Outline and evaluate the evolutionary theory of human attachment
Outline and evaluate the evolutionary theory of human attachment
12 marks
Bowlby put forward a theory of attachment based on the adaptive advantage we get through an innate tendency to form attachments with our caregiver. Bowlby adopted the idea of a critical period from ethologists like Lorenz and applied this to his explanation of how human infants form an attachment. The critical period hypothesis states that if you fail to attach between two and a half years, the child will suffer irreversible long-term consequences of this maternal deprivation as well as cognitive, social and emotional problems. Social releasers are instincts that babies are born with to attract parent’s attention. These include crying, sucking, clinging, gripping and imitating. These help in attachment because they release/ trigger the parent’s instinct to respond to the biological needs of a baby. Bowlby believed that infants form one very special and intense attachment with their mother which is known as monotropy. If the mother isn’t available, the infant could bond with another ever-present adult who will act as a substitute; for example, the father. The types of attachment an infant experiences form a template for that infant’s future attachments. This template is called an internal working model and plays a role in guiding future adult relationships.
The innate nature of attachment was illustrated by Lorenz, in 1952, in his studies of imprinting in geese. Lorenz’s study supports Bowlby’s attachment of being innate as in Lorenz’s experiment, the first moving thing the incubator group saw when they hatched was Lorenz himself and the geese immediately started to follow him around. When the incubator geese and natural mother geese were mixed together, they would quickly separate into the two original groups and follow either Lorenz or their natural mother. The strength of this study is that the geese had an innate tendency to establish a bond which was an adaptive behaviour. However,
12 marks
Bowlby put forward a theory of attachment based on the adaptive advantage we get through an innate tendency to form attachments with our caregiver. Bowlby adopted the idea of a critical period from ethologists like Lorenz and applied this to his explanation of how human infants form an attachment. The critical period hypothesis states that if you fail to attach between two and a half years, the child will suffer irreversible long-term consequences of this maternal deprivation as well as cognitive, social and emotional problems. Social releasers are instincts that babies are born with to attract parent’s attention. These include crying, sucking, clinging, gripping and imitating. These help in attachment because they release/ trigger the parent’s instinct to respond to the biological needs of a baby. Bowlby believed that infants form one very special and intense attachment with their mother which is known as monotropy. If the mother isn’t available, the infant could bond with another ever-present adult who will act as a substitute; for example, the father. The types of attachment an infant experiences form a template for that infant’s future attachments. This template is called an internal working model and plays a role in guiding future adult relationships.
The innate nature of attachment was illustrated by Lorenz, in 1952, in his studies of imprinting in geese. Lorenz’s study supports Bowlby’s attachment of being innate as in Lorenz’s experiment, the first moving thing the incubator group saw when they hatched was Lorenz himself and the geese immediately started to follow him around. When the incubator geese and natural mother geese were mixed together, they would quickly separate into the two original groups and follow either Lorenz or their natural mother. The strength of this study is that the geese had an innate tendency to establish a bond which was an adaptive behaviour. However,