Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [247]
From about eight months to two years, the infant typically cries when the mother leaves the room (“separation anxiety”), and when she returns goes to her and clings to her. (There are, of course, temperamental differences that make one infant more anxious than another; the findings of the Strange Situation are generalizations.) If a stranger enters and does not smile or talk, an infant of seven or eight months will look at the mother and in a little while start to cry (“stranger anxiety”), although at three or four months the same infant probably would have smiled. Stranger anxiety dissipates within a few months, but separation anxiety continues to rise until early in the second year, then declines gradually throughout the year.68
There are several explanations for the appearance and disappearance of the two reactions, but the most widely held is that with growing mental capacity, the infant is better able to evaluate the situation. Stranger anxiety wanes as the infant gains the ability to recall pleasant experiences with other strangers, separation anxiety as the infant becomes capable of understanding that the mother will return.69
Ainsworth’s original aim was to see how infants react when their mothers are absent, but she unexpectedly found that how they react when the mother comes back was even more interesting. Some are glad to see her and go to her to cling or be held; others ignore or avoid her; and still others squirm, hit, or kick her if she tries to hug them. Ainsworth called the first reaction (shown by about 70 percent of one-year-olds) “secure attachment,” the second kind (20 percent) “anxious-avoidant attachment,” and the third kind (10 percent) “anxious-resistant attachment.”
After studying all three kinds in greater depth, Ainsworth and other researchers concluded that avoidant attachment occurs when the mother is emotionally inexpressive, resistant attachment when the mother has been inconsistent in responding to the infant’s needs. Still other researchers have ascribed avoidant and resistant attachment to such factors as the mother’s personality traits, lack of expressiveness, negative feelings about motherhood, rejection of the infant, and harsh responses to the infant’s crying or demands.
Some psychologists later identified variants of Ainsworth’s three attachment styles, finding her explanations too pat. Jerome Kagan is one.
A child whose mother has been otherwise attentive and loving, but has successfully encouraged self-reliance and control of fear, is less likely to cry when the mother leaves and, therefore, is less likely to approach her when she returns. This child will be classified as “avoidant” and “insecurely attached.” By contrast, the child whose mother has been protective and less insistent that her child “tough it out” is likely to cry, to rush to the mother when she re-enters the room, and to be classified as “securely attached.”70
In a study of his own, Kagan found that mothers of the ostensibly less securely attached babies had careers outside the home and, while psychologists might regard them as less nurturing, may have tried to make their infants self-reliant and able to cope with separation. The mothers of the more securely attached infants may have been overprotective and prevented them from developing such inner security.71
A valuable study conducted in the 1980s used the Strange Situation to measure the attachment of 113 one-year-olds to their mothers and five years later evaluated their behavior and mental health by means of a questionnaire given their mothers and another given their teachers. Of the boys who had been securely attached at one year of age, only 6 percent showed signs of psychopathology; of those who had been insecurely attached, 40 percent did. (Girls, for unknown reasons, showed no such connection between the quality of early attachment and later psychopathology.) The research team cautiously concluded that the results “lend partial support to the hypothesis that the quality of the early mother-infant attachment relationship predicts later social-emotional