Bowlby rejected the simple learning-theory idea that babies love mothers because mothers provide food. Influenced by ethology, psychoanalysis and evolutionary thinking, he argued that infants are born with an attachment behavioural system. Crying, smiling, clinging and following are not random behaviours. They are social releasers that draw caregivers close.

For exams, learn Bowlby’s theory as five linked claims. If you can explain these in your own words, you can answer almost any Bowlby question.

Bowlby’s most powerful idea is the internal working model: the child builds a mental template of relationships from early caregiver experience. It contains beliefs like “Am I worthy of care?”, “Are others available?”, and “What happens when I need help?”

This is why attachment theory matters beyond infancy. Bowlby predicted a continuity hypothesis: early attachment can influence later friendships, emotion regulation, parenting and romantic relationships. Modern researchers treat this as probabilistic, not deterministic.

Ainsworth’s Strange Situation is a controlled observation designed to activate the attachment system without creating extreme distress. The infant is placed in an unfamiliar room with toys, the caregiver enters and leaves, a stranger appears, and the caregiver returns. The key measure is reunion behaviour: does the child seek comfort, avoid the caregiver, resist contact, or show contradictory behaviour?

Ainsworth’s original system had three categories. The secure infant is not the infant who never cries; secure infants may protest separation strongly. What matters is that the caregiver can comfort them on return and the child can go back to exploration. Later researchers added a fourth category, disorganised attachment, for infants whose behaviour does not form a coherent strategy.

Attachment is one of psychology’s strongest developmental traditions, but exam answers must be balanced. Praise the precision and real-world applications, then evaluate culture, temperament, determinism and method.

Van IJzendoorn and Kroonenberg’s 1988 meta-analysis of Strange Situation studies is a favourite exam evaluation point. It found that secure attachment was the most common classification across studied countries, supporting the idea that attachment is widespread. But the patterns of insecure attachment varied: German samples showed more avoidant classifications, while Japanese and Israeli samples showed more resistant classifications.

The smartest interpretation is not “some cultures attach wrongly.” It is that the Strange Situation was developed in a Western context and may read culturally normal behaviours through a narrow lens. A child used to constant caregiver proximity may find separation unusually stressful; a child socialised toward early independence may look avoidant.