Mary Ainsworth

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Mary D. Salter Ainsworth (December 1913 – 1999) was a Canadian developmental psychologist known for her work in early emotional attachment with "The Strange Situation" as well as her work in the development of Attachment Theory.

Life

Mary D. Salter Ainsworth was born in Glendale, Ohio in 1913, eldest of three sisters. Her parents both graduated from Dickinson College. Her father earned his Master's in History and was transferred to a manufacturing firm in Canada when Ainsworth was five. While her parents always put a strong emphasis on education, it was William McDougall's book Character and the Conduct of Life that inspired her interest in psychology.

Ainsworth enrolled in honors program in psychology at the University of Toronto in the fall of 1929. She earned her BA in 1935, her MA in 1936, and her Ph.D in 1939, all from the University of Toronto. She stayed to teach for a few years before joining the Canadian Women's Army Corp in 1942 in World War II, reaching the rank of Major in 1945.

She returned to Toronto to continue teaching personality psychology and conduct research. She married Leonard Ainsworth in 1950 and moved to London with him to allow him to finish his graduate degree at University College.

After many other academic positions, she eventually settled at the University of Virginia in 1975, where she remained the rest of her academic career. Ainsworth received many honors, including the Award for Distinguished Contributions to Child Development in 1985 and the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the APA in 1989.

Early work

While in England, Ainsworth joined the research team at Tavistock Clinic investigating the effects of maternal separation on child development. Comparison of disrupted mother-child bonds to normal mother-child relationship showed that a child's lack of a mother figure leads to "adverse development effects." In 1954, she left Tavistock Clinic to do research in Africa, where she carried out her longitudinal field study of mother-infant interaction.

She and her colleagues developed the Strange Situation Procedure, which is a widely used, well researched and validated, method of assessing an infant's pattern and style of attachment to a caregiver. (See Attachment theory.)

Strange Situation

In the 1970s, Ainsworth devised a procedure, called A Strange Situation, to observe attachment relationships between a caregiver and child.

In this procedure of the strange situation 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. The situation varies in stressfulness and the child's responses are observed. The child experiences the following situations:

  1. Parent and infant are introduced to the experimental room.
  2. Parent and infant are alone. Parent does not participate while infant explores.
  3. Stranger enters, converses with parent, then approaches infant. Parent leaves inconspicuously.
  4. First separation episode: Stranger's behaviour is geared to that of infant.
  5. First reunion episode: Parent greets and comforts infant, then leaves again.
  6. Second separation episode: Infant is alone.
  7. Continuation of second separation episode: Stranger enters and gears behaviour to that of infant.
  8. Second reunion episode: Parent enters, greets infant, and picks up infant; stranger leaves inconspicuously.

Four aspects of the child's behavior are observed:

  1. The amount of exploration (e.g. playing with new toys) the child engages in throughout.
  2. The child's reactions to the departure of its caregiver.
  3. The stranger anxiety (when the baby is alone with the stranger).
  4. The child's reunion behaviour with its caregiver.

On the basis of their behaviors, the children were categorized into three groups, with a fourth added later. Each of these groups reflects a different kind of attachment relationship with the caregiver.

Secure attachment

A child who is securely attached to its mother will explore freely while the mother is present, will engage with strangers, will be visibly upset when the mother departs and happy to see the mother return. However, the child will not engage with a stranger if their mother is not in the room.

Securely attached children are best able to explore when they have the knowledge of a secure base to return to in times of need (also known as "rapprochement," meaning in French "bring together"). When assistance is given, this bolsters the sense of security and also, assuming the mother's assistance is helpful, educates the child in how to cope with the same problem in the future. Therefore, secure attachment can be seen as the most adaptive attachment style. According to some psychological researchers, a child becomes securely attached when the mother is available and able to meet the needs of the child in a responsive and appropriate manner. Others have pointed out that there are also other determinants of the child's attachment, and that behavior of the parent may in turn be influenced by the child's behavior.

Anxious-resistant insecure attachment

A child with an anxious-resistant attachment style is anxious of exploration and of strangers, even when the mother is present. When the mother departs, the child is extremely distressed. The child will be ambivalent when she returns - seeking to remain close to the mother but resentful, and also resistant when the mother initiates attention. When reunited with the mother, the baby may also hit or push his mother when she approaches and fail to cling to her when she picks him up.

According to some psychological researchers, this style develops from a mothering style which is engaged but on the mother's own terms. That is, sometimes the child's needs are ignored until some other activity is completed and that attention is sometimes given to the child more through the needs of the parent than from the child's initiation.

This is now more commonly known as amibivalent/resistant attachment as the child can't make up his mind about what he wants; when he is held he wants to be left alone and when he is left he clings to the mother. Both ambivalent attachments and avoidant attachments are types of insecure attachments which are less desirable than secure attachments,[1] but ambivalent attachment tends to be indicative of more maladaptive parenting and indicates a greater likelihood for attachment problems in the future.

Anxious-avoidant insecure attachment

A child with an anxious-avoidant attachment style will avoid or ignore the caregiver - showing little emotion when the caregiver departs or returns. The child may run away from his caregiver when they approach and fail to cling to them when they pick him up. The child will not explore very much regardless of who is there. Strangers will not be treated much differently from the caregiver. There is not much emotional range displayed regardless of who is in the room or if it is empty.

This style of attachment develops from a care-giving style which is more disengaged. The child's needs are frequently not met and the child comes to believe that communication of needs has no influence on the caregiver.

Disorganized/disoriented attachment

A fourth category was added by Ainsworth's colleague Mary Main[2] and Ainsworth accepted the validity of this modification[3].

A child may cry during separation but avoid the mother when she returns or may approach the mother, then freeze or fall to the floor. Some show stereotyped behaviour, rocking to and fro or repeatedly hitting themselves. Main and Hesse[4] found that most of the mothers of these children had suffered major losses or other trauma shortly before or after the birth of the infant and had reacted by becoming severely depressed[3]. In fact, 56% of mothers who had lost a parent by death before they completed high school subsequently had children with disorganised attachments[4].

Critique of the Strange Situation Protocol

Michael Rutter describes the procedure in the following terms in 'The Clinical Implications of Attachment Concepts' from the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, Volume 36 No 4, pp. 552–553,[5]

"It is by no means free of limitations (see Lamb, Thompson, Gardener, Charnov & Estes, 1984)[6]. To begin with, it is very dependent on brief separations and reunions having the same meaning for all children. This maybe a major constraint when applying the procedure in cultures, such as that in Japan (see Miyake et al.,, 1985)[7], where infants are rarely separated from their mothers in ordinary circumstances. Also, because older children have a cognitive capacity to maintain relationships when the older person is not present, separation may not provide the same stress for them. Modified procedures based on the Strange Situation have been developed for older preschool children (see Belsky et al., 1994; Greenberg et al., 1990)[8][9] but it is much more dubious whether the same approach can be used in middle childhood. Also, despite its manifest strengths, the procedure is based on just 20 minutes of behavior. It can be scarcely expected to tap all the relevant qualities of a child's attachment relationships. Q-sort procedures based on much longer naturalistic observations in the home, and interviews with the mothers have developed in order to extend the data base (see Vaughn & Waters, 1990)[10]. A further constraint is that the coding procedure results in discrete categories rather than continuously distributed dimensions. Not only is this likely to provide boundary problems, but also it is not at all obvious that discrete categories best represent the concepts that are inherent in attachment security. It seems much more likely that infants vary in their degree of security and there is need for a measurement systems that can quantify individual variation".

Ecological validity and universality of Strange Situation attachment classification distributions

With respect to the ecological validity of the Strange Situation, a meta-analysis of 2,000 infant-parent dyads, including several from studies with non-Western language and/or cultural bases found the global distribution of attachment categorizations to be A (21%), B (65%), and C (14%) [11] This global distribution was generally consistent with Ainsworth et al.'s (1978) original attachment classification distributions.

However, controversy has been raised over a few cultural differences in these rates of 'global' attachment classification distributions. In particular, two studies diverged from the global distributions of attachment classifications noted above. One study was conducted in North Germany [12] in which more avoidant (A) infants were found than global norms would suggest, and the other in Sapporo, Japan [13] where more resistant (C) infants were found. Of these two studies, the Japanese findings have sparked the most controversy as to the meaning of individual differences in attachment behavior as originally identified by Ainsworth et al. (1978).

In a recent study conducted in Sapporo, Behrens, et al., 2007.[14] found attachment distributions consistent with global norms using the six-year Main & Cassidy scoring system for attachment classification.[15] In addition to these findings supporting the global distributions of attachment classifications in Sapporo, Behrens et al. also discuss the Japanese concept of amae and its relevance to questions concerning whether the insecure-resistant (C) style of interaction may be engendered in Japanese infants as a result of the cultural practice of amae.

Attachment measurement: discrete or continuous?

Regarding the issue of whether the breadth of infant attachment functioning can be captured by a categorical classification scheme, it should be noted that continuous measures of attachment security have been developed which have demonstrated adequate psychometric properties. These have been used either individually or in conjunction with discrete attachment classifications in many published reports [see Richters et al., 1998; [16] Van IJzendoorn et al., 1990). [17]] The original Richter’s et al. (1998) scale is strongly related to secure versus insecure classifications, correctly predicting about 90% of cases [17]. Readers further interested in the categorical versus continuous nature of attachment classifications (and the debate surrounding this issue) should consult the paper by Fraley and Spieker [18] and the rejoinders in the same issue by many prominent attachment researchers including J. Cassidy, A. Sroufe, E. Waters & T. Beauchaine, and M. Cummings.


Major works

  • Ainsworth, M. and Bowlby, J. (1965). Child Care and the Growth of Love. London: Penguin Books.
  • Ainsworth, M. (1967). Infancy in Uganda. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins.
  • Ainsworth, M., Blehar, M., Waters, E., & Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of Attachment. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

References

  1. ↑ Rathus, S. A. (2009) Psych. Mason: Cengage Learning
  2. ↑ Template:Cite conference
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Colin Murray Parkes (2006). Love and Loss. Routledge, London and New York. p. 13. 
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Template:Cite conference
  5. ↑ Rutter, M. (1995). Clinical implications of attachment concepts: Retrospect and Prospect. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry and Allied Disciplines, 36, 549-571.
  6. ↑ Lamb, Thompson, Gardener, Charnov & Estes,(1984). Security of Infantile attachment as assessed in the 'Strange Situation'; its study and biological interpretations. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 7, 127-147
  7. ↑ Miyake, Chen, & Campos (1985). Infant temperament and mother's mode of interaction and attachment in Japan; an interim report; In I. Bretherton & E Waters (Eds), Growing points of attachment theory and research. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 50, Serial No 209, 276-297.
  8. ↑ Belsky, J. & Cassidy, J. (1994). Attachment Theory and Evidence. In M. Rutter & D. Hay (Eds) Development Through Life; A Handbook For Clinicians (pp. 373-402). Oxford; Blackwell Scientific Publications.
  9. ↑ Greenberg, M. T., Cicchetti, D. & Cummings, M. (Eds), (1990). Attachment in the preschool years; theory research and intervention. Chicago; University of Chicago Press.
  10. ↑ Vaughn, B. E. & Waters, E. (1990). Attachment behavior at home and in the laboratory. Child Development, 61, 1965-1973.
  11. ↑ Van IJzendoorn, M.H., & Kroonenberg, P.M. (1988). Cross-cultural patterns of attachment: A meta-analysis of the strange-situation. Child Development, 59, 147-156.
  12. ↑ Grossmann, K.E., Grossmann, K., Huber, F., & Wartner, U. (1981). German children's behavior toward their mothers at 12 months and their fathers at 18 months in Ainsworth's strange situation. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 4, 157-184.
  13. ↑ Takahashi, K. (1986). Examining the Strange-Situation procedure with Japanese mothers and 12-month old infants. Developmental Psychology, 22, 265-270.
  14. ↑ Behrens, K. Y., Main, M., & Hesse, E. (2007). Mothers’ Attachment Status as Determined by the Adult Attachment Interview Predicts Their 6-Year-Olds’ Reunion Responses: A Study Conducted in Japan. Developmental Psychology, 43, 1553–1567.
  15. ↑ Main, M., & Cassidy, J. (1988). Categories of response to reunion with the parent at age 6: Predictable from infant attachment classifications and stable over a 1-month period. Developmental Psychology, 24, 415-426.
  16. ↑ Richters, J. E., Waters, E., & Vaughn, B. E. (1988). Empirical classification of infant-mother relationships from interactive behavior and crying during reunion. Child Development, 59, 512-522.
  17. ↑ 17.0 17.1 Van IJzendoorn, M. H., & Kroonenberg, P. M. (1990). Cross-cultural consistency of coding the strange situation. Infant Behavior and Development, 13, 469-485.
  18. ↑ Fraley, C. R., & Spieker, S. J. (2003). Are Infant Attachment Patterns Continuously or Categorically Distributed? A Taxometric Analysis of Strange Situation Behavior. Developmental Psychology, 39, 387-404.

Further reading

  • O'Connell, A.N., & Rusoo, N.F. (1983). Models of achievement: Reflections of eminent women in psychology. New York: Columbia University Press.

External links

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