Attachment-based therapy (children)
Attachment-based therapy applies to interventions or approaches based on attachment theory, originated by John Bowlby. These range from individual therapeutic approaches to public health programs to interventions specifically designed for foster carers. Although attachment theory has become a major scientific theory of socioemotional development with one of the broadest, deepest research lines in modern psychology, attachment theory has, until recently, been less clinically applied than theories with far less empirical support. This may be partly due to lack of attention paid to clinical application by Bowlby himself and partly due to broader meanings of the word 'attachment' used amongst practitioners. It may also be partly due to the mistaken association of attachment theory with the pseudo-scientific interventions misleadingly known as attachment therapy. The approaches set out below are examples of recent clinical applications of attachment theory by mainstream attachment theorists and clinicians and are aimed at infants or children who have developed or are at risk of developing less desirable, insecure attachment styles or an attachment disorder.
Herman Witkin
Herman A. Witkin (2 August 1916 – 8 July 1979) was an American psychologist who specialized in the spheres of cognitive psychology and learning psychology. He was a pioneer of the theory of cognitive styles and learning styles (developed in cooperation with Solomon Asch, Donald Goodenough etc.). He preferred to diagnose not by questionnaires but by other means, such as projective tests, task-solving tests etc. He was the author of the concept of field-dependency vs. field-independency. The majority of Witkin's research was done during his tenures at the SUNY Downstate Medical Center College of Medicine in Brooklyn, NY and at Educational Testing Service (ETS) in Princeton, New Jersey, where he worked until his death in 1979. A "Review of General Psychology" survey, published in 2002, ranked Witkin as the 96th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.