Tamis-LeMonda-05-14-2021-7
Attachment 269
© Nina Leen/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
proposed that infants were equipped with a repertoire of behaviors, including crying, sucking, smiling, clinging, and following, which matured over the first months of life and became focused on the primary caregiver. Over the first year of life, infants form attachments with the prominent people in their lives. Harlow’s Monkeys Around the same time that Bowlby was developing his ethological theory of attachment, the American psychologist Harry Harlow and his colleagues con- ducted a series of experiments with infant rhesus monkeys that lent further support to the biological importance of infant attachment. Harlow compared infant monkeys reared in isolation from birth to monkeys reared normally. The socially isolated monkeys were fed and kept healthy but kept away from other monkeys for six months. The isolated monkeys displayed socially deviant behaviors, including avoidance of other monkeys, an inability to learn from or communicate with other monkeys, and (for females) a lack of interest in sex. When the isolated females were artificially impregnated, they rejected, ignored, and attacked their babies. In other experiments, Harlow separated infant monkeys from their moth- ers and placed them in a cage that contained two “surrogate” mothers: a wire monkey that fed the infants milk and a cloth monkey that provided warmth and contact comfort. The monkeys would spend most of their days clinging to the cloth monkey, and only approached the wire monkey to eat. When exposed to a frightening stimulus, the monkeys fled to the warm, cloth surrogate for comfort, and monkeys whose cloth surrogates were removed displayed high anxiety and fear ( FIGURE 7.19 ) (Harlow, 1958). Harlow’s findings supported the conviction that proximity to and close bodily contact with an “attachment figure,” rather than the provision of food or oral gratification alone, was responsible for the infant’s attachment to its primary caregiver. These findings profoundly challenged Freud’s drive reduction theory (1927, 1940), which held that a primarymotivation of humans is to satisfy biologi- cal needs—including the need for nourishment. As Harlow showed, being fed was insufficient to the formation of attachment. Tamis-LeMonda Child Development: Context, Culture, and Cascades 1E Sinauer Associates/OUP Morales Studio TAMIS1 _07.18 06-30-21 FIGURE 7.18 Imprinting. Konrad Lorenz’s work on “imprinting” stated that certain animal species followed the first moving object they saw during a specific critical pe- riod early in life. Here, ducklings who had been exposed to Lorenz from birth follow him around. His finding was taken as evidence for an evolutionary view of attachment. PROPERTY OF OXFORD
drive reduction theory The idea that a primary motivation of humans is to satisfy biological needs, such as hunger and thirst UNIVERSITY PRESS
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