In this video I describe several concepts and theories related to the formation of the relationship between mother and child. These include Konrad Lorenz’s work with imprinting in goslings, Harry Harlow’s work on comfort and security in rhesus macaques, and Mary Ainsworth’s strange situation to assess the quality of attachment. Finally I consider the complexity involved in understanding this relationship due to the possible role of temperament, caregiver behavior, expectations, and reciprocal determinism.

Deborah Blum’s excellent biography of Harry Harlow: Love at Goon Park – http://amzn.to/2Fy1oa4

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Video Transcript

Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In the previous video I talked about the zone of proximal development and this was the idea from Lev Vygotsky that the social environment matters in shaping our development because other people provide scaffolding. They provide help and support and this allows us to develop more skills because we can do things with help that we can’t do independently and this helps us to learn and to grow. And this emphasizes the role of social relationships on our development. We have to learn that we can trust others to provide support and assistance in certain skills and so that brings us to question: how we learn to develop social relationships?

That brings us to the first major relationship that will form between the infant and the mother and this is referred to as attachment. So how does this first relationship actually form? Well one way we can try to answer that question is to look to other species and this brings us to the work of Konrad Lorenz who, along with Nicholas Tinbergen and Karl von Frisch, is considered one of the founders of ethology; the study of animal behavior.

And here’s a picture of Lorenz here, and this is Tinbergen here, and one of the things that Lorenz investigated, and in 1973 won the Nobel Prize along with Tinbergen and von Frisch, was the idea of imprinting. So he found that young goslings will attach to the first large moving object that they see and then they would simply follow it around. And generally this would be the mother, right? The goslings would hatch, they would see their mother, and then they would follow her around until they were old enough to be more independent. But what Lorenz showed was he could get them to attach to other things; they could attach to other animals, they could attach to a ball that he rolled around near them after they hatched, and he even got goslings to attach to himself. And you can find cute pictures of Lorenz with a little trail of goslings waddling or swimming behind him. And he found that this imprinting occurs within a critical period of about twelve hours after hatching. Now of course humans don’t imprint in this way, so we might look to closer relatives to understand how we form an attachment.

This brings us to the work of Harry Harlow, who looked at rhesus macaque monkeys. And in these rhesus macaque monkeys we see that the very young monkeys will cling to the fur of their mother. They’ll basically hold on, a sort of literal type of attachment here, where they’ll cling to the mother and this is part of how they learned this relationship with the mother. What Harlow found, and here’s a picture of Harlow here, is that if he raised monkeys in isolation, where they didn’t have a real mother to cling to, he found that they would cling to these cloth diapers that were being used and they would use these as a source of security and a source of comfort. So then Harry Harlow investigated this further by looking at these surrogate mothers that he created and so he wondered whether it was that the young monkey attaches to the mother because she’s the source of food, or because she provides some sense of comfort or security, that maybe these cloth diapers were mimicking.

And so he tested this by raising these monkeys in isolation and then giving them access to a wire mother that provided food. So there was a bottle there they could feed the monkey but it wasn’t particularly comfortable to cling to this wire mother. Or they could choose to spend their time on a cloth mother, which didn’t provide any food but could provide this sense of security. And what he found was that these young monkeys would spend almost all of their time clinging to the cloth mother. They would go to the wire mother only when they needed food and then they would feed and then immediately go back and cling to the fur of this terrycloth mother.

Now initially when Harlow was conducting these studies he thought maybe this cloth was all they needed to form this proper relationship; they had something to cling to, some sense of security, maybe they’d be ok. It turns out that these monkeys that were raised in isolation did later show signs of psychological disturbance and they did have problems with socialization and this suggested that just a piece of cloth was not enough to provide this true relationship for these young monkeys.

So now we can turn to humans and well human infants don’t cling to their mothers the way these monkeys do. We do still have a vestige of this in a grasp reflex; so infants will show this grasp reflex where they will grasp something that touches the palm, they can actually hold on strong enough to support their own body weight. But we form this attachment in this connection with others by paying attention to who responds to us. So infants communicate with others by crying, by cooing, and making babbling sounds, and by making eye contact and essentially what infants are doing is they’re tracking, who’s paying attention to me? Who can I count on to come respond to me when I cry? Who can I count on to make eye contact with me and show that they’re paying attention to me, they’re paying attention to my needs?

So who’s responding, and that’s a big part of forming this attachment and this brings us to the idea of the mother or primary caregiver serving the role of a secure base. This is a term used by John Bowlby and this is the idea that the child is comfortable exploring the environment in the presence of this secure base because the child knows that if something goes wrong, if the child needs help or support, they can turn to the secure base and they can rely on this person to help them.

And this brings us to the work of Mary Ainsworth, who investigated the quality of attachment between the infant and the mother. And here’s a picture of Ainsworth here, and the way the Ainsworth did this is through what’s called “the strange situation“. So this was a situation where the mother and child would come into the lab and they would go into a room where there’s some toys and in the presence of the mother, the child could play with some of the toys. And then the mother would get up and leave the room, and sometimes there was a stranger in the room as well, sometimes the child was alone, but the mother would get up and leave the room while the child was there playing.

And the child was actually being observed through a mirror and they would see, how does the child respond to this abandonment? Then after a few minutes, the mother would return and the reaction to this reunion would also be monitored. So Ainsworth proposed that this reaction to the mother leaving and returning would tell us about the quality of attachment between the mother and the child. So she categorized the types of attachment into three main types.

The first type is the secure attachment. And this is what we would find in about 60% of American children. They show this secure attachment with the model. What this means is that when the mother leaves, the child is distressed. The child is upset by this. The mother has been this secure base for them to play and explore this new environment, but now when the mother leaves them alone here, or with a stranger, they show distress. And they often try to follow the mother out of the room as she starts to leave. And then when the mother returns a few minutes later, they’re comforted by this. So they might be crying the whole time that she’s gone but then the mother comes back and the children are comforted. They stop crying, they often run to the mother as soon as she comes into the room and embrace her, and this shows the secure attachment with the mother.

Now, not all infants show this. Some of them show what’s called an avoidant attachment, or it’s also sometimes called an insecure-avoidant attachment. In this case, when the mother leaves, the child doesn’t seem disturbed by this. They don’t show the same type of distress. And consequently when the mother returns a few minutes later, they also don’t seek comfort from the mother. So they don’t seem to have this secure attachment. They seem almost avoidant; like they don’t really care whether the mother is there or not. And about 20% of American children will show this type of attachment, this avoidant attachment.

And the third type we have is called an ambivalent attachment, or it’s also called an insecure-resistant attachment. And this is where the young child will show distress when the mother leaves. So the mother leaves the room and they cry, but then when the mother comes back, they’re not comforted. It’s like the mother can’t get them to stop crying. They remain upset and in some cases they might even resist the mother’s attempts to console them. So the mother might try to get them to play with the toy when she returns and, you know, in some cases the child will will hit the toy out of the mother’s hand, you know, and remain angry. And this is shown in about 15% of American children.

And then the remaining 5% show what’s called a disorganized attachment style and this is a case where it doesn’t neatly fit into one of these three categories. So now we can think “well, what’s the these differences in attachment?” And this of course is going to be a complicated question. One possible answer is that it has to do with the temperament of the child; that different children have different patterns of emotional reactivity. This is sort of the first signs of their personality and this is something I talked about in the videos on personality. So it might be the temperament of the child, maybe they’re born with a certain level of emotional reactivity and that’s going to influence the relationship with the mother.

Or it could be the case that the mother’s behavior matters. The caregiver’s behavior is related, it’s about the expectations that the child has already built up about the caregiver’s behavior. So maybe they can expect that when mom returns she will console them and so maybe they’ve learned that through past experience, you know? They get upset and mom comes to console. Or maybe they’ve learned isolation; that they can’t rely on the mother to console them. And so when the mother comes back, they are not relieved by this or they’re not upset when when she first leaves the room because they don’t have expectations that she’s going to help them or provide the assistance they might need.

Or lastly maybe they’ve learned to expect confrontational situations with the mother, where when the mother enters the room this is frequently to scold them or punish them in some way. And so when the mom returns this just makes them angry and they don’t feel comforted by her presence. And then another way we can think about this is it has to do with emotions and the ability of the caregiver and of the infant to express and recognize emotional states. So maybe the mother is not quite able to understand what the child is thinking or how the child is feeling, and so she’s not able to respond appropriately in order to provide consolation or in order to provide comfort. And then that brings us to the question of the idea of reciprocal determinism I talked about. This was the idea from Albert Bandura that we have this complex interaction between our biological predispositions and our environment and then the interaction between these things can shape which environments we seek out, and that in turn in turn shapes how we continue to develop. And so it could be the case in, not just the case for the mother and how she treats the child, and then how the child responds and then how that influences the mother’s future responses. And that in turn influences the child’s future responses. We have this complex scenario here where it’s very difficult to say exactly what’s causing a particular type of attachment style to occur. Ok, I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!