Twelve-month-old infants are observed in various situations:
1 with their mother
2 as mother leaves the room 3 alone
4 with a stranger 5 as mother returns.
On the basis of their reactions to each situation, infants are assigned to one of three categories, reflecting the security of their attachment with their mother.
(a) Securely attached child: the infant returns to the mother when she appears and is easily consoled.
(b) Anxious-avoidant child: on the caregiver’s return the infant turns away, avoiding comfort.
(c) Anxious-resistant child: the infant is often upset in the caregiver’s presence and on separation; and on reunion, closeness is sporadic- ally resisted.
KEY TERM
Monotropy. The infant’s bond with the mother is (biologically) qualitatively different from any other, so any interruption to this bond is necessarily maladaptive.
reactions in each situation. Those with the most secure maternal attachments preferred mother to other carers, though they were not overly upset in the company of strangers. Ainsworth’s research bolstered the epigenetic view of the primacy of the maternal bond as a foundation stone for healthy development.
Culture and strange situations
Various cross-cultural versions of Ainsworth’s research have precipi- tated a debate about whether the securely attached child should be recognised as a global ideal. Indeed, even before Ainsworth’s studies were conducted, cross-cultural support for the epigenetic model of attachment came from Konner’s (1981) fieldwork with !Kung hunter- gatherers in the Kalahari region of southern Africa (‘!’ represents the linguistic clicking sound used by the group). During their first year,
!Kung infants were with their mother for 70–80% of the time. This per- centage subsequently fell as the social network expanded to include father and mixed-age peers.
Following Ainsworth’s original studies, versions of the strange situation experiment were conducted in many cultural settings in order to investigate the cultural universality of attachment patterns. The classic experimental format was used as a standardised design and then replicated in accordance with a cross-cultural research paradigm (see Chapter 1).
So, are Ainsworth’s findings replicated across cultures? Well, attachment patterns corresponding to ‘secure’ in Ainsworth’s scenario have shown up to be ideal arrangements in many cultural settings.
When Posada et al. (1995) asked mothers from China, Germany, Israel, Colombia and Japan to rate the characteristics of an ideal child, their profiles tallied closely with Ainsworth’s securely attached model.
Furthermore, more children invited the ‘secure’ classification than any other classification in a review of fourteen attachment studies across four continents (van Ijzendoorn & Sagi, 1999). In another meta-analysis, van Ijzenddoorn (1996) also found the securely attached pattern to be the most common across eight nations, inviting the portrayal of the securely attached child as the global ideal or norm.
Yet there is also counter-evidence. Grossman and Grossman (1990), Takahashi (1986) and others have revealed cultural variations in the degree to which infants in different cultures are assigned to Ainsworth’s three categories (see Table 8.1). In short, infants in some countries appeared to be typically more securely attached, or anxious- resistant, than they were in others.
Such regional variations have since invited two alternative explanations:
• Explanation 1: Some cultures yield more secure infants than others do. The strange situation scenario is a measure of emotional attachment that is equally valid (meaning it measures what it sets out to measure) in all cultures. Variable patterns show secure attachments to be more common in some places (North America) than in others (Germany). Furthermore, the anxious-resistant response seems to be more a feature of Japanese and Israeli society than it does elsewhere.
• Explanation 2: The strange situation scenario is not meaningful in all cultures. The strange situation scenario is not equally valid across cultures. It has different meanings for participants in different contexts. We cannot assume that categories used in Ainsworth’s original study mean the same thing in all places. This standard scenario cannot provide us with ‘like-for-like’ cross-cultural comparisons of attachment patterns.
Defenders of the first of these explanations may conclude that North American infants are typically more securely attached than their German counterparts, with Japanese culture being associated with more anxious infants. Arguing for the second explanation, Grossman and Grossman (1990) suggest that Ainsworth’s notion of ‘anxious- avoidance’ has a different meaning in Germany, where it is reinter- preted as ‘autonomy’ and considered a virtue. Takahashi (1990) too stresses the special cultural meaning of the strange situation scenario for Japanese one-year-olds, who traditionally rarely stray from their mothers. The strange situation experiment is therefore especially stressful for them, leading to their over-categorisation as ‘anxious- resistant’.
Such diverse cultural interpretations reflect a methodological dilemma for Ainsworth’s paradigm. Explanation 1 invites the replication of her experiment in a standard form across cultures. Yet Cole (1992),
TABLE 8.1
Cross-cultural categorisations in the ‘strange situation’ (%)
Country Secure Anx-avoidant Anx-resistant Researchers
USA 67 21 12 Ainsworth et al. (1978)
Germany 35 52 13 Grossman & Grossman (1990)
Israel 57 7 34 Sagi et al. (1985)
Japan 68 0 32 Takahashi (1990)
writing from the viewpoint of cultural psychology (see Chapter 5), expresses concern that this rides roughshod over the diverse cultural meanings attached to these experiments. The way forward, he argues, is to develop research methods that take account of (and are partly modelled on) diverse local meanings and parenting practices. This may involve the use of less standardised, more qualitative or ethnographic methods. For example, Tronick and Morelli (1992) have shown that in certain cultural settings, meaningful attachments with multiple care- givers might serve as a normal prerequisite for a positive sense of self (see key study).
The debate about the universal desirability of the ‘securely attached’
child is not going to go away. The secure attachment pattern is evident globally, though we would be foolish to presume that the pre- ponderance of alternative or multiple attachments in some cultures somehow reflects defective childrearing. Instead, it may be helpful to see attachments, however they manifest themselves, as neutral