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Does maternal responding imply reduced infant crying? A critique of the 1972 Bell and Ainsworth report.

GEWIRTZ, JACOB L., and BOYD, ELIZABETH F. Does Maternal Responding Imply Reduced Infant Crying? A Critique of the 1972 Bell and Ainsworth Report. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1977, 48, 1200-1207. An examination was made of the published rank correlations (p's) from which Bell and Ainsworth concluded that mothers who responded more consistently and promptly to their infants' crying in earlier quarters of the first year had infants who cried less often and long in later quarters of that year. Technical limitations critically restrict interpretations of those p's: (a) intercorrelations were of intrinsically contingent measures; (b) the overlapping, dependent intercorrelations were correlated within and between matrices, with unknown Type I error levels; and (c) there were no statistical controls for likely antecedent and concurrent determinants of the 2 outcome-variable sets. Apart from these technical concerns, Bell and Ainsworth's assumption that maternal responding to crying is the inverse of maternal ignoring of crying and their main conclusions from the between-quarter correlations that depended on it were questioned on the bases of (a) the defined independence between the maternal responding and ignoring variables, (b) the positive within-quarter pattern of correlation between them, and (c) the failure to present between-quarter correlations between maternal responding and infant crying. At the same time, Bell and Ainsworth's data were remote from the level of detail required by an operant-learning account (to which, nevertheless, many have referred them). Under such a learning account, various outcomes would be plausible, including the outcome Bell and Ainsworth emphasized. It was concluded that Bell and Ainsworth's main conclusion, that maternal responding implied a reduction in infant crying, was not supported by their data.