Mary Ainsworth

Saul McLeod John Bowlby (1969) believed that attachment was an all or nothing process. However, research has shown that there are individual differences in attachment quality. Indeed, one of the primary paradigms in attachment theory is that of the security of an individual’s attachment (Ainsworth & Bell, 1970). Much research in psychology has focused on how forms of attachment differ among infants. For example, Schaffer and Emerson (1964) discovered what appeared to be innate differences in sociability in babies; some babies preferred cuddling more than others, from very early on, before much interaction had occurred to cause such differences. However, it was probably the psychologist Mary Ainsworth (1913 1999) who provided the most famous body of research offering explanations of individual differences in attachment. It’s easy enough to know when you are attached to someone because you know how you feel when you are apart from that person, and, being an adult, you can put your feelings into words and describe how it feels. However, most attachment research is carried out using infants and young children, so psychologists have to devise subtle ways of researching attachment styles, usually involving the observational method. Psychologist Mary Ainsworth devised an assessment technique called the Strange Situation Classification (SSC) in order to investigate how attachments might vary between children. The Strange Situation was devised by Ainsworth & Wittig (1969) and was based on Ainsworth’s previous Uganda (1967) and later Baltimore studies (Ainsworth et al., 1971, 1978).