Mary Ainsworth was a Canadian by nationality. She was famous for her major contributions in psychology. As a developmental psychologist, she was best known for her work in attachment theory. She invented the classical study used in attachment research known as The Strange Situation (Ainsworth et al., 2015). Also, she is widely known for creating the assessment tools used for establishing children attachment styles. Mary Salter Ainsworth was born on 1 December 2013. Ainsworth was born in Glendale Ohio being that she was American-Canadian ( Crittenden, 2017) . Mary died at the age of 86. It was after her popular contribution to the psychological subject. Mary experienced World War II in 1942. This event happened when she was at the University of Toronto before joining the Canadian Women Army Corp. After a period of serving in government she came, Ainsworth returned to Toronto.
After some time, she worked under Bowlby where she responsibly researched on maternal separation. It is when Mary determined that a child is likely to experience relational and detrimental emotional effects when he or she does not have a readily accessible mother (Crittenden, 2017). Mary later went to Kampala, Uganda to do a field study on the attachment theory. Mary researched how the process of attachment occurs and later published a book, Infancy in Uganda. Ainsworth lacked motherly love and attachment as a child. In the real sense, she thought that children need mothers during their emotional moments (Ainsworth et al., 2015). Thus, the experience gave her the need to come up with the attachment theory for learners. It made her read a book known as Character and the Conduct of Life written by William McDougall which further made her develop interest.
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References
Ainsworth, M. D. S., Blehar, M. C., Waters, E., & Wall, S. N. (2015). Patterns of attachment: A psychological study of the strange situation. Psychology Press.
Crittenden, P. M. (2017). Gifts from Mary Ainsworth and John Bowlby. Clinical child psychology and psychiatry, 22(3), 436-442.
