Salter Ainsworth, M.D. & Bell, S.M. (1970). Attachment, Exploration, and Separation — Illustrated by the Behavior of One-year old’s in a Strange Situation.
Arhe Vaninetti
Research Methods and Statistics, PSY 301, Pacific University, Oregon
February 6, 2023
For Mary Ainsworth, a student of John Bowlby, the theory of attachment was not fleshed out enough to be generalizable to infants outside of the insecure realm. Summarized in Ainsworth & Bell’s (1970) article is the idea that attachment stems from ethological and evolutionary viewpoints that suggest that attachment is a mechanism of survival. When successful, attachment promotes exploratory behavior, parent-seeking behavior, and later reassurance in the infant’s sense of self. At the time, Ainsworth had been branching off of Bowlby’s work with insecurely attached children who had experienced neglect, abuse, or inconsistency in receiving care. From this, Ainsworth asked whether or not the categories of attachment were universal or categorical in infants who experienced different levels of care and attentiveness. This article found that among proximity-seeking behaviors, contact-maintaining behaviors, proximity-avoiding behaviors, contact-resisting behavior, and search behaviors (i.e., searching for the parent who participated in the study), infants who exhibited inconsistent or atypical responses to the mother’s return were categorized as insecure-ambivalent or detached.
Ainsworth & Bell (1970) convenience sampled 56 white, middle class infants from a pediatrician from the ages of 49-51 weeks old. In a novel and furnished room, Ainsworth placed two chairs, infant toys, and a 9×9 foot square space for the infant to explore. In this room was one-way glass, as well as video cameras to record the infants’ reactions. The ‘Strange Situation’ consisted of eight episodes of moving parts, where the infant was desensitized to a stranger with the mother present, left with the stranger, and then reunited with the mother during the last episode. Ainsworth was most interested in the reunification of the mother and infant to establish secure, insecure-ambivalent, or detached attachment. Ainsworth then recorded and graphed the coded behaviors according to prevalence.
Ainsworth & Bell (1970) establish the categories of secure and insecure-ambivalent attachment and suggest behaviors that equate to them. Adding onto Bowlby’s research with neglected, abused and inconsistently cared for children, as well as rhesus macaque monkeys, Ainsworth & Bell (1970) suggested explanations for the insecure behavior displayed in human infants in the Strange Situation. While this research lacked concrete statistics, it displayed complex levels of behavior coding fit for descriptive data. Furthermore, because the Strange Situation is still used today for testing of attachment styles in infants, it has established reliability and validity as well as ethical strength, even before the publishing of the 1973 Belmont Report. Due to the Strange Situation, the field of developmental psychology and the theory of attachment has been built into a main theory utilized by child and adult psychologists. This 1970 study, however, was not representative of many cultural and ethnic populations, who may harbor different values surrounding child-attentiveness and care. Similarly, the infants were from middle-class families who may employ alternative child-care methods, like a nanny, daycare, or a babysitter, which may have had an impact on the results of the study. Lastly, the study may have provided different results if the stranger who entered the room was male or had a different skin tone than caucasian. These small differences may have affected the infants’ reactions and proximity-seeking behaviors. Because this study has been so prolific, these alternative methods may have been established, which would have increased the social validity of attachment styles, as well as global generalizability. Because this study is quite old and the category of insecure-ambivalent is quite vague, it would be helpful to see the attachment styles relabeled or made more concise through subcategories or more clear definitions.