Читать книгу The Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of Childhood Social Development - Группа авторов - Страница 71

During the 1960s and 1970s, a co‐worker of Bowlby’s, Mary Ainsworth, developed a method of studying this maternal deprivation hypothesis. Ainsworth (1967) developed a procedure for observing the effects of brief maternal separation in the lab. This involved the observation of infant behavior during the mother’s brief disappearance from the room, after which a stranger enters and remains until the mother reappears. For obvious reasons she called this the strange situation procedure. Ainsworth noted that, while infants generally cry when the mother leaves the room, their response when she reappears seemed to fall broadly into one of three forms. Based on these observations, Ainsworth (1967) suggested infants form one of three attachment styles:

 Secure attachment (type B)–cries when mother disappears but is a quite rapidly comforted on her return.

 Insecure avoidant attachment (type A)–shows less distress when mother disappears and is as easily comforted by the stranger as by the mother.

 Insecure resistant attachment (type C)–remains clinging to mother, shows great anxiety when she disappears and difficult to comfort when she returns.

Both Bowlby and Ainsworth uncovered evidence that these early responses to such a brief event are quite accurate predictors of later childhood (and adulthood) relationship issues (Ainsworth, 1989; Ainsworth & Bowlby, 1991). Those classified as forming insecure attachment types (A avoidant, or C resistant) commonly developed dysfunctional relationships with other children and later in their adulthood romantic relationships (Taylor & Workman, 2018).

Although it is clear from the work of Bowlby and Ainsworth that insecure attachments predict poor relationships and an increased chance of dysfunctional behavior later, one question they failed to answer is why do so many infants fall into types A and C? It is now known that around 30% of all infants taking part in such studies fall into these two insecure types of attachment style (Del Giudice & Belsky, 2011). So how might we account for such a remarkably high proportion of deviant and maladaptive behavioral patterns? During the early 1990s some evolutionary psychologists begun to suggest that perhaps such responses were not maladaptive after all.