Keith E Rice - Stages of Infant Attachment

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Stage	Rudolph Schaffer & Peggy Emerson (1964) (Based on mainly on their Glasgow Babes study)			John Bowlby (1969) (Based on a number of studies over nearly 30 years)
1	0-6 weeks Asocial Stage	Smiling and crying, not directed at any special individuals. No apparent recognition of individual people.	Babies respond to people as they would respond to balloons, puppets, etc.	0-8 weeks Pre-attachment Phase	Orientation and signals towards people without discrimination of one special person. However, crying, babbling, smiling and reaching all function as social releasers to create and maintain proximity with caregivers.	Infants behave in characteristic and friendly ways towards other people but their ability to discriminate between them is very limited – eg: they may just recognise familiar voices.
2	6 weeks – 7 months Indiscriminate Attachment	Attention sought from different individuals. Rudolph Schaffer (1977) split Stage 2 into: (i) 6 weeks – 3 months: general sociability; (ii) 3 – 7 months: increased distinguishing between familiar and unfamiliar people.	Infants can now distinguish between people and things and show a general sociability towards people. As they mature, that sociability is directed more specifically towards people they know. Will still allow strangers to handle them without apparent distress, provided treated properly.	8-10 weeks – 6 months Attachment-in-the-Making Phase	Orientation and signals directed towards one or more special people.	Infants continue to be generally friendly but there is starting to be a marked difference in behaviour towards one mother-figure or primary caregiver.
3	7-11 months Specific Attachments	Strong attachment to one individual. Good attachments to others often follow.	The infant forms a strong emotional bond with one particular individual. (Not always the mother.) They also show separation protest. Most children have multiple attachments by 18 months. Stranger anxiety now apparent.	6 months to 1-2 years old Clear-cut Attachment Phase	Maintenance of proximity to a special person by means of locomotion as well as signals to that person.	The infant starts to follow their mother-figure, greet them when they return, and use them as a base from which to explore. The infant selects other people as subsidiary attachment figures. At the same time the child’s friendly responses to others decrease and strangers are treated with increasing caution.
4	9 months on Multiple Attachments (Rudolph Schaffer, 1996)	Strong emotional ties form with other major caregivers (eg: father, grandparents, older siblings) and non-caregivers (similar-age siblings and other children).	Fear-of-strangers response starts to weaken. Mother figure still the strongest attachment.	From approximately 2 years	Formation of a goal-oriented partnership.	The child gains insight into the mother-figure’s behaviour which enables them to consciously influence the relationship.

Stage Notes:-

There is much support for idea that infants are effectively asocial in the first three months of life. For example, Daphne Maurer & Maria Barrera (1981) found that, at 2 months, infants showed no preference for realistically-drawn faces as against ‘scrambled’ faces - eg: nose where the eyes should be; however, by three months, infants in their sample were showing a marked preference for the more realistically-drawn faces.
However,the Asocial Stage may not be quite as asocial as Schaffer & Emerson presumed. G Carpenter (1975) demonstrated that two-week-old infants can recognise their mother’s face and voice. He set up a situation in which the infants looked at face while hearing a voice. Sometimes the face and the voice belonged to the same person; sometimes they did not. The infants looked at the face the longest time when it was their mother’s face and when it was accompanied by her voice. When their mother’s face was matched with a different voice or her voice was matched with a different face, most infants found this distressing and looked away from the face. There is a potential methodological flaw with Carpenter’s investigation in that those rating the behaviour of the infants knew which condition was being used at any time.
I W R Bushnell, F Sai & T R Mullen (1989) presented 2-day-old babies with the faces of their mother and a female stranger until they had had reached a total of 20 seconds fixating on one or other of the faces. Almost two-thirds of the babies showed a preference for their mother over the stranger, indicating that they had some ability to recognise their own mother.
R Ahrens (1954) found that infants begin to smile ‘socially’ at around 6 weeks. Moreover, Juan Serrano, Jaime Iglesias & Angela Loeches (1995) showed that infants can smile back at a photograph of a happy face, thus demonstrating reciprocity.
According to Jean Piaget (1937), around about 7 months most children begin to develop the schema of object permanence - ie: they realise things still exist even though they can’t necessarily see them. Around this time, infants also become capable of exploring their environment more through crawling. These two capabilities go together, according to Bowlby, allowing the infant to explore - essential for cognitive development, whilst knowing that the mother/attachment figure is still there as a ‘safe base’ to return to.
Mary S Ainsworth (1967) reported that Ugandan infants expressed stranger anxiety at the slightly earlier age of 6 months - though their motor development was also more advanced.

General: The boundaries between the stages, in reality, are fluid. A child is not in one stage and then suddenly another. Some children will pass from one stage to another very quickly while others seem to be in a state of apparent transition - showing characteristics of more than one stage - for perhaps some time.