How do infants become attached? (Part 2)
Last month, I have shared with you what is
attachment, and how it would affect baby’s emotional development. There are a
lot of psychologists studied infant’s attach behavior, and they all believe
that this particular behavior do help children in their future development in a
lot of areas. Babies have an internal sense of deciding which object or subject
they want to form attachment with. In this issue, I would like to share with
you about a popular research on attachment called “wire mother experiment”.
The experiment of “wire mother”
In 1960, Harry Harlow, an American psychologist, did
an experiment to demonstrate how powerful the effect of love was. A young
monkey was involved in his experiment, and the aim was to find out which types
of object this monkey tended to be attached with.
The materials used to conduct this experiment
involved two surrogate mothers that were designed with a simple facial shape.
The main difference between both “mothers” was that one of them was covered with
a thick layer of towel on its body; we can simply call her a fat mother. The
other one was not covered with towel but a layer of wire and it was inserted
with milk bottles on its breast, we can simply call her thin mother. This baby
monkey could get food from thin mother, but it could not get any food from fat
mother. The main purpose for this experiment was to find out which “surrogate mother”
this monkey would hug on while experienced different conditions, e.g. Fear.
Throughout the experiment, Harlow has observed that
the young monkey loved to stay with fat mother most of the time except when feeling
hungry. If the young monkey was experiencing fearful situation, it refused to
separate from fat mother.
Harlow conducted a further research to observe the
young monkey’s response if fat mother disappeared after they were staying in
the same room for thirty minutes. When separated from fat mother, young monkey
felt anxious, fear and started to cry for fat mother back.
What does this research tell us?
From the first experiment, Harlow found that young
monkey was hugging fat mother most of the time, it would only go to thin mother
when it needed for food. The second research shows that once young monkey has
formed attachment with fat mother, a security base would be formed between them.
Both results can proof that attachment is vital for children’s development and
they tend to form attachment with comfortable things or people. Without
attachment, they easily feel fear and anxious and lose security feeling. So remember
to spend more time with your kids, or baby brother & sister, if you have
one.
Vicky Wong
References:
Cherry, K. (2006, 7 24). An Overview of Attachment Theory.
Retrieved from About.com.Psychology:http://psychology.about.com/od/loveandattraction/a/attachment01.htm
Mcleod, S. (2007 , 4 12). Bowlby Attachment Theory.
Retrieved from
http://www.simplypsychology.org/bowlby.html
