Mary Dinsmore Ainsworth (née Salter; December 1, 1913 – March 21, 1999)[1] was an American-Canadian developmental psychologist known for her work in the development of the attachment theory.
Both her parents were graduates of Dickinson College who placed "high value on a good liberal arts education" and expected their children to have excellent academic achievements.
[5] In 1918, her father's manufacturing firm transferred him and the family moved to Toronto, Ontario, Canada, where Salter would spend the rest of her childhood.
She began reading by the age of three, and the family would once a week visit the local library where her mother would select appropriate books for her level.
[6] Salter excelled in school, and decided to become a psychologist after reading William McDougall's book Character and the Conduct of Life (1926) at the age of 15.
She completed coursework for her bachelor's degree in 1935, and decided to continue her education at the University of Toronto with the intention of earning her doctorate in psychology.
Soon she was promoted as an Advisor to the Director of Personnel Selection of the Canadian Women's Army Corps, and reached the rank of major in 1945.
[1][5] After victory in the war, Salter returned to Toronto to continue teaching personality psychology, conducted research, and worked with Klopfer on a revision of the Rorschach.
[4] Although they divorced in 1960,[9][10] the 10 years of accompanying Leonard to different places for his career gave Mary the opportunity to meet and work with many influential psychologists including John Bowlby,[citation needed] as well as the occasion when they moved to Kampala, Uganda where her first "mother-infant" observation was done.
After leaving the Canadian Women's corps she returned to Toronto to continue teaching personality psychology and conducting research.
While in England, Ainsworth joined the research team of John Bowlby at the Tavistock Clinic, investigating the effects of maternal separation on child development.
"[10] In 1954, she left the Tavistock Clinic to do research in Africa where she carried out her longitudinal field study of mother-infant interaction.
She chose to examine a common weaning practice in the area, in which the child is sent away for several days to live with relatives and "forget the breast."
Ainsworth conducted detailed interviews with families from 6 villages surrounding Kampala, Uganda, but was originally met with a language barrier.
She therefore made a great effort to learn the language to the extent that she could carry out simple conversation, thus developing an appreciation of the culture.
While he had previously been a mentor, they started working together as equal partners, exchanging paper drafts for comments and finding the time to meet on rare occasions, since he was still primarily in London.
In Ainsworth's original sample, all six C infants showed so much distress in the course of the episodes of the Strange Situation Procedure 'that observations had to be discontinued.
[21] In 1990, Ainsworth put in print her blessing for the new 'D' classification, though she urged that the addition be regarded as 'open-ended, in the sense that subcategories may be distinguished', as she worried that the D classification might be too encompassing and might subsume too many different forms of behaviour[22] In contrast to infants in other categories classified by Mary Ainsworth, which possess a standard path of reaction while dealing with the stress of separation and reunion, type D infants appeared to possess no symptom of coping mechanism.