types of attachment

• Mary Ainsworth's strange situation study

  the strange situation is a controlled experiment the baby is placed in a room where its behaviour is observed in different situations:

  1. the baby is encouraged to explore testing secure base and proximity seeking
  2. stranger comes in testing stranger anxiety
  3. stranger and baby are left together testing separation and stranger anxiety
  4. caregiver returns and stranger leaves testing reunion behaviour
  5. baby is left alone testing separation anxiety

  each stage lasted 3 minutes
• types of attachment - secure attachment

  60%-75%, findings showed that the baby will use the mother as a safe base to explore their environment and become distressed when the mother leaves, they are also avoidant of the stranger alone but friendly when mother is in the room and is positive and happy when mother returns
• types of attachment - insecure avoidant attachment

  20-25%, findings showed that the baby will explore freely without proximity or a secure base and when the mother leaves the infant shows no signs of distress, the infant is okay with the stranger and continues playing when stranger is present and when mother returns they show little interest but receives comfort off stranger and mother
• types of attachment - insecure resistant attachment

  3%, findings show that the baby will seek strong proximity and explore less and infant shows signs of intense distress when mother leaves, infant avoids the stranger and shows fear and when mother returns the infant approaches her but resists contact and even push her away crying
• Ainsworth's strange situation evaluation strengths

  the study has good inter-rater reliability as it was also tested by Bick(2012) and found agreement on 92% of the cases, so there is no experimenter bias and doesn't depend on subjective judgements
• Ainsworth's strange situation evaluation limitations

  lacks validity as its not measuring a general attachment style but one with the mother, not all infants form a primary attachment with the mother, low ecological validity due to taking place in an artificial setting so cant be said the same thing would happen in another setting

  
  

  the study may be culture bound, different cultures have different relationships with the infant, Takahashi (1990) - the procedure is not suitable for Japan as mothers rarely leave the baby so separation anxiety would be high even if they had a secure attachment