Secure Attachment

Secure attachment is a pattern of infant behavior toward a primary caregiver, identified as one of several distinct attachment styles, in which the infant uses the caregiver as a safe base from which to explore an unfamiliar environment, shows visible distress when the caregiver leaves, and is readily and effectively comforted upon the caregiver's return, quickly settling back into contentment and continued exploration. The developmental psychologist Mary Ainsworth identified and named the pattern through her Strange Situation laboratory procedure, developed in the late 1960s and published in the 1970s, building directly on the attachment theory first proposed by the British psychiatrist John Bowlby, who argued that infants are biologically predisposed to form a strong emotional bond with a primary caregiver as a survival mechanism. Ainsworth's research found secure attachment to be the most common pattern across the populations she studied, typically resulting from caregiving that is consistently sensitive, warm, and responsive to an infant's signals and needs. Securely attached infants have been found in extensive follow-up research to show a range of favorable outcomes later in childhood compared with insecurely attached peers, including greater emotional resilience, more effective social skills, higher self-esteem, and an internal working model of relationships, a concept Bowlby proposed describing a person's underlying mental expectations about how available and trustworthy other people will be, that tends to carry forward into more secure and satisfying close relationships in later childhood and adulthood.