was only one primary attachment. The ‘many attachments’ approach believes there are many attachments and that they are all similarly important to the child. The text also claims that Bowlby did not believe that the main attachment had to be the mother, saying that his words ‘maternal’ and ‘mothering’ were not intended to mean mother!
Bowlby (1969) claimed that there was a hierarchy of attachments, with a primary caregiver, usually the mother at the top. The Efe, an African tribe, share the care of their children so that women in the village breast feed each another’s children. However, the infants still go on to form their primary attachment with their biological mother!
Guaranteed care
This is all about quality not quantity of care. So mothers are responsive to their child’s needs and are constant and predictable. Separation from the mother makes the child feel anxious and should be avoided most of the time.
Critical Period/Sensitive Period :
A Critical period is where babies must form an attachment within the first 2 years, an attachment would never occur and their are risks of damaging the child socially, emotionally and intellectually.
Later on Bowlby revised his theory and called it a a Sensitive period. A child is maximally sensitive up to the age of 2, but it was still possible to form an attachment up to the age of 5 years. However it becomes more difficult for the child to form a first attachment after 2 years.
Internal Working Model:
The internal working model is a schema. The IWM provides a template and a set of expectations for future relationships. For example, a secure attachment leads to greater emotional and social stability as an adult, whereas an insecure attachment is likely to lead to difficulties with later relationships. This longer-term effect is the continuity hypothesis.
Memory strategy for Bowlby’s evolutionary explanation:
So MAGIC!
So – Social Releasers: Crying and looking cute
M – Monotropy: Forming one special attachment, but you also have multiple attachments with others.
A – Adaptive Advantage: Attachments enable us to effectively adapt to our environment e.g. learning to walk and being fed so that we are more likely to survive, use mother as a safe base for exploration and safety in general in order to survive (Evolution)
G – Good quality care: This is all about quality not quantity of care. So mothers are responsive to their child’s needs and are constant and predictable. Separation from the mother is not recommended.
I – Internal Working Model: Your first attachment forms a template (schema) for your adult relationships in the future
C – Critical period/Sensitive period: Babies must form an attachment within the first 2 years, otherwise their are risks of damaging the child socially, emotionally and intellectually. Bowlby viewed this as more of a sensitive period in that if an attachment is not formed it becomes ever more difficult for the child to form a first attachment.
In summary:
- Babies are cute
- Cuteness makes it easier to form an attachment to them
- They attach to one primary care giver – mother – during a critical ‘innate’ period.
- She is a secure base acting as protection from the world around us.
- Protection + food = survival
- Survival means the species lives on. Hurrah!
Evaluation:
Strengths:
- Usefulness: Bowlby’s theory has been widely applied in practical situations, particularly in hospitals, children’s homes and fostering policy. A piece of research by Rutter on Romanian orphans support this. He found that children exposed to long periods of Institutionalisation are more to suffer long-term effects to their emotional and intellectual development. Children are more likely to make a full recovery if adopted into a caring environment at an earlier age. Those who were adopted before the age of 6 months had the most positive outcomes. This is a key strength of Bowlby’s critical period theory as it means it can be used to ensure that children are adopted as early as possible in order to avoid negative outcomes in the child’s future.
- Research to support: Further research to support the idea of the critical period, for example Harlow’s monkeys – studies where they placed the monkey in cages. The extent of the abnormal behaviour reflected the length of the isolation. Those kept in isolation for 3 months and returned to a socialised group of monkeys were the least affected, but those in isolation for a year never recovered the effects. This shows that there are numerous studies that support the existence of a critical period and that attachments aid survival.
- Research to support: Further research to support the existence of an internal working model can be found by the research by Grossman who found that positive playful relationships in infancy are a good predictor of positive relationships in the future. Bailey et al (2007) looked at 99 mothers who had 1 year old babies. They measured their infant’s attachment style using the strange situation and assessed the mothers attachment style with their own parents – using interviews. They found that if mothers described poor attachments about their own parents – they were also more likely to have children who were poorly attached in the observation. This association was also found in securely attached mother’s and babies.
Weaknesses:
- There is research to oppose: Bowlby’s monotropic theory Monotropy. Schaffer & Emerson found that multiple attachments are the norm and found that a significant minority of infants formed multiple attachments first.
- Socially Sensitive Research (SSR): Refers to research that could be used to discriminate against a group in society or perhaps put them at some sort of disadvantage. Even though individuals may not have been harmed in any way during the course of the study, the group(s) to which they belong may suffer as a result. Bowlby’s concept of monotropy and his emphasis on mothers as the primary caregiver suggests they should get the blame when parenting goes wrong or if the child’s development is in any way impaired. In addition, British soldiers returning from war found their jobs had been taken by women, working the fields and in factories. Bowlby’s research provided an ideal excuse to get women back into the home, caring for children and vacating jobs for the returning men. In short it was good for morale!
- Individual differences/Temperament hypothesis: Perhaps the reason for a relationship between early attachment and later relationships has nothing to do with the type of attachment formed. Kagan (1984) believed it was all down to the temperament of the child. Those who are naturally good at forming relationships do so early in life and form close relationships with parents and this is true later in life as well; because of their pleasant temperament they are more popular with people in later life too.
- Alternative explanation – Nature/Nurture: This theory underestimates the power of nurture and is too focused on the nature side of attachment. The learning theory provides an explanation which shows how attachments can be formed through a process of association and reinforcement. The baby learns to associate food with the mother. Therefore – Bowlby’s innate theory cannot provide a full explanation of attachment. It is impossible to separate nature from nurture and therefore a better explanation of attachment should take more of an interactionist approach.
Bowlby background – interest only, you don’t need to know this for your exams
John Bowlby’s father (Sir Anthony Bowlby) lost his own father at the age of five and spent much of the rest of his life caring for his mother (John’s grandma). John was reared by a nanny until the age of four when she left. According to Bowlby, his mother was cold and reacted to his needs in the very opposite way that you’d expect a mother to react. At the age of seven, John was sent to boarding school, so again was separated from friends and family. In the introduction to one of his many books Bowlby quotes Graham Greene;
‘Unhappiness in a child accumulates because he sees no end to the dark tunnel. The thirteen weeks of a term may just as well be thirteen years.’
It is very clear that his young life was not happy. He experienced many separations, including his father going off to war when he was seven. He studied psychology at Cambridge but took time off, spending six months in a school for maladjusted and delinquent children. He later referred to this as the most important six months of his life. Whilst there he noticed how many of the children had lost their mothers at a very young age.
He later trained in medicine but didn’t enjoy the experience of medical practice. In 1939 he raised concerns about the desirability of evacuating young children and separating them from their mothers.
CGS Psychology Blog: Mrs Harris & Miss D'Cruz 