Child Development

Mary Dinsmore Salter Ainsworth’s conceptual contributions and
empirical findings revolutionized how psychologists think about
infant-caregiver attachment. (R. S. Marvin)

infant-mother pair, was published many years later,
in 1967.

In 1954 the Ainsworths moved to Baltimore,
Maryland. For a few years, Mary lectured part-time
and worked at a psychiatric hospital. It was only in
1958 that Johns Hopkins University offered her a
professorship in developmental psychology. During
this period, she and Leonard divorced.

The position at Johns Hopkins enabled her to
launch a groundbreaking sequel to the Ganda Study.
The Baltimore Project was based on monthly home
observations of twenty-six families. Home visits began
shortly after an infant’s birth and were recorded as
detailed narratives. The last observation, at twelve
months, consisted of a laboratory procedure of
mother-infant separations and reunions, devised with
Barbara Wittig, and now known as the Strange Situa-
tion. The Strange Situation revealed important indi-
vidual differences in patterns of attachment that were
correlated with home observation findings. For this
reason, it became tremendously important as a short-
cut method of assessing the quality of infant-parent
attachment. However, Ainsworth occasionally ex-

pressed regret that the Strange Situation stole the

limelight from her highly original analyses of feed-

ing, close bodily contact, face-to-face play, and crying

observed in the home. These documented that mater-

nal sensitivity to infant signals in the early months

leads to a more harmonious mother-infant relation-

ship at the end of the first year. Several influential

journal articles and a book, Patterns of Attachment, were

published over the next decade or so.

From the mid-1960s onwards, Ainsworth attract-

ed many graduate students who made further contri-

butions to attachment theory and research (e.g., Silvia

Bell, Mary Blehar, Inge Bretherton, Alicia Lieber-

man, Mary Main, Sally Wall). Her stimulating lectures

influenced undergraduates such as Mark Cummings,

Mark Greenberg, Robert Marvin, and Everett Waters,

who, as graduate students, took attachment theory to

other universities.

When Ainsworth accepted a position at the Uni-

versity of Virginia in 1974, her work was becoming

increasingly influential, stimulating longitudinal

studies of attachment in the United States and other

countries that are still ongoing. In the late 1970s she

was elected president of the Society for Research in

Child Development. At the same time, many graduate

students interested in attachment continued to flock

to her (among them Jude Cassidy, Deborah Cohn,

Virginia Colin, Patricia Crittenden, Carolyn Eich-

berg, Rogers Kobak, and Ulrike Wartner). After re-

luctantly retiring as Professor Emerita in 1984 at the

required age of seventy, Ainsworth remained profes-

sionally active until 1992. In her later years, until her

health began to fail, she retained a deep interest in

the work of her former students who had begun to

study attachment beyond infancy. A year before her

death, she received one of the highest honors psy-

chology can bestow, the Gold Medal Award for Life

Achievement in the Science of Psychology from the

American Psychological Association. She died of a

massive stroke on March 21, 1999, in Charlottesville,

Virginia. Her conceptual contributions and empirical

findings have revolutionized how psychologists think

about infant-caregiver attachment and close human

relationships at all ages.

See also: ATTACHMENT; PARENT-CHILD

RELATIONSHIPS

Bibliography

Bretherton, Inge. ‘‘The Origins of Attachment Theory: John Bowl-

by and Mary Ainsworth.’’ Developmental Psychology 28

(1992):759–775.

Karen, Robert. Becoming Attached: First Relationships and How They

Shape Our Capacity to Love. New York: Oxford University

Press, 1998.

22 AINSWORTH, MARY DINSMORE SALTER