The Strange Situation procedure was formulated to observe attachment relationships between a caregiver and children between the age of nine and 18 months. It was developed by Mary Ainsworth, a developmental psychologist. Originally it was devised to enable children to be classified into the attachment styles known as secure, anxious-avoidant and anxious-ambivalent. As research accumulated and atypical patterns of attachment became more apparent it was further developed by Main and Solomon in 1986 and 1990 to include the new category of disorganized/disoriented attachment. In this procedure the child is observed playing for 20 minutes while caregivers and strangers enter and leave the room, recreating the flow of the familiar and unfamiliar presence in most children's lives.
Describe and evaluate research that suggests that there are different types of attachment Mary Ainsworth (1970) preformed an experiment called ‘Strange situation’ to study how infants behaved under mild stressful situation by separation and stranger anxiety. The procedure followed 8 steps; the first was that the mother and the infant were put in a room (the laboratory where Ainsworth sat behind a stained glass observing and notating) full of toys, then a stranger walked in without any interaction with the child or mother. Soon after the mother walked out, leaving the stranger and the infant alone (separation and stranger anxiety). After a short while the mother would re-enter to greet and/or comfort, then the infant was left alone (specifically examining the behavior during separation). The stranger then enters in an attempt to comfort the child then after a short while the mother would walk in and the stranger would leave inconspicuously.
Say about background of SS & who designed it, where it was. The results of the observation showed that 15% of the infants were ‘insecure avoidant’ (type A)- they ignored their mother and didn’t mind if she left. A stranger could comfort them. 70% were ‘securely attached’ (type B)- content with their mother, upset when she left, happy when she returned and avoided strangers. 15% were ‘insecure resistant’ (type c)- uneasy around their mother and upset if she left.
P. An application of attachment theory to the study of child abuse. [Ph.D. dissertation], California School of Professional Psychology; 1979 [3] Main, M.; & Hesse, E. Parents’ Unresolved traumatic Experiences are Related to Infant Disorganized Attachment Status: Is Frightened and/or Frightening Parental Behaviour the Linking Mechanism? In Greenberg, M.T. ; Cicchetti, D.; & Cummings, M. [Eds.]
* Mother leaves the room and reappears after a short absence. * A Stranger enters the room and talks to mother. * The mother then leaves the child with the stranger. Ainsworth discovered 3 distinct attachment types : secure attachment (infants with a happy relationship with caregiver, comfortable with social interactions and greet the caregiver cheerily on their return), insecure-avoidant attachment (infants who avoid all social interaction, showing no
In the second experiment they used priming and the carry over effect. Wilcox and Chapa primed with 7.5 month old infants to detect color change in balls in an occlusion event. They found that infants are able to detect change from green to red ball. Then the experimenters did experiments to detect an interaction violation involving heights on covering events. Height information was carried over to the physical representation of the second covering event.
Gopnik first uses a personal experience to captivate her audience then proceeds to provide scientific evidence on the psychological abilities of children, beginning with newborn babies to toddlers about the age of four. The author informs readers on the thought capabilities of children by providing examples of the changes in mind development in different age categories. She suggests that "newborn babies (the youngest tested was only 42 minutes old) can imitate facial expressions" (Gopnik, 238) and how children that are nine months old can already distinguish between internal feelings such as happiness, sadness and anger. Gopnik recaps experiments that discover how children have learnt about people's wants and how they may conflict with their own in this portion of her writing. Two year old children seem to turn intentionally difficult and challenge their parents constantly, letting desire take control.
By two years old, children begin testing and exploring this idea. Three year olds understand visual perception and the concept of hiding objects. By the time a child is four, they understand that people can have incorrect thoughts about the world. In opposition to the traditional understanding that babies and young children learn and think differently than adults, Gopnik suggests that babies and young children use the same learning methods as scientists. They “observe, formulate theories, make predictions, and do experiments” (Gopnik, 237) to learn about people, objects, and their surroundings.
Due to a growing interest in infants’ ability to perceive the surrounding world in the early 20th century various research studies and experiments aiming to observe and investigate newborns’ nature were conducted. One of the first to engage in newborns’ observational studies was Bower (1965) who found they are capable of perceiving depth cues at the age of 3 months. What he did was to present babies with a cube in a distance of one meter and examine whether they would suck a pacifier while viewing the cube. After a couple of trials, infants realized that every time they suck the pacifier when the cube was shown they will be rewarded. Although cubes of different sizes and larger distances were used to test the babies, a relatively little sucking was produced by them, which suggests the hypothesis that infants may have prior knowledge of depth and size constancy.
The first article that I reviewed is titled Infant Developmental Outcomes: A Family Systems Perspective. Infant & Child Development. The main reason for this study is because the authors were interested in how “Parental mental health, parent-infant relationship, infant characteristics and couple’s relationship factors were associated with the infant’s development” (Parfitt, Pike, Ayers, 2014). To do this, the researchers gathered forty-two families and observed the infant at the ages of three months through the infant being video recorded, five months by giving the parents an in-depth clinical interview to evaluate their psyche and lastly at seventeen months they measured the infant’s cognitive language and motor development. To their surprise,