A Level AQA Attachment (updated)

1. AQA A-Level Psychology:
Attachment
Ella Warwick

2. Specification
• Caregiver-infant interactions in humans: reciprocity and interactional
synchrony. Stages of attachment identified by Schaffer. Multiple
attachments and the role of the father.
• Animal studies of attachment: Lorenz and Harlow.
• Explanations of attachment: learning theory and Bowlby’s monotropic
theory. The concepts of a critical period and an internal working model.
• Ainsworth’s ‘Strange Situation’. Types of attachment: secure, insecure-
avoidant and insecure-resistant. Cultural variations in attachment,
including van Ijzendoorn.
• Bowlby’s theory of maternal deprivation. Romanian orphan studies: effects
of institutionalisation.
• The influence of early attachment on childhood and adult relationships,
including the role of an internal working model.

3. Caregiver-Infant Interactions
• Reciprocity - both being able to produce response from each other. E.g.
Smiling. Becomes the basis for development of basic trust.
• Interactional synchrony – mutual focus, reciprocity, mirroring of emotion
and behaviour. Like a conversation.
• Evans showed that infants who demonstrate a lot of interactional synchrony and
reciprocity from birth onwards have been found to have a better quality of
attachment when measured using the strange situation.
• Cause or effect?
• Observing movement doesn’t necessarily show, we don’t know what's going on inside the
child’s mind.
• Mother may not be being natural
• Controlled observations are used so everything seen and measured, child is not aware of it
being a lab study. High ecological validity.
• Real life application – shows importance of this communication.

4. Stages of attachment (Schaffer and Emerson)
• Group of working class women in Glasgow measured by diary entries. looked at infants response to separation situations. Attachment was
measured by whether child showed separation and stranger anxiety.
1. Stage 1- asocial attachment(0-2 months) – animate or inanimate object
2. Stage 2- indiscriminate attachment(2-7 months) – preference to people over objects, recognise familiar adults, don’t show either anxieties.
3. Stage 3- specific attachment(7-9 months) – primary attachment figure, shows separation and stranger anxiety.
4. Stage 4- multiple attachment(9+ months) – secondary attachments formed. Shows separation ad stranger anxiety.
• Pattern suggests its biologically controlled.
• Attachments form with person who responds accurately to babies signals.
• Natural environment as studied at home – ecological validity.
• Difficult to study a social stage as babies are immobile.
• Conflicting evidence on multiple attachment.
• Just because an infant gets upset when someone leaves doesn’t mean they are truly attached.
• Measuring just stranger an separation anxiety are limited behavioural measures.
• Self report social desirability – show children in a good light & good parenting skills.
• Carried out 1964 (temporal/historical validity) – children raised differently and father role is different.
• Only looked at working class families – low generalisability.
• Cultural – may only apply to individualistic cultures. In collectivist many carers may live together with child so multiple attachments early. –
ethnocentrism.

5. Role of the Father
• Primary attachment more likely with mother because:
• Cultural factors – men are providers
• Economic factors – men have to work to support family
• Social policies – paternal leave
• Biological factors – oestrogen levels (creates higher levels of nurturing)
• The child ( age, gender, temperament) – males may prefer the father, or with age become to
prefer the father.
• Role of father is changing as longer paternity leaves are allowed.
• The mother physically cares for the baby as well as emotionally (breast feeding).
• 75% have attachment to father by 18 months.
• Grossman – the better quality of play with father, the better the adolescent attachments.
• Lots of contrasting evidence.
• Socially sensitive research as says children without a father are at a disadvantage, and
parents wouldn’t want to hear they have bad relationships with their children.

6. Animal Studies
• Lorenz
• Imprinting is a form of attachment.
• Imprinting for goslings must occur in the critical period of between 4 and 25 hours after hatching.
• Low generalisability from bird to human
• Contradicting evidence – after birds fail to mate with humans they return to their own species – it
is not permanent.
• Real life application – orphan lambs wrapped in dead lambs fleece to be accepted by new mother.
• Harlow
• Monkeys choose contact comfort over the wire food producer. Contact comfort is related to
emotional security.
• More generalizable as they are primates but not the same species.
• Unethical? – monkeys suffered and would not develop socially normally. Was it worth it for the
practical application?
• Helps social workers understand child neglect.
• A mother should be introduced within the 90 days critical period.

7. Explanations for Attachment
• Learning theory – learning due to associations (classical), altering due to
reinforcements (operant).
• Classical conditioning – mother becomes conditioned stimulus from neutral and pleasure
becomes conditioned response to the mother.
• Operant conditioning – food is the primary reinforcer, caregiver is the secondary reinforcer
because it means we can get food.
• Lorenz evidence – they followed him before he fed them.
• Harlow evidence – monkeys became attached to the comfort giver not food giver.
• Schaffer & Emerson – babies attach to the more responsive parent not the feeder.
• Just talks about food, ignores reciprocity and intimacy (cupboard love).
• Maybe play and interaction are the unconditioned stimulus.
• Social learning theory (bandura) – learning what behaviours to repeat by
vicarious reinforcement.

8. Bowlby’s Theory of Attachment
• MASS SCIM (monotropy, adaptive and innate, sensitive period, secure base, social releasers, continuity hypothesis, internal working model, maternal
deprivation hypothesis)
• Adaptive – innate drive for attachment
• Lorenz and imprinting
• Social releasers – characteristics that elicit caregiving
• Brazleton et al – parents ignored babies and social releasers present.
• Critical period – the time within an attachment to form for one to form at all (before 6 months according to Bowlbey) otherwise serious psychological
problems will pursue.
• Lorenz & Harlow
• Should be called sensitive period as not end of world, but just more sensitive.
• Monotropy – primary caregiver centrally important
• Schaffer and Emerson did study and found primary attachment figure wasn’t always one that fed, but one that responded correctly.
• Internal working model (schema) – mental representation of how relationships should be by watching parental relationships.
• Longitudinal study showed continuity between early and later attachment.
• Rutter – multiple attachment model: there is no primary or secondary attachment, they are all equally important for different aspects.
• Role of temperament not just due to quality of attachment, Bowlby fails to acknowledge that an innate temperament exists.
• Monotropy is socially sensitive – mother is to blame if anything goes wrong.
• Psychological harm – any research on attachment is socially sensitive.

9. Ainsworth – Strange Situation
• Measures separation anxiety, stranger anxiety, reunion and secure base behaviour during 8 different scenarios.
• Attachment types:
• Secure(66%) – moderate anxiety, secure base behaviour, accept comfort.
• Insecure avoidant(22%) – no secure base, not phased by separation, little anxiety.
• Insecure resistant(12%) – seek greater proximity, huge anxiety, resist comfort.
• Prediction of later development – good validity
• Good inter-rater reliability (0.94)
• Takes place in controlled conditions
• Artificial situation
• Culturally bound
• Temperament?
• Disorganised attachment? – children display a mix of avoidant and resistant.
• Socially sensitive - upsetting for parent
• Ignores father figure
• Unethical to deliberately cause a child stress
• Are they looking at attachment or relationship
• Just one day, may have argued before?

10. Cultural Variations in Attachment
• Ijzendoorn & kroonenberg meta-analysis of cultural variation in attachment.
• Used Ainsworth’s study, looked at 32 countries results.
• Germany had high percentage of avoidant – children are taught to be independent.
• Japanese children are rarely left by their mother so experience more distress, they are
more clingy and labelled resistance
• Individualist vs collectivist cultures - there was a trend.
• Reflects different cultures rearing practices.
• Large samples – increased internal validity
• Unrepresentative sample – studied countries not cultures
• Method of assessment is biased - not relative to other cultures – imposed eitc
• Alternative explanation – differences reflect effects of media
• Reports of greater differences found within cultures than between them.

11. Bowlby’s Maternal Deprivation Hypothesis
• Bowlby saw the fist 2.5 years as the critical period, if the child is deprived of the
mother in this period, psychological damage was inevitable.
• 44 thieves study – 14 identified as affectionless psychopaths, 12 of those had
experienced prolonged separation for more than 6 months in the critical period.
• Leads to mental retardation, low IQ, poor social development, lack of empathy
and guilt (poor emotional development), immaturity
• Bowlby did the interviews and assessments himself so there may be bias.
• Bowlby drew on sources from ww2, the poor treatment may be the reason instead of
separation.
• Counterevidence.
• Damage is not inevitable and it is fixable (sensitive period not critical).
• Animal studies support – long term separation affects social development.
• Severe long term damage Bowlby associated with deprivation was actually a result of
privation.
• Deprivation is having an attachment then loosing it, privation is never having the attachment.

12. Romanian Orphan Studies -
Institutionalisation
• Institutionalised children show disinhibited attachment.
• In orphanages there was very little physical or emotional care, and horrific conditions.
• Longitudinal study, naturally occurring.
• 19% of institutionalised were found to have secure attachments compared to 75% control group. 65% had
disorganised attachment.
• Rutter et al. (1998) studied 111 Romanian orphans adopted before 2 years and British orphans adopted
before 6 months and found that the sooner the children were adopted, the faster their developmental
progress. By 4, most of the children adopted before 6 months had caught up with British adoptees. Many
adopted after showed disinhibited attachment.
• Real life application, improvements to institutional care
• Children have a key worker to avoid disinhibited attachment
• Few extraneous variables – increased internal validity
• Conditions cannot be applied to understanding better institutional care – lack generalisability.
• Children adopted earlier may have been more sociable (not randomly assigned)
• Factors that influence recovery
• Quality of care in institution
• Age when removed
• Quality of care after
• Experiences in later life.

13. Influence on Later Relationships
• Internal working model – primary attachment forms mental template of relationships.
Quality of first attachment is crucial.
• The love quiz (Hazel and Shaver) – an assessment of attachment type and a love
experience questionnaire.
• Found evidence to support IWM.
• Cause and effect is not clear in the correlation.
• McCarthy – studied women who had attachment types distinguished when younger –
found correlation.
• Zimerman – found very little correlation
• Self report techniques are subject to demand characteristics and social desirabiltity.
• Relies on recollection of childhood – low validity
• Role of temperament?
• With self report we are relying on conscious understanding of relationships when IWM
are unconscious.