S4 Psychology Essay ( Animal Studies )

Animal studies play an important role in the development of attachment, these

animal studies helps us to have a better understanding of human attachment. In
1935, Konrad Lorenz conducted research with goslings, and Harry Harlow
studied rhesus monkeys in 1959.

Lorenz first noticed the phenomenon of imprinting as a child when he was

given a newly hatched duckling by his neighbours, and the hatched ducklings
followed him around. Imprinting is an innate readiness to develop a strong bond
with the mother which takes place during a specific time in development,
probably the first few hours after birth/hatching. Lorenz (1935) took a clutch of
goslings eggs and separated them into two groups. One group acts as a control
condition in which the goslings were left with their natural mother, whereas the
other group of gosling eggs was placed in an incubator. When the incubator
eggs hatched, the first living/moving object they saw was controlled to be
Lorenz.

Lorenz (1935) found that the goslings that hatched in the presence of their
mother followed the mother around, whereas goslings that hatched in the
incubator followed the first living/moving thing they saw, which was Lorenz.
The goslings that hatched in the incubator did not recognise their natural
mother. He also concluded that the imprinting process is limited to a very
definite period of the young animal’s life, called a critical period. A young
animal will not imprint if it is not exposed to a moving object during its critical
period. This suggests that animals can form an imprint on a persistently moving
object if it is seen within its first two days of life.

Lorenz (1952) observed several characteristics of imprinting, including the fact

that the process appeared to be irreversible and long-lasting. Martina, a geese
who imprinted on Lorenz, used to sleep on his bed every night, reflected this.
He also noted that this early imprinting had an effect on later mate preferences,
a phenomenon known as sexual imprinting. Animals, especially birds, will
choose to mate with the same type of organism that they imprinted on. Other
than that, Lorenz also did a case study on a peacock in the same year. The
peacock was raised in a zoo’s reptile house alongside giant tortoises from the
time it hatched. When it matured, it directed courtship behaviours towards giant
tortoises.

One of Lorenz’s (1953) strengths is that there has been considerable support for
research on imprinting. Imprinting has also been demonstrated in a number of
studies. For example, Lucia Regolin and Giorgio Valloritgara (1995), and
Guiton (1966) both demonstrated using chicks that young animals are born with
innate mechanism to imprint on a moving object present during their critical
period. While Guiton also found that the male chickens tried to mate with the
gloves as they matured, the glove is the moving object the chicks saw during the
early stage of their critical period, indicating that the effect of early imprinting
is long-lasting and influences later mate preferences. Therefore, these supports
Lorenz’s idea of imprinting.

Harry Harlow attempted to demonstrate that attachment was not based on

feeding bond between the mother and the infant as described by learning theory.
He then spent 165 days studying 8 rhesus monkeys and titled his report The
Origins of Love.

Harlow (1959) created 2 wire (mother) monkeys, one was additionally wrapped
in soft cloth. The milk bottle was on the cloth-covered mother for 4 of the
monekys, and for the remaining 4 monkeys, the milk bottle was on the plain
wire mother. The amount of time each infant monkey spent with the different
wire mothers was recorded. The infant monkeys’ reactions when frightened by a
mechanical teddy bear were also studied.

Despite having some with and some without the feeding bottle, all eight
monkeys spent the majority of their time with the cloth-covered mother. Those
monkeys who were fed from the wire mother only spent a short amount of time
getting milk and then returned to the cloth-covered mother. When frightened, all
monkeys clung to the cloth-covered mother, and when exploring new
environments, the monkeys often kept one foot on the cloth-covered mother or
returned frequently to the cloth-covered mother, treating the cloth-covered
mother like a secure base, seemingly for reassurance.

Harlow concluded that infants develop an attachment to the person who

provides contact comfort rather than the person who feeds them. He also
reported that the motherless monkeys, even those who did have contact comfort,
developed abnormally. Some monkeys became socially abnormal, they froze or
fled when approached by other monkeys. While some had abnormal sexual
development, they did not exhibit normal mating behaviours and did not cradle
their own babies.

Harlow also discovered a critical period for these attachment formation,

requiring a mother figure to be introduced to a young monkey within 90 days
for an attachment to form. Therefore, once the critical period has passed,
attachment is impossible and the damage done by early deprivation is become
irreversible.
Harlow’s study is often criticised for being unethical. The monkeys were
dysfunctional as a result of maternal deprivation. The study created long-lasting
emotional harm to the monkeys and they did not develop normal behaviours.
They became aggressive, and when some became mothers, they neglected their
young while some others attacked their children, even killing them in some
cases. On the other hand, the experiment can be justified because it helps us to
understand more about attachment. Therefore, it could be argued that benefits
outweigh the costs to the animals involved in the study.

The ultimate aim of animal studies is to be able to generalise the conclusions to

human behaviours. However, all animal studies have low generalisability to
humans. Although humans are also animals, it can be seen that we think and
behave very differently from other animals despite the individual differences
among humans. Harlow’s rhesus monkeys are much more similar to humans
than Lorenz’s birds because all mammals share some common attachment
behaviours. This means that it may not be appropriate to generalise Harlow and
Lorenz’s findings on humans.

To conclude, while the findings of animal studies may have low generalisability
on humans or ethical issues, they still play an important role of the development
of attachment and helps us to understand attachments in humans.