Essay On Attachment And Attachment

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This essay will describe and evaluate two approaches/theories in developmental psychology and supporting studies, It will also include the nature versus nurture debate in relation to attachment. Attachment is an affectional tie that one human or animal forms between themselves and another specific one - a tie that binds them together in space and endures over time. (Cardwell & Flanagan, 2017) The Nature vs. Nurture debate is concerned with the extent to which particular aspects of behaviour are either inherited or acquired characteristics. Is it also to do with what makes humans different from each other, whether being genes or the environment and which contributes more to a humans psychological and physical development. Cognitive development …show more content…

Meltzoff and Moore (1997) conducted research into caregiver and infant interactions. The method they used was an adult model displaying one of three facial expressions and the child's response was filmed, the results showed that there was an association between infant behaviour and adult model. Interactional synchrony is a form of rhythmic interaction between infant and caregiver involving mutual focus, reciprocity and mirroring of emotion or behaviour. One issue with Meltzoff and Moores research (1997) is the reliability of testing infants, as they pull faces all the time and it is not uncommon for an infant to stick their tongue out, yawn or smile and therefore it is difficult to distinguish between normal behaviour and imitation. Although a strength of the study could be that a replication of the study was conducted six years later, and they found the same results which shows that the results were …show more content…

Classical conditioning involves learning through association. This occurs when you learn to associate two different stimuli, no behaviour is involved, the first stimuli that is encountered is an unconditioned stimulus, this produces a response without any previous learning. Pavlov (1902) started from the idea that there are some things that a dog does not need to learn. For example they don't salivate when they see food. Pavlov showed the existence of the unconditioned response by presenting the dog with food and measuring the salivary secretions. Pavlov's study was a laboratory experiment so there is a high control of variables and the results are reliable they have been repeated several times and the results are consistent. However the study was conducted with dogs so the results may not always apply to

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