Outline and Evaluate how learning theory explains attachment formation

The learning theory has two main concepts to help explain attachment formation. One concept is operant conditioning which explains attachment formation through a reinforced response. When an infant gets food its discomfort from its hunger will become happiness. The infant will now associate the happiness with food and so the food becomes the primary reinforcer. The person feeding the infant will also become associated with the happiness and becomes the secondary reinforce and an attachment will be formed. Another concept of the learning theory of attachment is classical conditioning. Classical conditioning outlines how the infant creates unconditioned and conditioned responses with food and the mother. The infant receiving food, which is an unconditioned stimulus, produces an unconditioned response, which is happiness, and the mother feeding the infant would be the neutral stimulus. The infant will then experience the mother giving them food as well as happiness and the infant will then learn to associate the mother, who has become a conditioned stimulus, with the feeling of happiness, a conditioned response, and so an attachment will form between the infant and the mother as well. Even though the learning theory of attachment does explain attachment formation, it is flawed. Experiments such as Harlow’s monkey study of 1958 is a weakness of the Learning theory as it opposes the idea of learning theory as an explanation of attachment. Harlow’s monkey study saw how monkeys reacted to replacement mothers depending on their material (cloth or wire). Learning theory suggests that the monkey should’ve spent more time on the mother that gave them food (the wire monkey), however the monkey would spend the majority of his time on the comfort monkey (the cloth monkey). This decreases the validity of the learning theory of attachment as an explanation for attachment as Harlow’s monkeys study opposed what learning theory suggested. However, the monkey