Quick Facts
Born:
December 1, 1913, Glendale, Ohio, United States
Died:
March 21, 1999, Charlottesville, Virginia (aged 85)

Mary Salter Ainsworth (born December 1, 1913, Glendale, Ohio, United States—died March 21, 1999, Charlottesville, Virginia) was an American Canadian developmental psychologist known for her contributions to attachment theory.

When she was five years old, Mary Salter’s family moved to Toronto, where her father became president of a manufacturing firm. At age 15 she read Character and the Conduct of Life (1927), by the American psychologist William McDougall, which inspired her to study psychology. A year later she entered the University of Toronto, earning bachelor’s (1935), master’s (1936), and Ph.D. (1939) degrees.

After a stint as an instructor at the University of Toronto, she entered the Canadian Women’s Army Corps in 1942, gaining substantial clinical and diagnostic skills. She returned to the University of Toronto in 1946 and married Leonard Ainsworth, a World War II veteran and graduate student, in 1950.

Leonard’s decision to complete his doctoral studies in London led to Mary’s collaboration with the British psychologist John Bowlby at the Tavistock Institute for Human Relations, where she was exposed to Bowlby’s emerging ideas about the evolutionary foundation of infant-mother attachment. She also admired the naturalistic observations of mother-child separation conducted by Bowlby’s research assistant, James Robertson. In 1953, when Leonard accepted a postdoctoral position at the East African Institute for Social Research in Kampala, Uganda, Mary was able to undertake a short-term longitudinal study of mother-infant attachment interactions in Ganda villages. Her research was eventually published as a book, Infancy in Uganda: Infant Care and the Growth of Love (1967).

After the Ainsworths’ move to Baltimore, Maryland, in 1954, Mary performed diagnostic work at a psychiatric hospital and lectured at Johns Hopkins University, where she became associate professor of developmental psychology in 1958. Shortly thereafter, she and Leonard divorced.

Appointed to a full professorship in 1963, Mary Ainsworth launched the Baltimore Project, modeled on her work in Uganda. Monthly home visits to 26 families began after a child’s birth and ended at 12 months. Detailed narratives captured the quality of interactions between mother and infant during feeding, contact, play, and distress episodes. The final observation, at 12 months, consisted of a mother-infant separation and reunion procedure now known as the Strange Situation (see attachment theory: Individual-difference features of attachment theory). Patterns of infant behaviour during this laboratory procedure were predicted by maternal sensitivity and harmonious interaction qualities at home. Her findings, published during the next decade in several journal articles and a book, Patterns of Attachment (1978), inspired major longitudinal attachment studies in the United States, West Germany, and Israel.

In 1975 she joined the faculty of the University of Virginia, becoming Commonwealth Professor of Psychology in 1976. She retired as professor emeritus in 1984. Among her many honours was the American Psychological Association’s Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement in the Science of Psychology in 1998.

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Inge Bretherton

attachment theory, in developmental psychology, the theory that humans are born with a need to form a close emotional bond with a caregiver and that such a bond will develop during the first six months of a child’s life if the caregiver is appropriately responsive. Developed by the British psychologist John Bowlby, the theory focused on the experience, expression, and regulation of emotions at both species (normative) and individual (person-specific) levels of analysis.

Bowlby believed that the attachment system, as he and others called it, served two primary functions: to protect vulnerable individuals from potential threats or harm and to regulate negative emotions following threatening or harmful events. The normative component of attachment theory identifies the stimuli and contexts that normally evoke and terminate different kinds of emotions, as well as the sequence of emotions usually experienced following certain relational events. The individual-difference component addresses how people’s personal histories of receiving care and support from attachment figures shape their goals, working models (i.e., interpersonal attitudes, expectations, and cognitive schemas), and coping strategies when emotion-eliciting events in relationships occur.

Normative features of attachment theory

Bowlby’s fascination with the emotional ties that bind humans to each other began with an astute observation. In all human cultures and indeed in primate species, young and vulnerable infants display a specific sequence of reactions following separation from their stronger, older, and wiser caregivers. Immediately following separation, infants protest vehemently, typically crying, screaming, or throwing temper tantrums as they search for their caregivers. Bowlby believed that vigorous protest during the early phases of caregiver absence is a good initial strategy to promote survival, especially in species born in a developmentally immature and very dependent state. Intense protests often draw the attention of caregivers to their infants, who would have been vulnerable to injury or predation during evolutionary history if left unattended.

If loud and persistent protests fail to get the caregiver’s attention, infants enter a second stage, known as despair, during which they usually stop moving and become silent. Bowlby believed that from an evolutionary standpoint, despondency is a good second strategy to promote survival. Excessive movement could result in accident or injury, and loud protests combined with movement might draw predators. According to this logic, if protests fail to retrieve the caregiver quickly, the next best survival strategy would be to avoid actions that might increase the risk of self-inflicted harm or predation.

After a period of despair, infants who are not reunited with their caregivers enter a third and final stage: detachment. During this phase, the infant begins to resume normal activity without the caregiver, gradually learning to behave in an independent and self-reliant manner. Bowlby believed that the function of emotional detachment is to allow the formation of new emotional bonds with new caregivers. He reasoned that emotional ties with previous caregivers must be relinquished before new bonds can fully be formed. In terms of evolution, detachment allows infants to cast off old ties and begin forming new ones with caregivers who might be able to provide the attention and resources needed for survival. Bowlby also conjectured that these normative stages and processes characterize reactions to prolonged or irrevocable separations in adult relationships, which might also have evolutionary adaptive value in terms of maintaining, casting aside, or forming new romantic pairings.

In addition to identifying the course and function of these three distinct stages, Bowlby also identified several normative behaviors that infants commonly display in attachment relationships. Such hallmark behaviors include sucking, clinging, crying, smiling, and following the caregiver, all of which serve to keep the infant or child in close physical proximity to the caregiver. Bowlby also documented unique features of caregivers and their interactions with the infant that are likely to promote attachment bonds. The features include the competence with which the caregiver alleviates the infant’s distress, the speed with which the caregiver responds to the infant, and the familiarity of the caregiver to the infant. These behaviors and features are also believed to be critical to the development of adult attachment relationships.