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The strange situation is a procedure devised by Mary Ainsworth in the 1970s to observe attachment in children, that is relationships between a caregiver and child. It applies to children between the age of 9 to 30 months. Broadly speaking, the attachment styles were (1) secure and (2) insecure (ambivalent and avoidance).
Mary Dinsmore Ainsworth (née Salter; December 1, 1913 – March 21, 1999) [1] was an American-Canadian developmental psychologist known for her work in the development of the attachment theory. She designed the strange situation procedure to observe early emotional attachment between a child and their primary caregiver .
Anxious-ambivalent attachment is a form of insecure attachment and is also misnamed as "resistant attachment". [53] [55] In general, a child with an anxious-ambivalent pattern of attachment will typically explore little (in the Strange Situation) and is often wary of strangers, even when the parent is present. When the caregiver departs, the ...
Secure attachment has been shown to act as a buffer to determinants of health among preschoolers, including stress and poverty. [10] One study supports that women with a secure attachment style had more positive feelings with regard to their adult relationships than women with insecure attachment styles.
Avoidant attachment (insecure) Avoidant attachment speaks for itself—it’s a product of a caregiver who was “distant, unavailable, or neglectful,” says Kuehnle, which results in a child ...
Ainsworth observed mother-infant interaction and came to the conclusion that individual differences in reaction to separation could not be explained by simple absence or presence of the caregiver but must be the result of a cognitive process. [4] However, when Bowlby developed his attachment theory, cognitive psychology was still at its beginning.
Bowlby's colleague Mary Ainsworth identified that an important factor which determines whether a child will have a secure or insecure attachment is the degree of sensitivity shown by their caregiver: The sensitive caregiver responds socially to attempts to initiate social interaction, playfully to his attempts to initiate play.
John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth developed the attachment theory in the 1960s while investigating the effects of maternal separation on infant development. [4] The development of the Strange Situation task in 1965 by Ainsworth and Wittig allowed researchers to systematically investigate the attachment system operating between children and their parents. [5]