Mary Dinsmore Salter Ainworth, an American psychologist who
specialized in the study of infant attachment was born December 1, 1913 in
Glendale Ohio. Mary was the oldest of
three sisters and both of her parents were graduates from Dickinson College. When Mary was five years old her father
earned his Master’s in History degree and was transferred to a manufacturing
firm in Canada where he moved his family.
William McDougall’s book Character
and the Conduct of Life is what inspired Mary Ainsworth interest in
psychology at the age of 15. In this
book McDougall endeavours to make practical application of his psychology for
the benefit of those who desire to be usefully happy and blamelessly
successful. He hopes that it may be
found to go a little farther than others of similar aim in affording practical
guidance in the conduct of life, and whatever view we may take of the attempt,
it can scarcely be denied that this modest hope is amply justified. The book falls into two fairly distinct
parts—the first dealing with the more formal and general aspects of conduct,
the second with the more material and specific aspects ("Character and the
Conduct of Life: Practical Psychology for every man," 1927). Mary went on to attend the University of
Toronto and was enrolled in the honors psychology program.
In an article about the secure child Mary Ainsworth stated that
“Throughout my entire career the underlying aim has been the understanding of
intimate interpersonal relationships, especially the earliest of these, and
they influence subsequent personality development. Undoubtedly it was the interest –then
half-recognized—that led me to choose to study psychology when an undergraduate
at the University of Toronto in the early 1930s” (Volpe, 2010).
Mary describes her primary interest in psychology increased while
attending Professor William Blatz’s course in genetic and abnormal psychology
in which he introduced the student’s to his “security theory”. Security theory is essentially a theory about
personality development. It can be
characterized as an open-ended theory (Volpe, 2010). At the same time, and experimental project
directed by Professor Sperrin Chant taught Mary that research could be
fascinating. Professor Blatz suggested
that Mary begin dissertation research relevant to his security theory under the
supervision of him and Professor Chant.
Mary’s dissertation was completed in 1939 and published in the following
year (Salter, 1940). It was believed to
be the first publication stemming from Blatzian security theory. Mary stated that these were the reasons that
inspired her to stay at the University of Toronto as a Graduate where she
earned her B.A. in 1935, her M.A. in 1936 and her Ph.D. in 1939 (Volpe, 2010) .
After obtaining her Ph.D., from the University of Toronto, Mary
began her career as a professor at the University of Toronto before joining the
Canadian Women’s Army Corp in 1942 during World War II where she was assigned
to the Directorate of Personnel Selection.
After a brief period of post-war government services as the
superintendent of Women’s Rehabilitation in the Canadian Department of
Veteran’s Affairs, Mary returned to the University of Toronto to teach
personality psychology and conduct research in the assessment of security
(Arcus, 2001).
In 1950 Mary married Leonard Ainsworth, a graduate student at the
University of Toronto. This marriage
created a conflict of interest on Mary’s behalf because she was a faculty
member at the university so the couple relocated to England where Leonard
accepted a doctoral program at the University College, London. Soon after that Mary began a research
position at the Tavistock Clinic with John Bowlby, who was using evolutionary
and ethological theory to explore the development of attachments to caregivers
and the consequences of maternal separation and loss for young children (Darity
Jr., 2008). The research team at the
Tavistock clinic studied 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.”
Mary’s work at the Tavistock clinic with Bowlby caused her earlier
interest in security and developmental surface and she created a plan to
conduct a longitudinal study of mother-infant interaction in a natural setting
at her earliest opportunity. That
opportunity came when her husband accepted a position in the East African
Institute of Social Research in Kampala, Uganda. It was there in Uganda that Mary studied
mothers and infants in their natural environment, observing and recording as
much as possible, and analyzing and publishing the data years later after
joining the faculty at John Hopkins University of Baltimore (Arcus, 2001).
According to the Gale Encyclopedia of Psychology, Mary concluded
that there are qualitatively distinct patterns of attachment that evolve
between infants and their mothers over the opening years of life. This was based on her original observations
in Uganda and subsequent studies in Baltimore. This was known as the Baltimore
project where she visited the homes of 26 families after a child was born up
until they turned twelve months. Her
findings were detailed narratives of mother-infant interactions. Mary stated
that although a majority of these patterns are marked by comfort And security,
some are tense or conflicted, and she found evidence suggesting that these
relationships were related to the level of responsiveness that mothers showed
toward their infants from the earliest months.
In one study she found mothers who responded more quickly to their
infants cries at three months were more likely to have developed secure
attachments with their babies by year one (Arcus, 2001) .
While teaching at John Hopkins University Mary and her colleagues
began working on creating an assessment to measure attachments between mothers
and children. It was at John Hopkins University
the she developed her famous ‘Strange Situation” assessment, which is said to
be one of the most common used procedures in child development research (Arcus,
2001). The Strange Situation has also
been extended to the studies of attachment behaviors and correlates in rhesus
monkeys, chimpanzees, and dogs used as pets and guide animals for the blind
(Darity Jr., 2008) .
The Strange Situation is a twenty-minute procedure where there is
a series of separations and reunions between mother and toddler. Three main patterns of attachments were
observed: (1) anxious/avoidant, in which the child tended not to be distressed
at the mother’s departure and to avoid her on return; (2) securely attached, in
which the child was distressed by mother’s departure and easily soothed by her
on return; and (3) anxious/resistant, in which the child tended to become
highly distressed at the mother’s departure, only to seek comfort and distance
simultaneously on her return by engaging in behaviors as crying and reaching to
be held, but then attempting to leave once picked up (Darity Jr., 2008) . A
fourth category disorganized/disoriented attachment was added by one of Mary
Ainsworth colleagues, Mary Main in which 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
behavior, rocking to and fro or repeatedly hitting themselves. Mary Main found that most of the mothers of
these children had suffered major losses or other trauma shortly before or
after birth of the infant and had reacted by becoming severely depressed. In fact, 56% of mothers who had lost a parent
by death before they completed high school subsequently was said to have
children with disorganized attachments (Solomon, 1990).
Mary Ainsworth’s research and development of the “Strange
Situation” assessment has played an important role in the understanding of
child development. She contributes her
desire to move forward with the research to William Blatz’s “security theory”
because she believed that it was the concept of security itself that was a
guiding principle for her work on showing how early attachment styles
contribute to later behaviors (Volpe, 2010).
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