Patterns of Attachment

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   Ainsworth turned Bowlby's idea into something measurable: what predicts the attachment pattern is not the quantity of time spent with the child but the sensitivity with which their signals are read.

   Patterns of Attachment · 1978

   It is not the quantity of time that predicts the pattern but the accuracy with which the signal is read.

   The procedure is called the strange situation and lasts twenty minutes: a one-year-old, a room with toys, a few departures and returns by the parent and by a stranger. What is scored is not how hard the child cries at the departure but what they do at the reunion. Three patterns came out of it, plus one added later by Main and Solomon. Secure: upset, then soothed, then back to play. Avoidant: appears calm, but physiological measures show stress — the child has learned the signal brings no answer, so they stop sending it. Ambivalent: hard to soothe, clings and pushes away at once — has learned the answer comes unpredictably, so the signal must be kept on all the time. Disorganised: contradictory behaviours, approach and freezing in the same second — the pattern associated with the case where the source of safety is also the source of fear. The predictor found in the home observations, not in the laboratory, was maternal sensitivity: how quickly and how aptly the signal is read.

   “An infant whose signals are answered promptly and appropriately becomes an infant who cries less, not more.”

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