Attachment — AQA A-Level Psychology
Test yourself on Attachment with AQA A-Level practice questions.
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Attachment explained
Long before speech, a baby and a carer run a two-way conversation.
Read the full explanation
Reciprocity is turn-taking: the carer speaks, the baby kicks or gurgles, and each response invites the next. Interactional synchrony is doing it in time and in kind, mirroring expression and movement. Meltzoff and Moore (1977) filmed babies as young as two weeks old copying adult tongue protrusion above chance; Isabella et al (1989) found high synchrony predicted better-quality attachment. Schaffer and Emerson (1964) observed 60 Glasgow babies monthly for a year, giving the asocial, indiscriminate, specific and multiple stages; fathers were the sole first attachment for only about 3% of babies, yet 75% had attached to father by 18 months. Grossmann ties fathers to play, not comfort: different, not secondary.
Animal studies of attachment: Lorenz and Harlow.
Imprinting is a fast, innate bond to the first moving object seen. Lorenz (1935) split a clutch of goose eggs: half hatched with the mother, half in an incubator where he was the first thing seen. His goslings followed him and, once the groups were mixed, sorted back to him. He argued imprinting happens only within a critical period of hours and shapes adult mate choice. Harlow (1958) gave infant rhesus monkeys a wire mother that dispensed milk and a cloth mother that did not; they clung to the cloth mother around 22 hours a day and visited the wire one only to feed, so contact comfort, not food, builds the bond. Deprived monkeys became aggressive and neglectful parents. Evaluation: birds are not mammals, Guiton showed imprinting can be reversed, and Harlow's monkeys were lastingly harmed.
Explanations of attachment: learning theory and Bowlby’s monotropic theory. The concepts of a critical period and an internal working model.
Two rival accounts of why babies bond. Learning theory, the 'cupboard love' view, says the bond is learned: by classical conditioning the carer is a neutral stimulus paired with food until the carer alone produces the pleasure food did; by operant conditioning crying brings food and comfort, and the carer is negatively reinforced when it stops. Dollard and Miller call it a secondary drive learned beside hunger. Bowlby rejects this: attachment is innate and adaptive, triggered by social releasers such as crying and a baby face, focused on one primary figure (monotropy), formed in a critical period of about two years, and carried on as an internal working model templating later relationships. Harlow's monkeys fed from wire and clung to cloth, which learning theory cannot explain.
Ainsworth’s ‘Strange Situation’. Types of attachment: secure, insecure-avoidant and insecure-resistant. Cultural variations in attachment, including van Ijzendoorn.
A controlled observation built to measure attachment quality. A baby and carer enter an unfamiliar playroom for eight short episodes behind a two-way mirror, with a stranger entering and the carer leaving and returning twice. Observers score five behaviours: proximity seeking, secure-base exploration, stranger anxiety, separation anxiety and, most telling, the reunion response. Ainsworth found roughly 66% secure (explores, easily comforted), 22% insecure-avoidant (little distress, ignores the carer on return) and 12% insecure-resistant (distressed, seeks then rejects comfort). Van Ijzendoorn and Kroonenberg meta-analysed 32 studies in eight countries: secure led everywhere, avoidant peaked in Germany, resistant in Japan, and variation within countries was about 1.5 times that between them.
Bowlby’s theory of maternal deprivation. Romanian orphan studies: effects of institutionalisation.
Bowlby's claim is about continuity, not a single parting: an infant needs unbroken emotional care from a mother figure through the first two and a half years, and prolonged separation without a substitute in that window causes lasting harm - lowered intellectual development and affectionless psychopathy, an inability to feel guilt or empathy. His 44 thieves study found 14 were affectionless, and most of those had prolonged early separation, against almost none of the controls. Romanian orphan studies test this naturally. Rutter followed 165 adoptees: those adopted before six months had a mean IQ near 102, those adopted late scored around 77 and often showed disinhibited attachment. Zeanah found only about 19% of institutionalised children were securely attached, against 74% of controls.
The influence of early attachment on childhood and adult relationships, including the role of an internal working model.
The internal working model is the mental template a first attachment leaves behind: a set of expectations about whether other people can be trusted and whether the child is worth caring for. A securely attached child expects warmth and behaves accordingly; an avoidant child expects rejection and keeps distance; a resistant child expects inconsistency and becomes clingy or controlling. Myron-Wilson and Smith (1998) found secure children were rarely involved in bullying, avoidant children were more often victims and resistant ones bullies. Hazan and Shaver's love quiz, answered by over six hundred readers, found 56% secure, 25% avoidant and 19% resistant, with secure adults reporting longer, more trusting relationships. Bailey et al found mothers usually passed their own attachment type to their babies.
Your focus
- Describe reciprocity and interactional synchrony and give the behaviour that tells one from the other.
- Outline Schaffer and Emerson's four stages in order and the monthly observation of 60 Glasgow babies behind them.
- Apply the stages to an infant's described behaviour, naming the stage and the evidence that places it there.
Show all 22 objectives
- Evaluate claims about the role of the father using Grossmann on play and the social sensitivity of the conclusions.
- Describe Lorenz's split clutch procedure and his finding that imprinting occurs only within a critical period.
- Explain how Harlow's wire and cloth mothers show contact comfort rather than food builds the attachment.
- Evaluate animal studies of attachment on generalisation to humans, reversibility of imprinting and ethical cost.
- Explain attachment as classical conditioning, placing food, carer and pleasure in the correct order of terms.
- Outline Bowlby's monotropy, social releasers, critical period and internal working model.
- Apply both explanations to a described bond and decide which one the detail in the scenario supports.
- Evaluate learning theory using Harlow's monkeys and monotropy using the evidence for multiple attachments.
- Describe the Strange Situation procedure and name the five behaviours the observers score.
- Explain how the three attachment types differ at reunion, quoting Ainsworth's proportions for each.
- Apply the three types to an infant's observed behaviour, using the reunion response as the deciding indicator.
- Evaluate cultural variation using van Ijzendoorn's within-culture finding and the charge of an imposed etic.
- Explain Bowlby's maternal deprivation hypothesis, naming the critical period and the two consequences he predicted.
- Describe the 44 thieves study and Rutter's Romanian findings, quoting the IQ scores for early and late adoption.
- Apply the theory to a case by distinguishing separation, deprivation and privation in what happened to the child.
- Evaluate the theory using Bowlby's biased interviewing and the confounding quality of the Romanian institutions.
- Explain the internal working model as expectations built from a first attachment and state the continuity hypothesis.
- Apply attachment types to described childhood and adult relationships, using Myron-Wilson and Smith and Hazan and Shaver.
- Evaluate the continuity hypothesis, given correlational retrospective data and temperament as a rival explanation.
Attachment exam tips
Marking Points
- Reciprocity defined as a two-way, turn-taking exchange in which each partner elicits a response from the other
- Interactional synchrony defined as carer and infant mirroring action or emotion simultaneously, in a co-ordinated way
- Meltzoff and Moore (1977) as evidence: infants two to three weeks old imitated specific adult facial and manual gestures above chance
- Schaffer and Emerson's four stages named in order: asocial, indiscriminate, specific, multiple
- Schaffer and Emerson's method and findings: 60 working-class Glasgow babies, monthly observation and maternal report over a year
- Role of the father: first sole attachment in a small minority, but most infants attached to father by around 18 months; Grossmann links father's play to later attachment quality
- Evaluation credit for controlled filmed observation, for failures to replicate the imitation finding, and for the social sensitivity of claims about fathers
- Imprinting defined: an innate readiness to follow and bond with the first moving object, formed in a narrow time window
- Lorenz's procedure: a clutch of goose eggs split between the natural mother and an incubator, then the hatchlings mixed to see whom they followed
- Lorenz's findings: incubator goslings followed him, separated back to him when mixed, and imprinting did not occur outside a critical period of a few hours
- Sexual imprinting as a long-term effect, illustrated by the peacock reared among tortoises
- Harlow's procedure: infant rhesus monkeys given a wire mother with a feeding bottle and a cloth mother without one
- Harlow's findings: monkeys spent most of the day on the cloth mother and fed briefly from the wire one, showing contact comfort outweighs feeding
- Harlow's long-term findings: maternally deprived monkeys were socially and sexually abnormal and neglected their own young
- Evaluation: generalising from birds and monkeys to humans, reversibility of imprinting, and the ethics set against the practical value of the work
- Classical conditioning explained in the right order: food as unconditioned stimulus producing pleasure, carer as neutral stimulus paired with it, carer becoming a conditioned stimulus
- Operant conditioning and drive reduction: crying is positively reinforced by attention, the carer negatively reinforced by the crying stopping; attachment as a secondary drive (Dollard and Miller)
- Bowlby's evolutionary basis: attachment is innate because it keeps an immobile infant close to a protector
- Social releasers and the caregiver's innate response to them
- Monotropy: one special attachment to a primary figure, with the law of continuity and the law of accumulated separation
- Critical (or sensitive) period of roughly two years, after which forming an attachment is much harder
- Internal working model as a template for later relationships and for the learner's own parenting, giving the continuity hypothesis
- Evaluation: Harlow and Schaffer and Emerson counter cupboard love; Bailey et al support intergenerational continuity; monotropy is challenged by multiple attachments and is socially sensitive
- Procedure identified as a controlled observation in a laboratory playroom, with eight episodes of about three minutes
- The five behavioural categories scored, with reunion behaviour named as the key indicator
- Secure attachment described: moderate separation and stranger anxiety, uses carer as a secure base, easily comforted on reunion
- Insecure-avoidant described: low stranger and separation anxiety, avoids contact at reunion
- Insecure-resistant described: high anxiety, resists comfort and shows conflicting approach and rejection at reunion
- Ainsworth's proportions quoted for the three types
- Van Ijzendoorn and Kroonenberg's meta-analysis: 32 studies, eight countries, secure most common in every sample, most avoidant in Germany, most resistant in Japan
- The within-culture variation finding, and the conclusion that child-rearing practices, not nationality, drive the differences
- Evaluation: high inter-rater reliability, imposed etic and culture-bound criteria, and the disorganised type added by Main and Solomon
- Distinction drawn between separation, deprivation and privation, with deprivation meaning loss of emotional care
- The critical period stated as the first two and a half years, with continuous care from a mother figure
- Consequences named: retarded intellectual development, low IQ, and affectionless psychopathy with a lack of guilt or empathy
- The 44 thieves study described: interviews and family histories, affectionless thieves linked to prolonged early separation, control group comparison
- Effects of institutionalisation from the Romanian studies: intellectual delay, disinhibited attachment, poor peer relations
- Rutter's finding that outcome depends on age at adoption, with figures for early and late adoption
- Zeanah's Bucharest findings on rates of secure and disinhibited attachment in institutionalised children
- Evaluation: Bowlby's own biased interviewing, confounding by the quality of Romanian institutions, and the real-world value for adoption and care policy
- Internal working model defined as a schema of expectations about relationships built from the first attachment
- The continuity hypothesis stated: the model generalises to friendships, romantic relationships and the learner's own parenting
- Effects on childhood relationships described type by type, with bullying evidence from Myron-Wilson and Smith (1998)
- Hazan and Shaver's love quiz: method, sample and the proportions of each adult type
- Hazan and Shaver's outcomes: secure adults report trusting, longer relationships; avoidant adults fear intimacy; resistant adults report jealousy
- Intergenerational transmission evidenced by Bailey et al's mothers and infants
- Evaluation: correlational data cannot show cause, temperament is a plausible third factor, retrospective self-report threatens validity, and the claim is over-deterministic
Examiner Tips
- 💡If asked to outline the stages, give each stage name, its rough age band and one observable behaviour that distinguishes it.
- 💡For a scenario about a parent and baby, quote the stem back: name the behaviour in the scenario and label it reciprocity or synchrony explicitly
- 💡In an extended answer, spend the evaluation half on observation difficulties, replication failures and social sensitivity rather than adding more description
- 💡Use a named researcher and a date in the first two lines; unattributed description rarely reaches the top band
- 💡Name the animal, the manipulation and the result for each study - vague sentences such as 'Harlow studied monkeys' earn nothing
- 💡A question on generalisability wants a reason, not a label: say what is different about a precocial bird or a rhesus monkey
- 💡For ethics, use the cost-benefit argument both ways, because a one-sided condemnation is not a developed evaluation
- 💡If the question names only one researcher, do not spend half the answer on the other
- 💡Set out conditioning as a labelled sequence; examiners credit the stimulus labels, not a general story about food
- 💡If the question asks you to compare the two explanations, use a comparison sentence per paragraph rather than two separate descriptions
- 💡Use Harlow and Schaffer and Emerson as counter-evidence to learning theory and as support for Bowlby - the same studies do both jobs
- 💡In an extended response, explain both theories concisely and develop evaluation through relevant evidence, comparisons and implications rather than repeating description.
- 💡Reunion behaviour is the discriminator - say what the baby does when the carer comes back for every type you name
- 💡For a scenario, match the described behaviour to a type and justify it with the specific behaviour in the stem, not with a definition
- 💡Cultural variation questions reward the imposed etic argument by name, plus one concrete example such as Takahashi's Japanese sample
- 💡Quote the proportions to one figure each; approximate numbers used accurately are credited, invented precision is not
- 💡State the time window and the requirement for continuous care before you describe any effects; the definition carries marks of its own
- 💡Where the question says 'refer to research', the figures from the 44 thieves or the Romanian studies are the quickest route to knowledge marks
- 💡Turn the Romanian studies into evaluation by discussing confounding variables and the lack of random allocation rather than just reporting them
- 💡Applied questions about adoption or fostering expect a recommendation, such as placing children before six months
- 💡Every study here is correlational, so 'no cause and effect' plus a named third variable is an evaluation point you can always reach for
- 💡Say how the model works, not only that it exists: expectation shapes behaviour, behaviour shapes the partner's response
- 💡In an applied question, name the childhood type in the stem and predict a specific adult behaviour from it
- 💡Balance the deterministic reading by citing evidence that later experience can revise the model
Common Mistakes
- Swapping the two terms: describing mirroring as reciprocity, or describing turn-taking as synchrony
- Saying interactional synchrony is simply imitation, when the defining feature is that it happens at the same time and in a co-ordinated rhythm
- Giving Schaffer's stages without the ages or the order, which scores far less than a sequenced answer
- Claiming fathers cannot be primary attachment figures, when the evidence shows a minority are and most infants attach to them later
- Padding the answer with the Strange Situation, which belongs to a different part of the topic
- Saying Lorenz studied ducks or that the goslings were taught to follow him, when imprinting is innate and the birds were geese
- Reporting that the wire mother was ignored altogether, when the monkeys did go to it to feed, which is the point of the study
- Treating Harlow's monkeys as proof that human attachment works the same way, with no comment on the species difference
- Offering ethics as the only evaluation point, with no balancing statement about what the research changed in practice
- Mixing up the conditioning stages, usually by calling food the conditioned stimulus or the carer the unconditioned stimulus
- Writing that learning theory has been disproved rather than that food alone is insufficient, since association still plays a part
- Describing monotropy as attachment to the mother only, when Bowlby means one primary figure who need not be biological
- Confusing the internal working model with the critical period, or treating either as a mechanism that acts on its own
- Ignoring the social sensitivity of monotropy, which is an easy evaluation mark about mother-blaming and childcare policy
- Treating the Strange Situation as an experiment and naming an independent variable, when it is a controlled observation
- Describing insecure-resistant as avoidant and the reverse; the resistant baby wants contact and then fights it
- Reporting cultural variations as differences between countries when the study's own finding is that variation within a country is larger
- Writing that Japanese infants are insecure, rather than that a procedure built on Western child-rearing misclassifies them
- Listing percentages with no comment on what they show, which scores knowledge but no evaluation
- Using deprivation and privation interchangeably, when Rutter's whole criticism turns on the difference
- Saying the 44 thieves study proves deprivation causes criminality, when it is correlational and Bowlby conducted the assessments knowing his hypothesis
- Reporting the Romanian findings as evidence about separation only, ignoring the malnutrition and lack of stimulation in the institutions
- Claiming the damage is always permanent, when late adoption studies show substantial recovery in many children
- Confusing disinhibited attachment with insecure-resistant attachment
- Describing the internal working model as a memory of the parent rather than as expectations that guide behaviour
- Stating that an insecure baby will have failed adult relationships, when the association is a tendency and many people change
- Quoting the love quiz without noting that it was a self-selecting volunteer sample of newspaper readers reporting on the past
- Leaving out the temperament explanation, which is the standard alternative account of the same correlations