Mary Salter Ainsworth Essay

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Mary Salter Ainsworth was born in Glendale, Ohio on December 1, 1913. She was an American Canadian developmental psychologist that spent most of her life contributing to the attachment theory. A lot of her work involved the patterns of infant attachment and she also developed the Strange Situation test. Her research has been cited over 7,000 times by social science sources and serves as a guideline to this day. Through an educated childhood, Ainsworth made major studies that contributed greatly to human development.
Since her early life, Ainsworth had been motivated to study psychology. At just the age of 15 Mary read Character and the Conduct of Life, which inspired her to enter into the University of Toronto the following year. There, Ainsworth …show more content…

She discovered that when a bond between a mother and a child are broken, the child has a chance of having developmental challenges. In order to discover this, Ainsworth created an assessment technique called the Strange Situation Classification. This would investigate how the bonds between children and their parents varied. The procedure was used to observe the behavior of infants from 12-18 months and comprised of 8 stages, about 3 minutes each: 1) The mother, baby, and experimenter in the room, 2) the baby and the mother alone, 3) a stranger joins the mother and baby, 4) the mother leaves the baby with the stranger, 5) the mother returns and the stranger leaves, 6) the mother leaves the infant alone, 7) the stranger returns to the room, and 8) the mother returns and the stranger leaves. The result of the experiment was the identification of three main attachment styles: secure, insecure avoidant, and insecure ambivalent. This research allowed Ainsworth to conclude that the more “sensitive” a mother is to her child’s feelings and needs, the more securely attached her children are. If a mother were to ignore or lose patience with a child, the child would likely be insecurely attached. This means that the child would either be physically and emotionally independent or would display clingy behavior, but show rejection when communicating. Evidently, this breakthrough was an accomplishment that would bring bigger opportunities for

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