Adult Attachment, Individual Differences

How Do Researchers Think about Individual Differences in Adult Attachment?

Infants and young children differ in the quality of their attachments with their adult caregivers. Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver proposed that distinct patterns of attachment may also characterize how adults function in their adult love relationships. They conceptualized romantic love as an attachment process and developed a measure to identify adult analogues of the original three infant attachment patterns: secure, avoidant, and ambivalent. Adults were asked to choose which of three brief paragraphs describing each style best captured their experiences in romantic relationships. Secure adults were characterized by high trust and comfort with closeness and mutual dependence in love relationships. Avoidant adults were characterized by discomfort with closeness and difficulty in trusting and depending on love partners. Anxious-ambivalent (also referred to as preoccupied) adults were characterized by a strong desire for closeness coupled with anxiety about rejection and abandonment. This simple classification was related to people's beliefs, expectations, and experiences in romantic relationships, as well as their childhood experiences with parents.

Hazan and Shaver's initial application of Attachment Theory to adult relationships proved remarkably fruitful, laying the foundation for hundreds of research studies. As well as replicating and extending the original research, researchers proposed various revisions and refinements to Hazan and Shaver's original conceptualization of adult attachment styles. Notably, Kim Bartholomew proposed that two distinct forms of avoidance could be identified in adulthood—a fearful style characterized by avoidance driven by fear of rejection and loss (similar to the original avoidant style) and a dismissing style characterized by defensive self-reliance and independence (similar to the dismissing pattern identified by the Adult Attachment Interview). In addition, researchers quickly realized that people do not fall neatly into one of three or four attachment categories. Rather, most people differ in the degree to which their experiences and expectations fit each attachment style. For instance, two individuals may be predominately secure, but one may have secondary avoidant tendencies and the other, secondary preoccupied tendencies, resulting in quite different presentations. Some researchers have further suggested that the very notion of distinct attachment styles or types is suspect.

It is now generally accepted that variation in adult attachment is best understood in terms of two continuous dimensions, anxiety and avoidance. Anxiety refers to the tendency to experience anxiety over rejection, separation, and abandonment; individuals high in anxiety are hypersensitive to anxiety-related threats, whereas those low in anxiety have trust in their attachment figures and are less prone to perceive threats. Avoidance refers to the behavioral strategy used to deal with attachment-related anxiety; individuals high in avoidance maintain distance and seek to deal with distress on their own, whereas those low in avoidance approach others for support to help regulate anxiety. See Figure 1 for a diagram of how four distinct attachment styles—secure, preoccupied (anxious-ambivalent), fearful avoidant, and dismissing avoidant—can be conceptualized as regions in the space defined by the anxiety and avoidance dimensions. This model of adult attachment emphasizes the dynamic operation of the attachment system. Thus, secure attachment is defined in terms of a relatively low threshold for activation of attachment anxiety and a tendency to approach [Page 36]attachment figures for support when anxiety is triggered.

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