My Assignment on Attachment

1. Define Attachment and Imprinting.

a) Attachment:

Attachment is certainly one of the most important steps of very early childhood. A little undermined before, this stage of development of an infant’s emotional balance is now regarded as a highly necessary event during the first and the second year of life.

By attachment, we mean the establishment of a special emotional bond with an important other. Babies get attached to the person who consistently and predictably answers their needs. Perhaps the crucial words here are “consistently” and “predictably”. Because of these two adverbs, attachment is mostly directed towards the mother. She is the one, who, from day one, if she is medically able, will answer the baby’s needs and cries almost 24/7. Nature is so well done that no matter how tired a mother is, no matter how sick, she will always find the strength to answer her baby, to try and find what the problem is and what it is he/she is trying to communicate, this is consistency.

The bond can of course be directed towards someone else: a caregiver, the father, etc… and there can also be multiple attachments, with siblings for example. But the majority of attachment targets are mothers.

It is important to know that mothers will, for example, always carry their baby the same way, always say the same words and always comfort them in the same manner. Fathers, on the other hand, are unpredictable, they will carry and comfort, but most of the times, they will do this in a different way, always surprising, always creative. It is a good thing for a child, and it is one of the reasons why fathers, too, have a role to play in the emotional development of their children.

However, when an infant is in despair, and when she, herself, does not know why, it is not a time for surprises and creativity, the small baby wants comfort, and she wants to recognize it is comfort the instant she receives it. She knows mother will give this and she can even be calmed down when just smelling mum getting closer, as her senses help her getting adjusted to the world, this is what makes the mother interaction with the child predictable.

During the first year of his life, the human baby will learn to recognize which person gives the care he needs in total selflessness and he will work hard on getting close to that person. Because a baby does not have many ways to get close to someone, and because he is totally and dramatically dependent, he is born with incredible social skills, smiles and little mimics making him so cute anyone would be able to get attached to him. However, his demands are almost incessant, let alone incomprehensible. It is not surprising that only mothers can understand and keep the rhythm; they need all their wits coupled with patience to achieve answering to an infant’s requests.

When a child reaches 8 months or so, he knows that if the target of his attachment disappears from his sight, he will not get the care he needs. The alarm rings in order to guaranty his survival (let’s not forget that we are, after all, animals) and he usually screams until the number one person gets back into sight. This is the way we can all be sure we will find out if an infant has succeeded in achieving the attachment bond he needs during the first year of life.


b) Imprinting:

Imprinting concerns social animals, and refers to a behavioural pattern involving the recognition of an attraction to another animal of the same kind or to a substitute. Imprinting also means that, once the animal has found a “target”, he will thus be able to stay close to it, in order to be fed and protected from danger.

The phenomenon of imprinting was first demonstrated in 1935 by Konrad Lorenz, a zoologist and founder of modern ethology. It is now studied in laboratories where conditions can be altered to better understand the grounds of the occurrence and to rate the intensity of the social bonding.

Lorenz had described the phenomenon as occurring only very early in life and as irreversible. More modern laboratory studies have proven that since imprinting is a result of an instinct, it can happen only when the target stimulates the animal’s production of endorphins, his presence creating a feeling of comfort, his absence creating a feeling of despair. That is to say that the target must have the special genetical characteristics of a target. Adult animals usually have these characteristics.

When the animal later on develops a fear for the unknown and unfamiliar objects, its attachment to a familiar other becomes more obvious. Lorenz described this as the “critical” period during which imprinting had to occur (about 3 days for a bird, 8 months or so for a human baby).

However, we know now that, even outside this critical period, if another animal has enough exposure to become familiar, it can stimulate the production of endorphins in order to make its presence pleasurable to the object.

Lorenz also stated that imprinting is a form of superindividual conditioning, that is to say that when the animal becomes sexually mature, he would have inclination for the entire species of which the imprinting target is a member.



2. How can studies of animal behaviour and reactions be applied to human psychology?

Psychology is a rather new science and since humans are, after all, animals, it is very interesting on a scientifical point of view to study animal behaviour in order to better understand humans.

Animals are beautiful to those interested in them, but it would be a waste of time and energy to love the animal but neglect the study of its behaviour as it certainly is the most important characteristic of a specie. The study of animal behaviour is called Ethology.

Of course in many ways, there are similitudes between the behaviour of some animals (primates for example) and human beings, and research in animal behaviour has brought a lot to human psychology.

When people started to study animals, they realized that research could be pushed farther with animals than it would be ethically possible with humans.

For example, the founders of modern ethology, Lorenz and Tinbergen observed the behaviour of baby birds. They proved that early in their life, the baby birds’ behaviour is such that it promotes survival. The bird will stay close to the mother and it will be fed and protected.

Using animals for the studies, it was then possible to try and change the pattern by removing the biological mother and replacing her with another animal (Lorenz, himself for example). This way, it was shown that the baby bird’s behaviour did not change when the “mother” changed, hence proving that a baby animal was “imprinted” genetically with the ability to find a carer.

This characteristic can be applied to human babies and we can say that babies are prepared biologically to contribute to establish a bond with their caregiver. It would be, in our society, totally unacceptable to conduct such studies on real babies.

Another example is the study of attachment and the consequences of its occurrence on the life of animals. The point here was to study humans, but we could not possibly take a child away from his mother in order to conduct a research on attachment.

The common conception was that babies will form an attachment with whoever is providing food. Harlow has shone a different light on the issue when he studied rhesus monkeys. He gave the babies two different surrogate mothers and proved efficiently that the babies became attached to the mother providing comfort, not food.

We could then easily join the results of this experience on the observation of children becoming attached to blankets and special toys when left to sleep alone at an early age.

These two examples, in the light of our lesson, are explicit enough to support the fact that the study of animal behaviour is an important step towards understanding human behaviour, and a serious element of research when all other means are impossible.

Scientists are definitely also thinking of this issue because as soon as it is possible, they revert to studying humans. For example, rhesus monkeys were used for the study of early attachment, but the consequences of the development of this bond was studied on real human babies in the “Strange Situation” experiment.