Читать книгу Lifespan Development - Tara L. Kuther - Страница 321

Raj gurgles and cries out while lying in his crib. As his mother enters the room, he squeals excitedly. Raj’s mother smiles as she reaches into the crib, and Raj giggles with delight as she picks him up. Raj and his mother have formed an important emotional bond, called attachment. Attachment refers to a lasting emotional tie between two people who each strive to maintain closeness to the other and act to ensure that the relationship continues.

Attachment relationships serve as an important backdrop for emotional and social development. Our earliest attachments are with our primary caregivers, most often our mothers. It was once thought that feeding determined patterns of attachment. Freud, for example, emphasized the role of feeding and successful weaning on infants’ personality and well-being. Behaviorist theorists explain attachment as the result of the infants associating their mothers with food, a powerful reinforcer that satisfies a biological need. Certainly, feeding is important for infants’ health and well-being and offers opportunities for the close contact needed to develop attachment bonds, but feeding itself does not determine attachment. In one famous study, baby rhesus monkeys were reared with two inanimate surrogate “mothers”: one made of wire mesh and a second covered with terrycloth (see Figure 6.1). The baby monkeys clung to the terrycloth mother despite being fed only by the wire mother, suggesting that attachment bonds are not based on feeding but rather on contact comfort (Harlow & Zimmerman, 1959). So how does an attachment form, and what is its purpose?

Description

Figure 6.1 Harlow’s Study: Contact Comfort and the Attachment Bond

This infant monkey preferred to cling to the cloth-covered mother even if fed by the wire mother. Harlow concluded that attachment is based on contact comfort rather than feeding.

Source: Harlow, H. F. (1958); Photo Researchers Inc.