Shashank K.Article Critique: “Does infant carrying promote attachment?”
1. The authors take ideals from many different theorists to come up with their hypothesis and their study idea. For example, they base their experiment on Erikson’s Psychosocial Theory, where a heavier emphasis is placed on social influences; as we can see in this study, they focus on women of a poor socioeconomic status (SES). And to be more specific, the first stage of his theory is touched upon, the psychosocial stage of “trust vs. mistrust”, where infant development is mostly dependent on how responsive people are regarding an infant’s needs, and where an infant has to trust his/her caregiver. The authors also touch upon S.K. Skinner’s theory of Operant Conditioning. By this I mean that they kept his theory in mind when looking at the correlation between infant attachment to the amount of physical contact with their mother. Since Operant Conditioning is the conditioning of an individual to a certain stimulus to elicit a response via another stimulus, the researchers performed various tests to make sure this wasn’t the reason for their favorable outcome. Lastly, I believe that the authors used Piaget’s Cognitive Development Theory in trying to explain why the phenomena of an infant crying less follows more parent interaction. In his theory, he talks about his ideas of schemes, or patterns of actions that are constructed by the individual that help define experiences, and with those schemes, the process of adaptation help mold those schemes. In the study’s conclusion, the authors talk about how babies might have reduced their crying and periods of vocalizing due to not needing to as their mothers were always close to them. This reduction in crying may be the result of adaptation, where they’re adapting from their biologically pre-dispositioned state of needing to cry to get attention.
2. The second hypothesis of the study was that, “[…] it was hypothesized that infant behaviors such…