Patricia McKinsey Crittenden

Crittenden obtained her Ph.D. at the University of Virginia under the supervision of Mary Ainsworth. She has served on various University faculties internationally, and published five books and over 100 research journal articles. She is the founder of the Family Relations Institute and currently serves as its lead instructor and Director of Research and Publication, and serves as a member of the Board of Directors for the International Association for the Study of Attachment. Her most well known work is Raising Parents: Attachment, Representation, and Treatment (2nd edition, 2016, Routledge).

Crittenden was a doctoral student of Mary Ainsworth in the early 1980s. Two surprising findings faced Ainsworth's doctoral students. The first surprising finding was that Ainsworth's ABC classification of infant behaviour in the Strange Situation Procedure appeared to account for the overwhelming majority of middle-class infants. Crittenden (1995: 368) and other students of Ainsworth were therefore brought to ask: ‘Why are there only three patterns of attachment when mothers are highly varied?’. The fact that these three patterns appeared so widely suggested that, on the one hand, the activation of the attachment system when an infant is anxious appeared to be an innate psycho-physiological mechanism. On the other hand, this finding implied that the quality of the attachment behaviour elicited by this anxiety differed in systematic ways as a function of the infant's caregiving environment.

A second surprising finding that confronted Ainsworth's students, however, was that not all infants could be classified using Ainsworth's 1978 protocols for classifying infant behaviour in the Strange Situation. This was especially the case with children from maltreatment samples, but it also occurred in samples of infants from middle-class homes.

The Strange Situation Procedure was first used by Ainsworth and Wittig (1969) to assess individual differences in the responses of 56 middle-class non-clinical infants aged 11 months to the departure of a caregiver. Infants classified as Secure (type B) used the caregiver as a safe base from which to explore, protested at their departure but sought the caregiver upon his or her return. Infants classified as Anxious-Avoidant (A) did not exhibit distress on separation, and ignored the caregiver on their return. Separation of an infant from her caregiver was theorised by Bowlby (1960) to necessarily evoke anxiety, as a reaction hard-wired by evolution since the infant cannot survive without the caregiver. Hence the apparently unruffled behaviour of the type A infants was understood by Ainsworth as a mask for distress, a point later evidenced through studies of heart-rate (Sroufe & Waters 1977). Infants classified as Anxious-Ambivalent/Resistant (C), showed distress on separation, and were clingy and difficult to comfort on the caregiver's return. A set of protocols for classifying infants into one of these groups was established by Ainsworth's influential Patterns of Attachment (Ainsworth et al. 1978).

Patricia McKinsey Crittenden (born 1945) is an American psychologist known for her work in the development of attachment theory and science, her work in the field of developmental psychopathology, and for creation of the Dynamic-Maturational Model of Attachment and Adaptation (DMM).