Mary Ainsworth (1913–1999).
Mary (Dinsworth Salter) Ainsworth was born in Glendale, Ohio, in 1913; her father, a businessman, worked for a large manufacturing firm. Her family then moved to Canada, where she obtained her education, graduating with bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees from the University of Toronto. After marriage (to Leonard Ainsworth), she travelled first to England and then to Uganda, where she performed early research, before returning to the United States where she lived and worked for the rest of her life. Ainsworth performed major empirical research into attachment behaviors, utilizing primarily observational methodology. She is credited with developing the classic “Strange Situation” procedure for measurement of infant attachment. Ainsworth died in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1999, aged 86.
Ainsworth’s Life
Mary Ainsworth was born Mary Dinsworth Salter in Glendale, Ohio, in 1913. Her father worked for a manufacturing firm, her mother was trained as a...
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Barnfield, A. (2019). Ainsworth, Mary. In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_356-1
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