​Emotional Development

• Research in emotional development focuses on the importance of attachments.

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• Experiments with animals reveal the effects of imprinting and contact comfort on developing attachments

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• Some psychologists believe the ages of 6 months to 3 years are a critical period for human children to form attachments.

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• ​Research suggests four patterns of attachment in children: secure attachment, avoidant attachment, resistant attachment, and disorganized attachment.

What is attachment?

​A close emotional bond shared usually between a mother and child, or primary caregiver

• Harry Harlow’s empirical work with primates is now considered a “classic” in behavioral science, revolutionizing our understanding of the role that social relationships play in early development.

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• In the 1950s and 60s, psychological research in the United States was dominated by behaviorists and psychoanalysts, who supported the view that babies became attached to their mothers because they provided food.

• Harlow and other social and cognitive psychologists argued that this perspective overlooked the importance of comfort, companionship, and love in promoting healthy development.

• In this study, Harlow took infant monkeys from their biological mothers and gave them two inanimate surrogate mothers: one was a simple construction of wire and wood, and the second was covered in foam rubber and soft terry cloth.

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• The infants were assigned to one of two conditions. In the first, the wire mother had a milk bottle and the cloth mother did not; in the second, the cloth mother had the food while the wire mother had none.

• In both conditions, Harlow found that the infant monkeys spent significantly more time with the terry cloth mother than they did with the wire mother.

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• When only the wire mother had food, the babies came to the wire mother to feed and immediately returned to cling to the cloth surrogate.

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• ​ Play Video: https://youtu.be/OrNBEhzjg8I

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What is imprinting?

​The rapid and early learning of attachment to first moving object viewed at birth in some species of animal.

• Lorenz (1935) investigated the mechanisms of imprinting, where some species of animals form an attachment to the first large moving object that they meet.

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• ​He took a large clutch of goose eggs and kept them until they were about to hatch out.  Half of the eggs were then placed under a goose mother, while Lorenz kept the other half hatched in an incubator, with Lorenz making sure he was the first moving object the newly hatched goslings encountered.

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• ​When the geese hatched Lorenz imitated a mother duck's quacking sound, upon which the young birds regarded him as their mother and followed him accordingly.  The other group followed the mother goose.

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• Lorenz found that geese follow the first moving object they see.

• This process is known as imprinting, and suggests that attachment is innate and programmed genetically.

• Lorenz believed that once imprinting has occurred, it cannot be reversed, nor can a gosling imprint on anything else.

• To ensure imprinting had occurred Lorenz put all the goslings together under an upturned box and allowed them to mix.  When the box was removed the two groups separated to go to their respective 'mothers' - half to the goose, and half to Lorenz.

• Play video: https://youtu.be/Y8rel_fYuqI

What is attachment?

​A close emotional bond shared usually between a mother and child, or primary caregiver

​ When is the critical period of attachment for children?

Between the ages of 6 months and 3 years old, the child has developed to the stage where he is able to remember and imagine his parents or caregivers and maintain relationship with them ​in imagination even if they are absent.

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​The four patterns of attachment in children

​Secure, avoidant, resistant, and disorganized.

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• secure: balance between need to explore and be close to mother

• avoidant: somewhat distressed when mother leaves, avoids mother when she returns

• resistant: not upset when mother leaves, reacts angrily when she returns

• disorganized: inconsistent behavior.