What is meant by the term attachment?

An emotional bond between a child and primary caregiver characterised by being distressed upon separation.

What is good day care?

High adult to child ratio

Small sized group

Stable attatchment figure

Well trained staff

Low staff turnover

Outline a strength of the Evolutionary Perspective

Research to support the theory

The Minnosotta longitudinial study found that children rated as more secure during infancy were rated as being more popular and having higher self asteem.

This supports the idea of 'long term benefits' and an 'internal working model'. Suggests study is reliable.

Evolutionary Perspective

• Survival
• Reciprocal
• Critical period
• Monotropy
• Long term benefits
• Social releasers
• Natural Selection
• Innate Tendency

Outline a weakness of the evolutionary perspective

It may be some infants are better at forming attatchments.

The temperament hypothesis suggests that children that are appealing to care-givers are usually more appealing to other people and this could explain continuities.

Therefore there could be other theories that are ignored by the evolutionary perspective.

Outline a strength of the learning theory

The learning theory explains how learning takes place

Both classical and operant conditioning explain early attatchment.

Therefore it offers an account of why an infant is likely to form an attatchment to one main caregiver.

Outline a weakness of the learning theory

The theory is criticised for being reductionist.

It reduces human behaviour to overly simple ideas such as stimulus, response and reinforcement.

These concepts cannot explain the complexity of human behaviour.

Which research challenged the learning theory of attatchment?

Harlow and Harlow's monkeys