According to Mary Main, whose research is foundational for the attachment perspective, an infant or child with a problematic, distress-generating caregiver actively organizes perceptions of this attachment figure’s responses and availability, forms constructs and mental models (schemas) of the contingencies involved, and develops specific strategies of behavioral and emotional self-expression for maintaining some degree of proximity and preventing the caregiver’s particular negative responses (Main, 1995). That process of learning forms the various types of attachment pattern.
