Explanations of attachment: learning theory and Bowlby's monotropic theory. The concepts of a critical period and an internal working model.

What this dot point is asking

AQA wants you to explain attachment through learning theory and Bowlby's monotropic theory, including the critical period and the internal working model. The exam skill is to apply the conditioning processes accurately, to know Bowlby's concepts precisely, and to weigh learning theory against the evidence that comfort, not food, drives attachment.

Learning theory

Learning theory, sometimes called the "cupboard love" approach, applies the behaviourist principles of conditioning to attachment. Through classical conditioning, the caregiver begins as a neutral stimulus but, by being repeatedly present when the infant is fed (an unconditioned stimulus that produces the unconditioned response of pleasure), comes to be a conditioned stimulus that produces pleasure in its own right. Through operant conditioning, the infant learns that crying brings food, which reduces the discomfort of hunger, so the behaviour is negatively reinforced; at the same time the caregiver, by being associated with the primary reinforcer of food, becomes a secondary reinforcer the infant seeks out. The major problem with this account, and the reason it is heavily criticised, is that animal studies contradict it: Harlow's monkeys attached to a comfort-giving cloth mother rather than the wire mother that fed them, and Schaffer and Emerson found many infants formed their primary attachment to someone who was not their main feeder. This suggests attachment is based on emotional responsiveness and comfort, not feeding.

Bowlby's monotropic theory

Bowlby rejected learning theory and drew instead on the evolutionary work of Lorenz and Harlow. He argued that attachment is an innate system that evolved because staying close to a caregiver promotes the infant's survival. Infants are born with social releasers (innate cues such as smiling, cooing and crying) that activate the adult attachment system and elicit caregiving. Attachment is monotropic, meaning one special attachment, usually to the mother, is qualitatively more important than the rest, and Bowlby proposed two principles to capture this: the law of continuity (the more constant and predictable the care, the better the attachment) and the law of accumulated separation (the effects of separation add up). This primary attachment must form within a critical period (Bowlby treated this as around the first two and a half years, with a sensitive period up to about five), or it becomes much harder. Finally, the quality of this first relationship generates an internal working model, a mental template of relationships that shapes the child's expectations of all future relationships (the continuity hypothesis), explaining why early attachment predicts later social and emotional functioning.