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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Attachment theory | 4/12 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attachment_theory | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T15:31:31.580137+00:00 | kb-cron |
=== A laboratory procedure === True to the principles of ethology, John Bowlby initially conceptualized infant attachments as observable entities. Not just newborn's attachment behaviours, but the attachment behavioural system which integrated these behaviours, and such behavioural consequences as fear of strangers and separation anxiety were all supposed to be directly observable. Upon this basis, Mary Ainsworth and her colleagues designed a seven-episode laboratory-based observational procedure for measuring infants' attachments to their mothers called the Strange Situation Procedure or SSP. They predicted that, once infants have begun to form attachments to their mothers around the end of their first year, they should predictably use her as a secure base from which to explore an unfamiliar room containing attractive toys, and, later, to flee to when confronted by a "stranger". These expectations were not confirmed by their research. Ainsworth's group found that, after a three-minute period of a mother, her baby, and a female stranger sitting together in the laboratory (Episode 3), only one out of ten babies followed their mother to the door—and only one out of five babies cried—when she left her baby alone with the stranger for three minutes (Episode 4). A third of the babies showed no alteration in attachment behaviours between Episodes 3 and 4. Thus, as Ainsworth and her colleagues put it, neither separation anxiety nor stranger fear was "as ubiquitous as anticipated" in the SSP: "separation protest . . . [is] by no means invariably activated by the baby's realization of the mother's departure", and separation from the mother, did not "significantly lower the total number of smiles, nor those directed to the stranger". So Ainsworth had to conclude both that attachment behaviours did not constitute an attachment behavioural system of the kind Bowlby's theory proposed, and that separation anxiety and fear of strangers could not be used to diagnose whether a baby was attached to their caregiver. To avoid jettisoning the theory, these results necessitated a quiet about-face. Rather than attachments being directly observable, Ainsworth and her colleagues proposed attachments were invisible internal structures which existed inside the baby without any easily-predicted or measurable link to their observable behaviour. This reorientation ushered in a new interpretive approach to attachment, meaning only researchers who have been extensively trained by attachment experts are thought to be able to classify what kind of attachment an infant-adult pair exhibit. The SSP remains the most widely used means of diagnosing the security or insecurity of infant-adult attachments, and of validating newer methods such as the Attachment Q-sort. It is a 21-minute procedure. So, over the years, many researchers have queried whether SSP ratings reflect the current state of infant-adult interaction, something which may vary over days or months. Alternatively, do classifications from the SSP measure a stable underlying structure, namely, the child's attachment to their caregiver, as attachment theory proposes?
=== Does the Strange Situation Procedure produce reliable results? === Psychological tests are reliable if they produce similar results under consistent conditions. If the SSP is reliable, it should produce the same attachment classification for an infant-caregiver duo when the test is done twice over a few weeks or months. Studies show the greatest reliability of attachment ratings from the SSP when the social background of the infant's family remains stable between the two assessments: socio-economically; maritally; in terms of social support; housing; and childcare provision. And vice versa: when a baby's social background changes between two SSP ratings, the ratings are likely to change. SSP classifications are especially volatile when researchers make the effort to recruit infants who do not come from intact middle-class families and whose parents have not volunteered to participate. An important corollary of this finding is that attachment studies which do not control for a family's social background, may produce results which, for example, seem to show levels of security in attachment classification have a strong positive correlation with a factor like maternal sensitivity, when, in fact, levels of security and sensitivity are both caused by other unstudied factors from their social background. This means that the results of correlational studies which seem to prove the long-term effects of an infant's attachment classification cannot be taken at face value if those studies were uncontrolled: the strength of correlations is likely to have been inflated by one or more of the unstudied background variables. One of the most frequently missing background variables in attachment studies using the SSP is social support. Even when studies do assess some types of environmental risk, they often miss out social support. Yet social support has powerful effects on improving caregiving behaviour, both in low and high-risk families. Though most attachment studies are correlational, some studies aim to demonstrate direct causal effects of maternal behaviour on infants' attachment security through interventions aimed at improving maternal care. Yet the results of these studies cannot be taken as proven when the studies producing them have not controlled for placebo effects. In sum, as Michael Lamb and his coworkers concluded in the 1980s, classifications of attachment in/security derived from the SSP cannot be taken as primarily reflecting the existence of an internal system or working model in the young child. They are far more likely to be reflecting what has recently been happening in the social world external to the infant and their mother-figure(s) at the time of their assessment.