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The strange situation is a procedure devised by Mary Ainsworth in the 1970s to observe attachment in children, that is relationships between a caregiver and child. It applies to children between the age of 9 to 30 months. Broadly speaking, the attachment styles were (1) secure and (2) insecure (ambivalent and avoidance).
Mary Ainsworth. Mary Dinsmore Ainsworth ( née Salter; December 1, 1913 – March 21, 1999) [ 1] was an American-Canadian developmental psychologist known for her work in the development of the attachment theory. She designed the strange situation procedure to observe early emotional attachment between a child and their primary caregiver .
Ainsworth's student Mary Main theorized that avoidant behaviour in the Strange Situation Procedure should be regarded as "a conditional strategy, which paradoxically permits whatever proximity is possible under conditions of maternal rejection" by de-emphasising attachment needs.
Although originally designed for 1-year-old children, Ainsworth’s strange situation has been adapted to measure the attachment and exploratory behavior of children between the ages of 2-4½ years-old. A fundamental feature of the strange situation is that the situation the child is placed in must elicit stress.
The most common and empirically supported method for assessing attachment in infants (12 months – 20 months) is the Strange Situation Protocol, developed by Mary Ainsworth as a result of her careful in-depth observations of infants with their mothers in Uganda(see below).
The PAA is a version of Mary Ainsworth's Strange Situation Procedure (SSP), adapted to 2–5-year-old children. It assesses the child's self-protective strategies used with the adult involved in the assessment. [57] It also uses a video recorded 8-segment process over a structured 21–23 minute adult-child interaction.
The Strange Situation was developed by Mary Ainsworth in the 1970s to assess attachment relationships between caregivers and children between 9 and 18 months old. Because maternal sensitivity is an indicator of attachment relationship, researchers sometimes use the Strange Situation to observe attachment so that they may use the results to ...
History of attachment theory. Attachment theory, originating in the work of John Bowlby, is a psychological, evolutionary and ethological theory that provides a descriptive and explanatory framework for understanding interpersonal relationships between human beings. In order to formulate a comprehensive theory of the nature of early attachments ...