Mary Ainsworth's Attachment

Ainsworth experiment
Attachment. Something that all humans develop naturally. We all become attached to something and/or someone throughout our lifetime. You see this in very young children, but have you ever wondered why you see it more in some than you do in others? Have you ever wondered why sometimes in twins you get a baby that is all about cuddling and being carried and one twin that would much rather walk and lay by his or herself. Well you aren’t the only one to wonder thing. Mary Ainsworth also wondered this. This is why she developed an experiment that investigated how attachments might vary from child to child. She believed that the children would react different from other children when put in different scenarios. This hypothesis
That got an infant and its mother to volunteer in the experiment the first thing that was done was that the experimenter and the mother walked into the room with the infant that was the first step that’s when the experimenter left. Then the second step started and that was the baby and its mother alone. Step three started when a stranger walked in and joined the mother and infant. Step four was the mother leaving the room and leaving the baby alone with the stranger. Step five was the mother returns and the stranger leaves so the mother is alone with the baby again. Step six is the mother leaves the room meaning that the infant is all alone in the room. Step seven is that the stranger returns so that it’s just the stranger and the baby in the room. Step eight is the mother returns into the room and the stranger leaves for the last time. These procedures were done with multiple babies and produced some very interesting
The first one was style A. This style was the avoidant attachment style. The babies that had this style were pretty indifferent about all the things that were going on they were pretty comfortable the whole time the mother and the stranger were both able to comfort the baby. The second one was style B. This style was the secure attachment style. This attachment was the stranger danger attachment the baby wanted nothing to do with the stranger and only wanted the mother displaying distressed behavior when the mother was not present in the room. This baby used the mother as a safe zone to explore its enviroment. The third and last one was style C. this style was the ambivalent attachment. This is the attachment where the infant was really anyone’s fan. These infants showed signs of distress when the mother left and ran from the stranger but unlike style B when the mother got back the baby was pretty distant from the mother but treated her better than the stranger also this baby explored a lot less than the other two