Strange situation

So I don't know.

There's some patterns that you can find as evidenced by these, like the strange situation experiment.

Interesting.

I don't think this is an actual statistic-

And together, they ended up coming up with a way to test and did further studies on expanding the concepts that they were finding in this research study.

It was actually Mary Ainsworth who took these concepts and finally did a study called the Strange Situation Test.

And how this would roll out is she would take babies, typically nine to 18 months old, and she would have their mothers primarily bring them into a research situation where they would leave the child with a stranger.

The parent would leave the room and then she would watch and observe as the parent re-entered the room.

survive.

And then Mary Ainsworth developed a measure of attachment the so-called strange situation procedure where a one-year-old or one-and-a-half-year-old is exposed to the minor stress and the child is in an unfamiliar place and the mother or father is asked to go out of the room for three minutes more than once and the way the child reacts to that needs for a classification of secure attachment or insecure attachment and initially there were two patterns of insecure attachment avoidant and resistant and then later a third one through the work of Mary Lane was added disorganised.

Okay so we've got a kind of paradigm

of the ways in which infants respond to threat and stress.

And this, Mary May asserted, correlates with disorganised attachment.

So going back to your question, and I think it's a very important question for psychotherapists, we can assume that there are continuities between relationships that we have with our caregivers as infants and our subsequent developmental history and indeed a with our the kind of relationships we establish in adult life so you might find people with a diagnosis of not a diagnosis the classification of avoidant attachment might find it difficult to form intimate relationships let's say and their relationships might be somewhat distant but also that that is manifest in the way they talk about themselves in their lives so that for psychotherapists we are sort of on the lookout we were listening with our third ear as opposed to the third eye for their discourse style and thinking that discourse style is a pointer as it were to the kinds of early relationships which they may have established So now there's a sort of gloss on this, which is important and came from one of the leading and wonderful attachment researchers from the Netherlands, Marius van Iskendoorn.

He talked about what he called the transmission gap, because although there are correlations and links between adult attachment, interview, um discourse style and childhood attachment patterns as manifest in the strange situation the correlations are not are on the weak side and so he called this the transmission gap and this is a slightly different point but i think it applied because he was looking at what kinds of strange situation classification does an infant or small child have in relation to their parents' attachment status? So the original research done by Fonagy and Miriam and Howard Steele looked at parents' attachment style when they were pregnant with their first baby, and then they looked at the attachment pattern of the child when it was born.

And what the key finding there, and this is one that Van Ischendorn emphasises, the key finding there was this idea of reflexive function.

Attachment theory came out of observations in the 1950s and 60s, mostly in Western settings.

Mary Ainsworth's strange situation procedure where a mother leaves a baby with a stranger and returns was developed in Baltimore and rural Uganda, and the pattern she found in Uganda didn't match the Baltimore patterns.

Babies in Uganda protested separation just as much, but their reunion behavior looked different.

They didn't need to cling to the mother the same way because the mother wasn't the sole source of security.

I need my own safe unit.

John Bowlby came in and Mary Ainsworth, and they did the strange situation experiment, which kind of is like the landmark study, right? That showed these four different attachment styles.

And that kind of went against the thinking at the They were like, wait, what?

Like

humans aren't just using their parents for food.

We actually need to connect and attach for no reason, just, just to have one another.

So anyway, can you speak to that, the strange situation and any of the history of it? I think it's like so fascinating.

Yeah, I mean, I think it also is kind of confronting some of the inherent sexism in research, right? And like, and how this idea that a woman after giving birth, the purpose that they serve in order to, you know, keep an infant alive is through the function of sustenance.

And then there's Mary Ainsworth, also a big name that we learned about in school.

Later expanded this work through observational research, including what became known as the strange situation, and you guys might not know it as a strange situation, but as I describe it, you might have heard about it.

So basically, researchers observed how young children responded when a caregiver left and then returned.

You can also find videos on YouTube if you wanna watch it.

And maybe you're wondering too, can our attachment styles actually change? And this is one of the most hopeful things I think I found in my own work and also in some of the research.

There is evidence that attachment can have stability over time.

One long-term study followed a group of participants from infancy all the way into early adulthood, and the researchers first observed them at 12 months old using the Ainsworth Strange Situation, and then reconnected with 50 of them 20 years later, and they found something really interesting.

About 72% received the same broad secure versus insecure attachment classification in early adulthood that they had received as infants.

Yeah

... yeah, the resistantly attached child, um, or one that gets classified as resistant in the strange situation, is a child who kind of maximizes their feelings, right? So the parent leaves the room.

They often will cry quite loudly.

And again, that's not as important as what happens when the parent returns.

Soon as they're put down, they wanna be picked up.

It looks quite chaotic, but it too, they too have a strategy.

They are trying at least to get near their caregiver to help them with this distress, but there again, it doesn't work so well, right? Because they're, soon as they're picked up, you'd think they'd be emotionally fueled and could return to play, so that the whole, um, strange situation or attachment system has kind of two coordinates, attachment needs and exploration needs, and if one is piqued, the other one cannot be.

So we all know those situations where someone close to us is sick, or there was a breakup, or some source of pain to do with our relationships.

Yeah, exactly.

Like when you look at the strange situation, which I always reference with Mary Ainsworth, she talks about each of the attachment styles through kids who were separated from their mom very briefly.

And it's really interesting because the securely attached kids, when they were separated from their caregiver, they still experienced some distress, right? They still cried when mom left.

And that uncertainty was still a little bit scary, but it was not too much uncertainty where they became as dysregulated as the other insecure attachment style.

And I hope that you find this goodness as well.

I totally agree.

I think this is kind of with the strange situation.

As I say what I'm about to say, think of the strange situation and compare it to like an adult.