Overview

1
Overview

• In this lecture, I will begin to review our
  research program on adult attachment.
• I will focus on the interpersonal and
  intrapersonal manifestations of attachment style
  and their implications of these styles for
  representations of the self and others, mental
  health, relationship quality, and other
  behavioral systems.

2
Management of close relationships

• Studies have focused on attachment-style
  differences in
• (a) the way people construe their love
  experiences and beliefs,
• (b) the way they manage interpersonal conflicts
  in close relationships, and
• (c) their proneness to disclose and share
  personal information and feelings
  (self-disclosure).

3
Hazan and Shaver (1987) Study

• Hazan and Shaver (1987) found that people who
  classified themselves as secure reported that
  their relationships were friendly, trusting, and
  supportive.
• They emphasized intimacy as the core feature of
  these relationships.
• They believed in the existence of romantic love
  and the possibility of maintaining intense love
  over time.

4
Hazan and Shaver (1987) Study

• People with an avoidant style described their
  relationships as low in warmth and emotional
  involvement. They believed that love fades with
  time.
• Anxious people described their relationships in
  terms of obsession and passion, strong physical
  attraction, desire for union with the partner,
  and proneness to fall in love quickly.
• They characterized their lovers as untrustworthy
  and non-supportive, and reported intense bouts of
  jealousy and anger.

5
Conflict Resolution Strategies

• Secure people report heightened reliance on
  effective conflict resolution strategies
  compromising and integrating ones own and ones
  partners positions.
• Anxious or avoidant people relied on less
  effective conflict resolution strategies
  (dominating and avoiding strategies), which leave
  a conflict unsolved.

6
Self-Disclosure

• Secure people were more likely to self-disclose
  and to be highly responsive to a partners
  disclosure.
• They disclosed more personal information and felt
  better interacting with a high than a low
  disclosing partner.
• They were attentive to the issues raised in the
  partners disclosure and expanded upon them in
  their own discourse.

7
Self-Disclosure

• Avoidant people reported low proneness to
  self-disclose.
• They were uncomfortable with a high disclosing
  partner, and did not disclose personal
  information even to such a partner.

8
Self-Disclosure

• Although anxious people were found to report
  heightened proneness toward self-disclosure, they
  tended to disclose indiscriminately to people who
  were not prepared for intimate interactions
  (strangers, low disclosing partners).
• They tended to be unresponsive to their
  partners disclosure.

9
Coping with Stress

• The role of attachment styles in coping with
  threats has been documented in
• Iraqi Scud missile attacks on Israeli cities
  during the Gulf War (Mikulincer, Florian,
  Weller, 1993),
• a demanding combat training exercise (Mikulincer
  Florian, 1995),
• the process of divorce (Birnbaum et al., 1997),
• the experience of chronic back pain (Mikulincer
  Florian, 1998),
• the birth of an infant who suffers from a
  congenital heart defect (CHD Berant et al.,
  2001a, 2001b).

10
Coping with Stress

• Anxiously attached people were found to appraise
  events in highly threatening terms and to hold
  the most serious doubts about their abilities and
  skills for dealing with them.
• In contrast, securely attached people reported
  the lowest levels of threat appraisal and the
  highest levels of perceived self-efficacy.

11
Coping with Stress

• secure people rely on support seeking and
  constructive attempts to solve the problem
  (problem-focused coping).
• Anxious people rely on emotion-focused coping,
  which is known to intensify the experience of
  distress.
• Avoidant people rely on distancing coping, which
  involves cognitive and behavioral withdrawal from
  the source of distress.

12
Coping with Stress

• Secure individuals have a stronger tendency to
  seek instrumental and emotional support in times
  of need from others.
• They benefit from both an emotional conversation
  and an instrumental problem-solving conversation

13
Coping with Stress

• Characteristics of the stressful events affect
  attachment-style differences in coping
  strategies.
• Avoidant people are more likely to rely on
  distancing coping when the stress is mild, but on
  less effective emotion-focused coping when the
  stress is more severe (Berant et al., 2001a).

14
Coping with Stress

• Characteristics of the stressful events affect
  attachment-style differences in coping
  strategies.
• Whereas secure mothers of both healthy infants
  and infants with mild CHD relied on
  support-seeking strategies, secure mothers of
  infants having a severe CHD relied on both
  support seeking and distancing strategies (Berant
  et al., 2001a).

15
Coping with Stress

• Attachment-related strategies were also evident
  in the retrospective accounts of the experience
  of captivity of Israeli ex-prisoners (POWs) of
  the Yom Kippur War, assessed 18 years after the
  war (Solomon, Ginzburg, Mikulincer, Neria,
  Ohry, 1998).

16
Mental Rumination

• The experience of failure led to more frequent
  bursts of task-related worries (compared with the
  no feedback condition) mainly for people who
  scored high on attachment anxiety (Mikulincer
  Florian, 1998 Kogot Mikulincer, 2002).

17
Death Anxiety

• Examining attachment-style differences in the
  strength of death concerns
• reports of overt fear of death (Florian
  Mikulincer, 1998 Mikulincer, Florian, Tolmacz,
  1990),
• unconscious expressions of this fear (responses
  to projective death-related TAT cards Mikulincer
  et al., 1990),
• the accessibility of death-related thoughts (the
  number of death-related words a person completed
  in a word completion task Mikulincer Florian,
  2000, Study 2 Mikulincer, Florian Birnbaum,
  Malishkowitz, 2002).

18
Death Anxiety

• Attachment anxiety was associated with
  heightened fear of death at both conscious and
  unconscious levels as well as heightened
  accessibility of death-related thoughts.
• Whereas attachment avoidance was related to low
  levels self-reported fear of death, it was also
  related to heightened death-related anxiety on a
  projective TAT measure.

19
Death Anxiety

• Attachment-anxious people tend to attribute fear
  of death to the potential loss of social identity
  after death (e.g., People will forget me),
• Avoidant people tend to attribute it to the
  unknown nature of the hereafter (e.g.,
  Uncertainty about what to expect).

20
Death Anxiety

• People with a secure attachment style have been
  found to cope with their fear of death by relying
  on two strategies constructive transformation
  of threats and the seeking of proximity
  (Mikulincer Florian, 2000).

21
Death Anxiety

• Mikulincer and Florian (2000) found that
  insecure individuals reacted to a mortality
  salience induction with more severe judgments and
  punishments of moral transgressors.
• Insecurely attached persons relied on
  culturally derived defenses adherence to a
  cultural worldview and defensive enhancement of
  self-esteem.

22
Attachment-related threats

• In a field study, Fraley and Shaver (1998)
  obtained evidence for the underlying action of
  attachment style in the behavioral reactions of
  couple members separating from each other in an
  airport.

23
Attachment-related threats

• Fraley and Shaver (1997) used a thought
  suppression paradigm to examine attachment-style
  differences in the ability to suppress
  separation-related thoughts.
• Participants wrote continuously about whatever
  thoughts and feelings they were experiencing
  while being asked to suppress thoughts about a
  romantic partner leaving them for someone else.

24
Attachment-related threats

• Attachment avoidance was found to be associated
  with greater ability to suppress
  separation-related thoughts.
• Attachment anxiety was associated with poorer
  ability to suppress separation-related thoughts
  more frequent thoughts following the suppression
  task and higher skin conductance during the
  suppression task.

25
Attachment-related threats

• Mikulincer, Dolev, and Shaver (2004) found that
  avoidant individuals were able to suppress
  thoughts related to the breakup but their
  ability to maintain this defensive stance was
  disrupted when a cognitive load remembering a
  7-digit number was added.

26
Attachment-related threats

• Fraley et al. (2000) found that avoidant
  deactivating strategies at least sometimes act in
  a preemptive manner, by blocking information
  about loss of a relationship partner from
  awareness and memory from the start.

27
Attachment-related threats

• Mikulincer et al. (2002) found that people high
  on attachment anxiety reacted to separation
  reminders with heightened accessibility of
  death-related thoughts.
• When given partial words and asked to complete
  them, anxious individuals in a separation
  condition produced more death-related words.

28
Anger management

• In a series of three studies, Mikulincer (1998a)
  examined attachment-style differences in the way
  people experience and manage anger-eliciting
  relationship episodes.

29
Anger management

• Secure individuals held optimistic expectations
  of partners responses.
• They tended to attribute hostility to another
  person only when there were clear contextual cues
  about a hostile intent.
• Secure persons tended to adopt constructive goals
  aimed at repairing the relationship with the
  instigator of anger, to engage in adaptive
  problem solving, to express anger outward in a
  controlled and non-hostile way, and to experience
  more positive affect following anger episodes.

30
Anger management

• Anxious individuals held negative expectations
  of partners responses during anger episodes.
• They attributed hostility to their partner and
  reacted with angry feelings even when there were
  ambiguous cues about hostile intent.
• Anxious individuals reported higher proneness to
  anger, experienced uncontrollable access to anger
  feelings, ruminated excessively on these
  feelings, and experienced more negative than
  positive affect following anger episodes.

31
Anger management

• Avoidant people did not report intense anger.
• But they reported heightened hostility and
  exhibited intense physiological signs of arousal
  during anger episodes
• They displayed an undifferentiated tendency to
  attribute hostility to a partner even when there
  were clear contextual cues about a partners
  non-hostile intent.

32
Cognition and Affect

• In two experiments, Pereg and Mikulincer (2003)
  documented the involvement of attachment style in
  shaping the cognitive consequences of negative
  affect.
• In both studies, participants were assigned to a
  negative affect condition (reading an article
  about a car accident) or a neutral condition
  (reading about how to construct something using a
  hobby kit). Following this affect induction,
  incidental recall or causal attributions were
  assessed.

33
Cognition and Affect

• Induced negative affect led secure participants
  to recall more positive headlines and fewer
  negative headlines and to attribute a negative
  event to less global and stable causes.
• Such cognitive strategies are likely to inhibit
  the spread of negative affect throughout memory
  and to activate competing positive cognitions.
• These cognitions facilitate mood repair.

34
Cognition and Affect

• Anxious attachment was manifested in
  mood-congruent cognitions.
• Induced negative affect led anxious people to
  recall more negative headlines and to attribute a
  negative event to more global and stables causes.
  
• These negative cognitions exacerbate negative
  mood and contribute to anxious activation of the
  attachment system

35
Cognition and Affect

• Avoidant attachment weakened the links between
  negative affect and cognitions.
• People who scored high on avoidance showed no
  notable effect of induced negative affect on
  recall or causal attributions.

36
Emotional Memories

• In Mikulincer and Orbachs (1995) study,
  participants were asked to recall early
  experiences in which they felt anger, sadness,
  anxiety, or happiness, and the time for
  retrieving a memory was taken as a measure of
  cognitive accessibility.
• Participants also rated the intensity of dominant
  and non-dominant emotions in each recalled event.

37
Emotional Memories

• Avoidant people exhibited the lowest
  accessibility (highest recall time) of memories
  of sadness and anxiety
• Anxious people showed the greatest access to
  these painful memories.
• Avoidant individuals rated dominant emotions
  (e.g., sadness when retrieving a sad memory) and
  non-dominant emotions (e.g., anger when
  retrieving a sad memory) as less intense than
  secure individuals.
• Anxious individuals reported experiencing very
  intense dominant and non-dominant emotions in the
  anxiety, sadness, and anger memories.

38
Emotional Memories

• Secure individuals tended to acknowledge
  distress, have access to negative memories, and
  exhibit well-elaborated processing of these
  experiences.
• However, they still had better access to positive
  memories and tended to control the spread of
  negative emotions to other non-dominant negative
  emotions.

39
Emotional Memories

• Avoidant individuals showed reduced access to
  negative emotional memories, and those that were
  recalled were psychologically shallow.
• Anxious individuals showed fast access to
  negative emotional memories and impaired control
  of the spread of activation from one memory with
  a particular negative tone to other, different
  negative emotions.

40
Self-Representations

• Dozens of studies have found that attachment
  anxiety is associated with lower scores on
  self-esteem scales, and the endorsement and
  incidental recall of more negative self-relevant
  traits

41
Self-Representations

• Mikulincer (1995) revealed that secure
  individuals have ready access to both positive
  and negative self-attributes, possess a highly
  differentiated and integrated self-organization,
  and have relatively small discrepancies between
  actual-self and ideal-self. Secure attachment
  seems to create a balanced, coherent, and
  well-organized self-view.

42
Self-Representations

• Anxious persons were found to have access only
  to negative self-attributes, scored low in the
  differentiation and integration of
  self-attributes, and revealed a pervasiveness of
  negative affect in self-representations.
• Avoidant persons had poor access to negative
  self-attributes and exhibited low integration of
  self-attributes.
• Both anxious and avoidant individuals had
  relatively large discrepancies between their
  self-image and self-standards (ideal-self).

43
Self-Representations

• Mikulincer (1998b) found that avoidant people
  reacted to threats with suppression of negative
  self-attributes and self-inflation They made
  more positive self-appraisals following
  threatening stimuli.
• Anxious individuals reacted to threats with a
  more intense focus on negative self-attributes
  and self-devaluation They made more negative
  self-appraisals following threatening stimuli.
• Secure people showed no notable bias in their
  self-appraisals.

44
Other-Representations

• Insecurely attached people have been found to
  describe relationship partners, such as parents,
  romantic partners, friends, and members of a
  group, in more negative terms than people who
  report having a secure style.

45
Other-Representations

• Mikulincer, Orbach, and Iavnieli (1998) found
  that anxious people were more likely than secure
  people to perceive others as similar to them and
  to show a false consensus bias.
• Avoidant individuals were more likely than secure
  people to perceive others as dissimilar to them
  and to exhibit a false distinctiveness bias.

46
Other-Representations

• Mikulincer and Horesh (1999) examined the
  projective mechanisms that might underlie
  insecure peoples perceptions of others. They
  examined
• (a) avoidant individuals tendency to defensively
  project unwanted traits of the self onto others,
  and
• (b) anxious individuals tendency to project
  their actual-self traits onto others.

47
Other-Representations

• The findings indeed revealed that avoidant
  individuals projected unwanted self-traits onto
  others.
• It seems that avoidant individuals attempts to
  defensively exclude negative information about
  the self and to maintain interpersonal distance
  dominate their perceptions of others.

48
Other-Representations

• Anxious individuals tend to project traits of
  their actual self onto others.
• It seems that their intense search for
  connectedness dominates anxious individuals
  perception of others.

49
Other-Representations

• Mikulincer and Horesh (1999) found that secure
  persons representations of others were unbiased
  by projective mechanisms.
• The sense of attachment security may allow people
  to tolerate ambiguities and contradictions in
  their self-view as well as in their relationships
  with others, thereby reducing the threats
  elicited by unwanted self-aspects or by
  self-other discrepancies and the resulting need
  for psychological projection.

50
Mental Health

• Our research program provides important
  information about the implications of attachment
  style for mental health and adjustment.
• Data have been collected with global measures of
  psychological well-being and distress, and more
  specific measures of emotional problems
  (depression, anxiety), adjustment problems
  (eating disorders, substance abuse), and
  personality disorders.

51
Mental Health

• All the studies have shown that secure
  attachment is positively related to well-being
  and inversely related to distress.
• Anxious attachment is inversely associated with
  well-being and positively associated with
  distress.

52
Mental Health

• In all of these studies, avoidant attachment has
  differential associations with mental health,
  depending on the presence of stressful
  circumstances.
• In community samples, weak associations have been
  found between attachment avoidance and mental
  health.
• However, in stressful circumstances, attachment
  avoidance has been strongly associated with poor
  mental health.

53
Mental Health

• These studies provide strong evidence for the
  distress-buffering effects of secure attachment.
• The encounter with stressful events has been
  found to heighten distress mainly among insecure
  persons, but not among people who report a secure
  style.

54
Mental Health

• Strong associations have also been found between
  reports of attachment style and reports of
  specific emotional problems.
• Symptoms of depression, anxiety, and hostility
  were inversely associated with the secure
  attachment style and positively associated with
  anxious and avoidant.

55
Mental Health

• Brennan and Shaver (1995) found that both
  attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance were
  positively associated with measures of eating
  disorders and the use of drinking as a
  maladaptive means for handling distress.
• Both attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance
  were positively associated with measures of
  psychoactive substance use and conduct disorders.

56
Mental Health

• Brennan and Shaver (1998) reported that
  attachment avoidance was positively associated
  with the schizoid personality disorder.
• Brennan and Shaver (1998) also found that
  attachment anxiety was positively associated with
  dependent and histrionic personality disorders.

57
Relationship Quality

• Studies have found that people who endorse a
  secure style report the highest level of
  relationship satisfaction and anxiously attached
  persons report the lowest level.

58
Relationship Quality

• The sense of attachment security has also been
  found to contribute to other aspects of
  relationship quality.
• Positive associations have been found between
  reports of secure attachment and measures of
  involvement in relationships.
• Ratings of attachment security were associated
  with greater commitment to a relationship.

59
Relationship Quality

• Mikulincer and Florian (1999) that spouses with
  a secure style reported relatively high family
  cohesion and flexibility.
• Avoidant spouses scored relatively low on these
  two dimensions.
• Anxious spouses reported high family cohesion but
  low family flexibility.

60
Exploration System

• Our research program offers evidence for the
  hypothesized effects of the sense of attachment
  security on the activation of the exploration
  system.
• These effects have been documented on peoples
  attitudes toward work, proneness to curiosity and
  information search, and cognitive openness.

61
Exploration System

• Hazan and Shaver (1990) found that secure
  individuals reported more positive attitudes
  toward work and were more satisfied with work
  activities than avoidant or anxious persons.
• In contrast, anxious individuals perceived work
  as an additional opportunity for social
  acceptance and approval.
• Avoidant individuals perceived work as an
  opportunity for evading close relationships.

62
Exploration System

• Mikulincer (1997) presented evidence that
  attachment security facilitates cognitive
  exploration and openness.
• Secure persons reported more curiosity-proneness
  than insecure persons.
• Secure people scored lower on cognitive closure,
  intolerance of ambiguity, and dogmatic thinking.
• Secure people were less likely to make judgments
  about another person on the basis of early
  information and to ignore later data.
• secure people were less likely than insecure
  people to make stereotype-based judgments.

63
Exploration System

• Mikulincer and Sheffi (2000) exposed
  participants to positive affect inductions or
  neutral affect conditions and assessed their
  creativity and cognitive flexibility.
• Positive affect induction increased creativity
  and cognitive flexibility only among secure
  people.
• For avoidant persons, no significant effect of
  positive affect was found.
• For anxious persons, a reverse effect was found
  which resembled the effects of negative affect
  induction.

64
Exploration System

• The observed reactions of secure individuals
  follow from their attention to affective cues.
• Secure peoples openness to affective cues leads
  naturally to considering positive affect to be a
  relevant input for cognitive processing, and then
  to loosening their cognitive strategies and
  exploring unusual associations.
• These reactions are reflections of secure
  individuals confidence that letting down their
  guard is not dangerous and that they can deal
  effectively with uncertainty, novelty, and any
  confusion that the broadening of knowledge might
  create

65
Exploration System

• The findings for avoidant individuals are
  compatible with their cognitive reactions to
  negative affect and may result from their
  defensive exclusion of affective material.
• Whereas dismissal of negative affect is necessary
  to prevent attachment-system activation,
  dismissal of positive affect may be necessary to
  prevent a loosening of cognitive strategies that
  can result in uncertainty and confusion.

66
Exploration System

• For anxious people, the spread of activation
  across negative cognitions can begin even with
  positive affect.
• Perhaps they at first experience a positive
  state, but then become reminded of the down side
  of previous experiences that began positively and
  ended painfully.
• Once attuned to these negative memories, the
  anxious mind may suffer from a spread of negative
  associations that interferes with exploration and
  creativity.

67
Caregiving System

• Our research also provides empirical support for
  the facilitatory effects of the sense of
  attachment security on the activation of the
  caregiving system the system that drives us to
  provide protection and support to others who are
  either chronically dependent or temporarily in
  need.

68
Caregiving System

• Mikulincer, Gillath, et al. (2001) found that
  both attachment anxiety and avoidance were
  associated with low levels of altruistic empathy.
  
• The findings also revealed that attachment
  anxiety but not attachment avoidance was
  associated with more intense personal distress
  responses during the encounter with others
  needs.

69
Sexual System

• Tracy, Shaver, Albino, and Cooper (2003) found
  that adolescents who endorsed a secure style were
  open to mutually satisfying sexual exploration in
  the context of a stable relationship and said
  they engaged in sex primarily to show love for
  their partner.

70
Sexual System

• With regard to avoidant persons, Birnbaum et al.
  (2002) found that avoidant individuals tended to
  remain emotionally detached even during
  heterosexual intercourse they scored relatively
  low on scales tapping the experience of
  pleasure-related feelings, orgasmic experiences,
  and feelings of love toward their partner during
  sexual activity.

71
Sexual System

• With regard to anxious individuals, Birnbaum et
  al. (2002) found clear evidence that they scored
  relatively high on scales tapping desire for
  partners emotional involvement during
  heterosexual intercourse and attempts to please
  the partner and satisfy his or her demands during
  this sexual activity.
• Tracy et al. (2003) found that anxious
  adolescents engage in sex primarily to please
  their partners, feel accepted, and avoid
  abandonment.

72
Conclusions

• Our research program has provided extensive
  evidence regarding the manifestations of
  attachment styles in the management of
  interpersonal behavior, close relationships,
  coping with stress, and regulation of distress.
• It also provides evidence on the implications of
  attachment style for representations of the self
  and others, relationship quality, mental health
  and adjustment, and the functioning of other
  behavioral systems (exploration, caregiving,
  sex).

73
Conclusions

• Several of our studies have also shown that the
  psychological manifestations of attachment styles
  are unique to individual variations in
  attachment-related anxiety and avoidance.
• The effects of the attachment dimensions cannot
  be accounted for by a host of other variables
  that are associated with attachment-related
  anxiety and avoidance, such as neuroticism, trait
  anxiety, global distress, extraversion,
  self-esteem, social desirability, and
  sociability.