Early Work
While in England, Ainsworth joined the research team at Tavistock Clinic investigating the effects of maternal separation on child development. Comparison of disrupted mother-child bonds to normal mother-child relationship showed that a child's lack of a mother figure leads to "adverse development effects." In 1954, she left Tavistock Clinic to do research in Africa, where she carried out her longitudinal field study of mother-infant interaction.
Ainsworth's book from that field study, Infancy in Uganda (1967) remains an exceptional and classic ethological study in the development of Attachment, and demonstrates that the process reflects specific universal characteristics that cross linguistic, cultural and geographic lines.
She and her colleagues developed the Strange Situation Procedure, which is a widely used, well researched and validated, method of assessing an infant's pattern and style of attachment to a caregiver. (See Attachment theory.)
Read more about this topic: Mary Ainsworth
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or work:
“Today’s pressures on middle-class children to grow up fast begin in early childhood. Chief among them is the pressure for early intellectual attainment, deriving from a changed perception of precocity. Several decades ago precocity was looked upon with great suspicion. The child prodigy, it was thought, turned out to be a neurotic adult; thus the phrase “early ripe, early rot!””
—David Elkind (20th century)
““The work is done,” grown old he thought,
“According to my boyish plan;
Let the fools rage, I swerved in nought,
Something to perfection brought;”
But louder sang that ghost “What then?””
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)