Animal Behaviour In Modern Psychology - Essay Example

?Critically discuss the appropriateness of the ethological approach of studying animal behaviour in modern psychology and evaluate application of Harlow’s findings on humans Ethologists have specifically analyzed different behavioral traits in animals related to mating, feeding, child rearing etc. The relevance of different important ethological approaches to understand the depths of animal behaviour has been frequently explored and a growing body of literature can be found to that effect. Ethology is basically about biological analysis of different kinds of animal behaviour to find out the underlying reasons about why animals behave in a particular manner. It is generally assumed that the ethological approach is highly effective given the way it closely observes a large variety of animal behaviours and then explores through the lens of biology. There are innumerable behaviours in the very big animal kingdom and contemplating them has infinitely contributed to modern psychology. The purpose of this essay is to critically analyze the appropriateness of these ethological approaches in modern psychology by reviewing what modern research has to say on the subject. The following discussion will also include the famous Harlow’s findings to evaluate how those findings can be applied on humans. Nikolaas Tinbergen is worth mentioning here because his contributions to classical ethology are extremely valuable. He identified four levels of analysis to explain animal behaviour. The first approach to explicate how and why animals behave when they do as in mating, feeding, or child rearing is called Causation. Physiological and cognitive mechanisms are studied under causation. Physiological mechanisms stress that a dog’s central nervous system has sensory cells which detect the presence of a human and send signals to motor neurons which then activate the muscles in the dog’s tail causing it to wag as a way of showing recognition, excitement, or even alarm. Cognitive mechanisms suggest that upon sensing a human form, the cognitive centers in a dog’s brain are activated which send impulses to the tail’s muscles through motor neurons and the dog starts moving its tail. According to the approach of ontogeny, a dog may even wag its tail upon sensing or seeing people who are not its companions because tail-wagging attitude is genetic for it, but it eventually learns to individualize and recognize which people are its companions. The functional approach, in contrast, suggests that tail-wagging cannot happen without an element of recognition and it is a physical signal used by dogs as a way of conveying friendly vibes to the members of their social groups be they humans or animals. The approach of evolutionary history maintains that tail-wagging is just one example of a behaviour which over time transformed into a signal. In the past, it occurred whenever dogs connected or socialized physically, but now it has changed into a signal which appears whenever there is a greeting upon seeing a companion. So to analyze why animals, for example dogs, act or behave as they do while mating, it is important to address both physiological and cognitive mechanisms to understand causation. In addition to Tinbergen’s four levels of analysis of nonhuman animal behaviour, it is important to mention Lorenz’s theory of instinctive behaviour. He was also a classical ethologist and his approach to understanding aggression in animals is quite interesting. He formulated that animals gets aggressive and tend to attach when their survival is threatened. Such threats posed by any factor in the environment motivate them to act aggressive. Lorenz has significantly relied on Freud’s work on psychoanalytic analysis of aggression and combined it with the natural selection theory of Darwin to explain animal behaviour from ethological perspective. Instinctual aggressiveness which is discussed by Freud in his psychoanalytic theory suggests that death instinct can be a motivator of aggression. But, Lorenz suggests that aggression on instinct is a product of evolution. He argues in his theory to explain animal aggression that aggressiveness witnessed in animals is not harmful but beneficial as it helps them to survive. It is because of aggression that animals have evolved over time and survived. Lorenz connected aggression to evolution in his ethological approach. Evolutionary psychology is an ethological approach to understanding animal behaviour in reference to mental and psychological attributes. This approach aims at integrating the functional way of reaching the biological mechanisms like breeding, mating etc. in the science of psychology. This approach also explains how females respond to different mating signals. They often have to choose from two or more mates and their mate choices can also be influenced by experience (Kirkpatrick, Rand & Ryan 2006: 1216). Over the course of the evolution, animals from stronger species are expected to destroy weaker animals leading to a stronger population of aggressive and stronger animals. This evolutionary theory of Lorenz is similar to Freud’s psychoanalytic approach because it maintains that aggression is instinctual. Other ethological approaches may also suggest that aggression is influenced by genetic mechanisms. While classical ethologists like Lorenz and Tinbergen viewed reproduction in nonhuman animals like mating as a cooperative process between males and females, more research done on mating and mate choice in animals has introduced new horizons and challenged a simplistic approach as considering sexual reproduction in animals a cooperative venture. Conflicts of interests between mating animals have been noticed which have challenged the idyllic approach of animal mating (Bolhuis & Giraldeau n.d.: 6). It is stressed by Smith (2009: 12) that according to evolutionary approach to ethology, all animals depend on interaction for survival and mating. Without interaction, animals would have to make do with solitary existence which is not possible. It is important to interact either consistently or infrequently with one another “to breed, to be raised or to raise their young, to find food, to avoid predators, to limit competition” (Smith 2009: 12). This idea suggests that interaction between animals forms the bedrock of all forms of activities explaining the cause of the event. Because there are many functions, there are also many kinds of interactional behaviour. There are many important approaches to understanding mate choice in female animals. They are extremely cautious about how potential mates look like, so visual stimuli are very important. There is also a tendency in males to heavily compete among themselves for a particular female. They fight among themselves and even get aggressive for the purpose of winning a female. But, the interesting fact is that even when a male wins a tough competition to reach the mate which he prefers, it is eventually the female who has the power to decide about which mate she would select from many choices to mate with. Females also have more power than males in executing influence on reproduction control. It is their decision that is considered final, so female animals control reproduction by being particularly selective or taking a long time to select a male mate. Apart from visual stimuli which is an important factor in choosing to mate for females according to cognitive ethology, there is also a factor of how potentially capable a male mate is of providing care to the expected offspring. This suggests that a female thinks long and hard before mating. She does not only look for an adorned male, rather she looks for a male mate who would be paternally strong and capable. Her cognitive skills are very complex and have a huge depth to them. This cognitive pattern of female animals is in accordance with the good parent theory which maintains that highly selective females decide on a male mate on grounds of how well they will take care of the kids (Alcock 2001: 491). Harlow conducted some notorious experiments on monkeys which attracted a lot of controversy. He separated some young monkeys from their mothers and confined them to cages. He noticed that after separation from mothers, the infant monkeys got particularly attracted to towels covering the cage floors. They started reacting to them as they would to their mothers. They threw tantrums when deprived of their towels, lied on them all the time, and treated them like a child would treat a stuffed toy. This experiment, however controversial it was, significantly contributed to understanding attachment in animals. Before this experiment, attachment was understood in context of nutrition that baby animals love their mothers because of milk. But, Harlow’s findings suggest that love is dependent not on taste (nutrition or mother’s milk), but on touch. If love was depended on taste and if attachment was essentially connected to nutrition, children would stop loving their mothers once they stop breastfeeding them. The findings of this experiment when applied on humans brought tremendous advancements in childrearing. The baby monkeys when detached from real mothers continued to love the faceless mothers that those towels had become which suggests that all animals including humans have a need to seek love and connect or attach with others at all costs. In conclusion, the above discussion suggests that ethological approaches to analyzing animal behaviour in addition to modern psychological approaches are extremely important. The biological studies conducted on animals since always have been structured to answer the fundamentally important psychological questions instead of other questions. This suggests the association of ethological approaches with modern psychology. The results of these studies are even applied on human today because of their undeniable relevance. Harlow’s experiments and the implementation of their findings on humans is one such example. References Alcock, J 2012, Animal Behaviour: An Evolutionary Approach, Sinauer Associates, Incorporated. Bolhuis, JJ & Giraldeau, L n.d, Introduction: The Study of Animal Behaviour, [Online] Available at http://www.blackwellpublishers.co.uk:443/content/BPL_Images/Content_store/Sample_chapter/9780631231257/Bolhuis_sample%20chapters_Behaviour%20of%20animals.pdf [accessed: 08 December 2013]. Kirkpatrick, M, Rand, AS & Ryan, MJ 2006, Mate choice rules in animals, ANIMAL BEHAVIOUR, Vol. 71, pp. 1215–1225. Smith, WJ 2009, The Behavior of Communicating: an ethological approach, Harvard University Press, USA. Read More