1. Unit one AQA A psychology
Attachment key study
summary revision

2. Attachment key study summaries
The two theories of attachment to learn are
 Bowlby’s evolutionary theory
 Dollard and Miller’s learning theory

3. Bowlby
His theory consists of 4 main points
 That attachments are innate
 That there is a critical / sensitive period
 Continuity
 Monotropy

4. Bowlby
 Innate is proven by Lorenz’s imprinting
geese, that followed and formed an
attachment with Lorenz from birth, proving
that attachment is in fact innate (we are born
with it)
 Although this was carried out on animals
which could be tricky to generalise to
humans

5. Bowlby
 The critical period is under the age of 2 years
old
 It is proven in Rutter's Romanian Orphans
study, in which the neglected children in the
orphanage had problems forming
attachments with their new adopted families
if they were over the age of 2

6. Bowlby
 Continuity is proven in Hazan and Shaver’s
Love quiz
 It showed that those whom had secure
relationships with their parents when they
were younger were able to create new
relationships far more easier later in their
adult lives, proving that childhood
attachments do matter

7. Bowlby
 Monotropy is putting attachments into a
hierarchy with having one primary
attachment (mum) and several others
 This was proven in the study of Tronick’s Efe
Tribe in Congo where all of the women
breast fed each others children, but despite
this the children still only formed on primary
attachment, this disproves the learning
theory of Dollard and Miller

8. Dollard and Miller
Learning theory consisted of two types of
conditioning
 Operant conditioning
 Classical conditioning

9. Dollard and Miller
Classical conditioning can be seen in the
example of Pavalov's Dogs
 Dog is hungry
 Salivates when sees food
 Bell is run each time before food arrives
 Take food out of the equation
 And the dog still salivates when bell rings
Continued on next slide

10. Dollard and Miller
… so if a baby (like the dog) learns to associate
Mother (like the bell) with food the baby will
form an attachment to mother

11. Dollard and Miller
Operant conditioning is the association
between a behaviour and a consequence to
teach children how to behave through either
reward or punishment

12. The next part of attachment is
Privation
Deprivation studies:
 Genie and Rutter’s Romanian Orphans
(you’ll find some studies can be related to
more than one part of attachment, chose
those ones to learn as you wont have as
many to memorise)

13. Genie
 She was kept in a room from being a baby
 Her parents neglected her, wouldn’t talk or
communicate with her
 She was taped to a commode for most of her
younger years
 She was beaten if she made noises
 Her younger brother was told to feed her
baby food as her diet

14. Genie
 When she was found by social services it
was reported that she looked like a 6 year old
when her actual age was 13
 She could only communicate through
animalistic grunts
 When taught how to speak by psychologists
she couldn’t form whole sentences as she
just didn’t understand how to

15. Genie
 When se was found she started to form
attachments with the psychologists as they
spent a lot of time with her helping her
 But when they were finished she was moved
around short term foster families in which
she was abused further
 She was unable to form attachments in foster
care

16. Genie
 Unfortunately further research was cut off
when genie’s mother regained custody of
her, they moved away and nobody has heard
of them since

17. Rutter’s Romanian Orphans
 In an over crowded orphanage in Romania
children were taken away and adopted into
English families
 The children were kept fed, clothed and
warm in the orphanage but due to
overcrowding it meant that thee children
were unable to get attention from adults, or
form attachments

18. Rutter’s Romanian Orphans
 It was found that the children that were
adopted under the age of 2 years settled in
lovely into their new homes and formed
attachments with their new parents with no
problems
 But those that were over the age of 2 were
resistant and angry about moving, they had
problems forming attachments

19. Short evaluation of the two
 In the case of Genie, she is a case study,
case studies are individual and unique
therefore cannot be generalised or applied to
other situations
 The two studies are observations, meaning
high validity as the experimenter did not
manipulate any variables

20. The next section of attachment is
Deprivation
Use the case studies of Robertson and
Robertson
The first case study is of a 2 year old girl who
was in hospital for 2 weeks
 Her moods swung from being calm and
being distressed, she would beg to go home,
but in the end came to terms with staying

21. Robertson and Robertson
The next case study is of John
 While his mother was giving birth to his sibling he
was sent to stay at a 9 day nursery
 The nurses were too busy to give him the amount of
attention that he wanted
 So he cried and began to refuse food
 Once her went home her became very resistant to
his mother, he would kick and shout when she
picked him up and reject her cuddles

22. Robertson and Robertson
Finally is the case study of Jane, Kate, Lucy and
Thomas
 They went into foster care for 2 weeks
 Their dad visits regularly
 They showed signs of distress at first, being
disobedient, crying, anger
 But when it was time to go home they seemed to
have formed a bond with the foster mother, and once
home rejected cuddles from parents

23. The next part of attachment is
Types
 For this you will have to learn Ainsworth and Bell’s
Strange Situation
 They took 100 middle class American infants
 They then put them in a room with their mothers, then
observed their reactions when their mother left the room
and when she came back
 They observed how the child reacted when a stranger
made contact with them both with and without their
mother in the room with them
 They also observed whether the baby was comfortable to
explore the room using mum as a safe base to come
back to if they get scared

24. Ainsworth and Bell’s Strange Situation
 They then came up with 3 groups of
attachment to put the infants into
 A) Insecure- Avoidant
 B) Secure
 C) Insecure- Resistant

25. Ainsworth and Bell’s Strange Situation
 They said that two things could effect the
attachment type of the infant
Care giver sensitivity hypothesis
Or
Temperament hypothesis

26. Ainsworth and Bells Strange Situation
 It isn’t ethically correct to make babies cry, it
may cause them psychological distress
 They only used Mothers in the experiment,
assuming that not all primary care givers to
children are their mothers this makes for less
generalisability
 This is a controlled laboratory observation,
which as you will know lowers ecological
validity

27. The last part of attachment is
Cultural Variations
The studies you will need for this part are:
 Van and Kroonenburg
 Ainsworth and Bell
 Tronick

28. Van and Kroonenburg
 They carried out a meta analysis of 32 studies in different
cultures
 They found that over all Secure was the most common
attachment type
 But in Japan Insecure-Resistant seemed to be
particularly high
 And is Germany it was Insecure-Avoidant
 This is because in Japan infants rarely leave their
mothers sides and in Germany the children are more
likely to be taught to be independent
 Therefore, American attachment type groups cannot be
generalised to other cultures as the ‘norm’ in one country
may be different in another

29. Ainsworth
 Ainsworth carried out a naturalistic
observation in Uganda
 Where she found that if a mother acts in a
sensitive caring manner towards the infant
then the attachment that will be formed is
Secure

30. Tronick
 Tronick observed the Efe tribe in Congo
 He found that despite every woman breast
feeding everyone's child, primary
attachments were still made with the
biological mother, which disproves the
learning theory of attachment

31. Finally
You will be required to evaluate each of the key
studies so consider:
 Ethical issues
 Generalisability
 Reliability
 Validity
 Any bias