Mary Ainsworth
See also: Ainsworth
Mary D. Salter Ainsworth (born in 1913 and died in 1999) played a big role in Psychologie in the Théorie of the attachment. Thanks to its experiment, the strange situation (strange situation), it highlighted various types of attachments, which are the type secure (standard of optimal attachment), and the types ambivalent, reducing insecures or avoiding and disorganized.
The strange situation
In this experiment with baby and its mother (or the person which usually deals with him), the baby is in the presence of its mother and it is reassured, then enters the part another person; then the mother from goes away: the child shows signs of concern, of alarm, whose nature shows its type of attachment. The experiment is not prolonged very a long time, but it is renewed, and with the second separation the reactions of the baby are even more speaking. In the global population one notices 5 % of children showing a type of disorganized attachment, at the risk of psychic vulnerability.
Tears of the nourisson
This experiment (Ainsworth & Beautiful, 1974) studies the way in which the baby evolves/moves in the first months according to the attention that his/her mother carries to him. 26 couples mother-baby are visited every three weeks during 4 hours.
the first report is that the tears of the babies are unforeseeable: that it has of it there little or much does not allow to envisage how it will cry later. on the other hand, the attitude of the mothers is very foreseeable: those which answer quickly and often the tears continue to do it.
the second report is that there is no bond between the reactivity of the mother and the frequency of the tears during the first six months. thereafter, more the baby cries, less the mother answers. more still, the mothers who act according to the precept " that it is necessary to let the baby cry if not it will be too much spoiled " The tears of their babies SUPPORT, instead of decreasing them.
No change is notable at the time of the first quarter. But the remainder of the year, the babies whose tears caused a fast reaction of the mother developed not only one very broad range of new means of communication (mimicry, vocalization, movements,…) but the frequency and the duration of the tears were reduced considerably. In other words, to let cry a baby to reduce his tears is against-productive.
For lack of answer to the principal means of communication of the baby at the time of the first months, this one has of greater difficulty of working out other means of communication. The concluded author that the answer to the tears of the baby (i.e. his primitive means of communication) is determining for more refined development of means of communication.
This result is completely coherent with the observations of Rene Spitz on the babies victims of Hospitalisme