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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 .
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).
Ainsworth completed her doctoral thesis in 1940 under William Blatz, who had developed security theory, a precursor to attachment theory. [4] Blatz believed the core nature of the relationship between a (to use his colloquial terms) mother and child involved the development of a trusted and secure relationship to function as a safe base for a ...
The theory was later famously expanded upon by psychologist Mary Ainsworth’s “Strange Situation” study, which observed children’s reactions to being reunited with their mothers after a ...
Mary Ainsworth developed a theory of a number of attachment patterns or "styles" in infants in which distinct characteristics were identified; these were secure attachment, avoidant attachment, anxious attachment and, later, disorganized attachment. In addition to care-seeking by children, peer relationships of all ages, romantic and sexual ...
Attachment theory has been crucial in highlighting the importance of social relationships in dynamic rather than fixed terms. [228] Attachment theory can also inform decisions made in social work, especially in humanistic social work (Petru Stefaroi), [235] [236] and court processes about foster care or other placements. Considering the child's ...
Children with secure attachment feel protected by their caregivers, and they know that they can depend on them to return. John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth developed a theory known as attachment theory after inadvertently studying children who were patients in a hospital at which they were working. Attachment theory explains how the parent-child ...
It was developed by Mary Ainsworth, a developmental psychologist [5] Originally it was devised to enable children to be classified into the attachment styles known as secure, anxious-avoidant and anxious-ambivalent. As research accumulated and atypical patterns of attachment became more apparent it was further developed by Main and Solomon in ...