Attachment is on the Specification so every candidate learns it and the Examiner will expect you to know it in detail. The Specification identifies BOWLBY and AINSWORTH as researchers into attachment, but candidates aiming for the highest bands should be familiar with other researchers too, such as Robertson, Spitz, Lorenz and Harlow. Theories of PRIVATION and DEPRIVATION also draw on the theory of attachment, making this topic area even more important.

ATTACHMENT

In Unit 2, Child Psychology expects all students to know about attachment and the linked topics of privation and deprivation.
Attachment is the bond between an animal and its parent - usually its mother. It is vital in learning and in social development and it seems to have effects which carry on into adult life. Attachment is observed in all animals.

The term "attachment" was coined by British psychologist John Bowlby who defined it as:
the lasting psychological connectedness between human beings - John Bowlby
Bowlby's work was followed up by Mary Ainsworth:
Attachment is a deep and enduring emotional bond that connects one person to another across time and space - Mary Ainsworth

STAGES OF ATTACHMENT

Rudolph Schaffer & Peggy Emerson (1964) studied 60 babies at monthly intervals for the first 18 months of life. This is a longitudinal study. The children were all studied in their own home. They observed attachment develop through these stages:.

The most important factor in attachment in humans is not who feeds the child but who plays and communicates with the child. Responsiveness is vital for attachment.

THEORIES OF ATTACHMENT
FREUD'S PSYCHODYNAMIC PERSPECTIVE

In Unit 1, you studied Freud's psychodynamic theory of aggression. It would be good to revise that while learning psychodynamic ideas of attachment.
Sigmund Freud was one of the first psychologists to consider attachment in humans as an explanation of lifelong behaviours. Freud's psychodynamic theory proposes that our personality forms through our childhood relationship with our parents.
  • In the first months of life, we develop an id - the instincts for pleasure and survival
  • In the second year of life, the ego develops - the self-aware part of the mind that can understand reality
  • Around the fifth year of life, the super-ego forms - this is the moral part of the mind that experiences guilt and shame
The super-ego is particularly linked to our parents. Freud argues that we internalise the values of our same-sex parents (girls' mothers, boys' fathers) but that this process is difficult and full of conflict - he calls it the "Oedipus Complex".
  • An under-developed super-ego can leave us without clear moral values, but haunted by a need for punishment and domination by others
  • An over-developed super-ego can leave us with incredibly strict values, but tormented by feelings of shame and worthlessness
Many psychologists were impressed by Freud's focus on early childhood as the source of later problems, but found his ideas of an unconscious mind and an Oedipus Complex too unscientific. John Bowlby adopted Freud's focus on child-parent relationships but adopted a more scientific and measurable approach.

ROBERTSON'S "A TWO-YEAR-OLD GOES TO HOSPITAL"

James Robertson was a research colleague of Bowlby's who had also worked with Freud's daughter, Anna Freud. Robertson studied children at Anna Freud's children's hospital and noticed the distress they showed when they were separated from their mothers. He made a film about a 2-year-old girl called Laura who was in hospital for an operation. The film proposed the view (which wasn't widely accepted at the time) that children suffered when their attachment figure wasn't near.
WHAT? Did people in the early 20th century really not notice that their children got upset when they were apart? Remember that the middle and upper classes routinely employed nannies or sent their children to boarding schools (Bowlby went to a boarding school and hated it), so the idea that this might be bad for children was slow to take hold
Robertson's study of Laura was a case study and a naturalistic observation. He kept the procedure scientific by sampling the girl's behaviour at random intervals over 8 days. He concluded that when the child was separated from the attachment figure, there were three stages:
  1. Protest: the child cries and throws tantrums, showing anger and fear
  2. Despair: crying becomes intermittent and the child seems to be settling down, but distress is really deepening
  3. Detachment: the child seems content but really the attachment is breaking and long-term emotional damage may take place
This is the PDD (Protest - Despair - Detachment) model of separation.
1-minute extract from Robertson's film A Two-Year-Old Goes to Hospital (1953)

SPITZ'S INSTITUTIONALISED CHILDREN

René Spitz (1946) studied children in hospitals and identified that they became depressed when away from their attachment figure.

Spitz concluded that if an infant forms an attachment with the mother in the first 6 months of life, the child will develop in a healthy way. If the attachment is broken (such as by a stay in hospital) then the child suffers anaclitic depression - the infants wastes away emotionally, socially and physically and can even die.
Anaclitic depression is depression brought on by separation from an attachment-figure. You can add this to your understanding of the non-biological explanations for depression in Clinical Psychology.
Short breaks in attachment can be recovered from; if the child is reunited with its mother it re-attaches in a couple of months. However, longer detachment can become severe and Spitz terms this HOSPITALISM. Three months seems to be the crucial period: before that time, the child will try to form attachments with nurses and carers and cling to them, but after that the child becomes severely depressed and withdraws. These hospitalised children lose weight and stop showing facial expression; they refuse to interact with carers or playmates.
This 7-minute film of Spitz's research has no sound - but students could use it for their observation practical
Spitz didn't just blame hospitalism on separation from the attachment figure. He also blamed lack of stimulation in hospitals where there was nothing for the child to look at or play with. He linked this to institutionalised children having low IQs.

In 1990, after the fall of Romania's Communist regime, thousands of orphans were discovered living neglected in state orphanages in shocking conditions. The mental states of these Romanian orphans resembled Spitz's description of hospitalism.
A surviving Romanian orphan looks back on the experience of growing up institutionalised - damaged by growing up in an institution

THEORIES OF ATTACHMENT
THE EVOLUTIONARY BASIS

In Unit 1, you studied evolution as part of the Biological Approach, as an explanation of aggression. You should revise it now as an explanation of attachment.
Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution proposes that humans have evolved from ape-like ancestors and will therefore develop in ways similar to other animals. Attachment may be a survival traits - something that makes a creature more likely to survive and grow up to reproduce. Animals that have genes that favour attachment have an advantage over animals that don't - they are more likely to be cared for and protected by their parents. They are also more likely to suffer psychologically and physically without their parent's presence, but overall there are more advantages than disadvantages to attachment.

Genes that encourage survival traits become more common within a population over time. Today, all humans (and other animals) are descended from ancestors that have these genes.
The study of behaviour from an evolutionary viewpoint is ETHOLOGY and one of the most famous ethologists to study attachment is Karl Lorenz. Lorenz noticed that ducks and geese, when hatched, follow the first moving object they see; this is called imprinting.
Usually, ducklings imprint on their mother, but occasionally they can imprint on another animal or a human, with comical results.
Human infants don't "imprint" on a mother as immediately and as dramatically as ducklings, but something similar does go on in a subtle way. John Bowlby combined this insight from ethology with Freud's insight from psychodynamic theory to create his own maternal deprivation hypothesis.

HARLOW'S MONKEYS

Harry Harlow is notorious in the history of Psychology for his experiments on rhesus monkeys to explore attachment. These infant monkeys were taken away from their mothers and encouraged to become attached to two models known as surrogates (replacements):
  • The wire mother was a metal frame that provided milk through a teat
  • The cloth mother did not provide milk but was wrapped in a soft terry cloth that provided comfort
Harlow observed that monkeys that had access to both surrogates developed into healthier adults than those who only had access to a wire surrogate. This shows that attachment is not just about food (which the wire mother provided), but emotional comfort as well. When Harlow used loud noises and lights to frighten the monkeys, those with access to a cloth mother would run to 'her' for comfort then show courage; those with no cloth mother would simply cower.
Harlow's experiments revealed a great deal about attachment but were condemned for the unethical treatment of animals - which verged on the sadistic.
John Bowlby was inspired by Harlow's ideas (but not his methods) and concluded that the protest stage when infants are separated from their attachment figure might also be a survival trait - the loud protest attracts the attention of the caregiver and (hopefully) brings her back.

EVALUATING THEORIES OF ATTACHMENT
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Credibility
The research by Robertson and by Spitz used naturalistic observation - real children in real hospitals - carried out with standardised procedures that reduced researcher effects.

Robertson's film can be watched today and his conclusions checked. Robertson replicated his procedure with later observations of other children undergoing short term separation and deprivation and he observed the same responses (distress, despair, detachment).

Spitz also replicated his research on other children and carried out longitudinal research, measuring changes to children's IQ scores over time, which supports his hypothesis that long term separation and deprivation is particularly harmful, especially when there is a lack of stimulation as well as attachment.

Harlow's research was also standardized and objective (so much so that it appears particularly callous and cruel today). The fearful reactions of the rhesus monkeys clinging to the cloth mother for comfort have face validity (it's clear that the monkeys are frightened). Rhesus monkeys share 93% of their genes with humans, which justifies generalising from infant monkeys to infant humans, to some extent.

Schaffer & Emerson (1964) found that human babies form attachments to other people beside their mother (like the father, uncles, big sisters) - this backs up Harlow's conclusion that attachment isn't just about a source of food.
Objections
Naturalistic observations in hospitals suffer problems of reliability, because the children will be affected by other people (visitors, the behaviour of nurses and doctors) as well as the situation itself (like being sick and undergoing an operation). There's even a tendency for the children to form attachments to the researchers. This weakens the conclusions that can be drawn from Robertson's and Spitz's research into attachment.

Spitz's research suffers from particular problems because it is hard to measure IQ reliably in very young children. Unlike Robertson, Spitz didn't use careful sampling and controls; he focused on children who already seemed to be suffering problems in hospital (rather than a representative sample of all the children in hospital) and he based his measures of distress and IQ on personal observations and interviews rather than anything objective. This means Spitz's research may reflect his own beliefs and prejudices rather than attachment.

Harlow's research lacked ecological validity because he kept the rhesus monkeys in strange and unnatural conditions - nothing about their life and experience was 'normal' for a monkey. Some of his test monkeys were the offspring of earlier test monkeys, so Harlow's lab was all they had ever known.

Despite the 93% similarity in genes, humans and rhesus monkeys differ in 7% of their genome and this might include important genes for development and attachment. Generalising from rhesus monkeys to human infants might not be meaningful.
Of course, Harlow's research was horribly unethical too - but be careful about raising this because the poor ethics of a piece of research doesn't damage its scientific conclusions. Harlow might be right about attachment even though he was wrong for treating the monkeys that way.
Differences
The psychodynamic and evolutionary explanations of attachment can be contrasted.

Both theories are different from the previously-accepted behavioral theory of attachment (Dollard & Miller, 1950),  which downplayed the child’s bond with their mother.  The behavioral theory of attachment stated that the child learns to be attached to the mother because she feeds the infant - therefore, anyone who feeds the infants fulfills its needs for attachment.

The psychodynamic explanations focus on human emotions and assume that infants have essentially the same emotions as adults, possibly even more intense, but that they express those emotions differently because of their lack of language or social skills. These explanations are "human-centred" and reject animal studies as unrepresentative. They focus strongly on the mother-child relationship, suggesting that the mother provides emotional comfort for the infant that other caregivers (like fathers) cannot.

Evolutionary explanations focus on behaviour rather than emotion. They identify attachment as a behaviour that has survival value and comes from genes. These explanations are not "human-centred" because they apply to all living creatures. As a result, animal studies can tell us a lot about attachment in humans. They suggest that "surrogates" can provide some of what the infant needs (so, for example, a father could be the caregiver for an infant just as well as a mother), however the infant needs more than just food from a caregiver, but also a sense of security.

John Bowlby combined both explanations in his maternal deprivation hypothesis.
Applications
Robertson's 1953 film led to changes in how hospitals treat sick children. In 1953, hospital visiting times usually involved just two hours on a Sunday - some hospitals (such as St Thomas's, London) didn't allow any visitors at all for the first month (but parents could come in and watch their baby sleeping).

In NHS hospitals today, there are usually open visiting hours every day and parents can stay overnight, sleeping beside the child in a reclining chair. This is a direct application of Robertson's research. Hospitals usually provide a play room for children and trained play assistants to make sure they are stimulated. This is an application of Spitz's research.