A-Level Psychology (AQA)

Topic Summaries

Attachment

Animal studies in attachment

  • 👥 Lorenz (1935): Imprinting in geese
    • Lorenz collected gosling eggs and split them into two groups – he returned one group back to their mother and incubated the other group. When hatched, the first thing the incubated goslings saw was him, so viewed him as their ‘mother’ and followed him everywhere.
    • To test if they’d imprinted on him, he took the goslings back to the pond that they came from and reunited them with their biological mother. When Lorenz attempted to leave, the goslings followed him instead. They did not recognise nor attach to their biological mother.
    • From this study, he established a critical period of 2 days when animals imprint. If they do not imprint within these days, they will not at all.
    • He concluded that imprinting is innate and irreversible. It’s used to bond with an adult caregiver in order for survival.
    • Evaluation of Lorenz
      • Recent studies have shown imprinting could be reversible. It could be a learnt process rather than an innate mechanism.
      • Generalisability: many psychologists debate whether studies on birds can be generalised to humans due to the lack of similarity between species. Many argue this research is useless and does not account for the complexity of human emotions and relationships.
  • 👥 Harlow (1959): Contact comfort in Rhesus monkeys
    • Harlow created two artificial mothers for baby monkeys which he had orphaned. These mothers had different roles – one was cloth to provide comfort and the other was made of wire but had a feeding bottle. He recorded the amount of time that the baby’s would spend on each.
    • He discovered that the baby monkeys spent the most time with the cloth mother as they sought out comfort when scared. These monkeys all developed abnormally due to a lack of biological mother and socialisation with other monkeys. As a result of this, they could never socialise normally with other monkeys. When approached by other monkeys, they reacted anxiously.
    • From his research, he developed a critical period of 3 months when attachment should be developed. If the attachment was formed later, there would be irreversible, harmful effects.
    • Harlow concluded that attachment wasn’t based on food, but rather on a parent’s ability to provide love and comfort.
    • Evaluation of Harlow’s research:
      • Ethical issues: Harlow has been criticised for animal cruelty. He orphaned newborn monkeys which lead them to grow abnormally. He would purposely scare them in order to test his hypothesis, causing psychological distress to the animals.
      • Confounding variable: this research has also been criticised for its lack of similarity in the shape of the fake mother’s heads as the cloth mother looked more appealing. Therefore, the experiment has been criticised for not being standardised enough.
      • Generalisability: despite monkeys being genetically close to humans, people still question whether animal studies should be generalised to humans given our different levels of emotional complexity.

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