Ainsworth, Mary

Mary Ainsworth, née Mary Dinsmore Salter, was born on 1st December, 1913 in Ohio, United States. She was born into a family that highly valued education, with the family relocating to Toronto, Canada when she was five years old due to her father’s work. When she was 15 years old, Ainsworth read Character and the Conduct of Life by William McDougall which is what first piqued her interest in psychology and inspired her to study and pursue a career in the field.

Ainsworth enrolled at the University of Toronto to study psychology in 1931 and went on to obtain her master’s degree and Ph.D. there. After completing her doctorate, Ainsworth spent the next few years teaching at the university before joining the Canadian Women’s Army Corp in 1942 to help aid the war effort and put her skills to use. She worked as an Army Examiner where she then became Advisor to the Director of Personnel Selection due to her previous role in assessing and interviewing recruits. In 1950 she married Leonard Ainsworth, who was also a psychologist, and the pair moved to London.

It was in London that Ainsworth joined the Tavistock Institute and first became acquainted with John Bowlby – a pioneering developmental psychologist. Ainsworth became interested in the area of attachment after working with Bowlby, which is ultimately what launched her influential career in attachment theory. In 1953 the couple relocated as Ainsworth’s husband was offered a post-doctoral position in Uganda. Here, Ainsworth took the opportunity to study attachment between mothers and their infants, providing valuable cross-cultural insights into attachment. Following her time in Uganda, Ainsworth moved to Baltimore, Maryland and found work at a psychiatric hospital whilst also lecturing at John Hopkins University, becoming an associate professor of developmental psychology in 1958.

Mary and Leonard Ainsworth divorced in 1960, and in 1963 Ainsworth launched the Baltimore Project – a project that consisted of monthly visits to 26 different families with infants until the infants turned 12 months old. At 12 months, the infants and their caregiver took part in the Strange Situation experiment. Mary Ainsworth is arguably most well-known for her development of the Strange Situation – a laboratory procedure designed to measure the quality of attachments between infants and their caregivers. Ainsworth’s Baltimore Project identified three main attachment styles (secure, insecure-avoidant, and insecure-resistant) and the findings of this study have become extremely influential in shaping our understanding of attachment. Ainsworth published her findings and first introduced the Strange Situation in her 1969 review A theoretical review of the mother-infant relationship.

In 1975 Ainsworth joined the University of Virginia and in 1976 became Commonwealth Professor of Psychology, and in 1978 published one of her most notable works, Patterns of Attachment, which develops and expands on her theories of attachment styles. Ainsworth retired as Professor Emeritus in 1984 and received many awards throughout her career, including the Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement in the Science of Psychology from the American Psychological Foundation in 1998. Mary Ainsworth eventually died on 21st March in 1999 in Virginia, US.