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Adult attachment styles and emotional biases

Jill Hunziker

Wilda Mesias

Long Island University, New York, USA

L. Clayton Culver

Southeastern Louisiana University, USA

This study was designed to extend the literature on personality differences and emotion biases among individuals characterised by different attachment patterns. Sixty-three individuals (M = 63 years) completed measures of parental child-rearing practices and trait emotion; they also completed a storytelling task and an emotion decoding task and were videotaped during an emotion induction procedure for later facial coding. Attachment patterns were assessed using a semi-structured interview and a four-category coding system. Multiple regression was applied to the data to test attachment models.

Analyses based on theoretical models accounted for 23–47% of the variance in attachment patterns. Alternative, empirical models, developed on the basis of observed bivariate associations, resulted in the improvement of three models. Attachment security was associated with facial expressions of joy, the absence of love-withdrawal as a parental disciplinary style, a decoding bias favouring shame, a disinclination to route negative affect from consciousness, and low scores on negative trait emotion. Fearful avoidance was typified by facial shame, punitive parental child-rearing practices, the inclination to see anger in faces, to tell stories with approval-seeking themes, and with trait anxiety. Dismissingness was characterised by mixed or ambivalent facial activity, the tendency to see disgust in faces, and to deny anxiety and yet write projective stories revealing inner conflict. Preoccupation was predicted by parental love-withdrawal, facial disgust, fantasies of closeness and affiliation, and trait anger and depression. Findings are discussed within the context of attachment theory and contemporary concepts concerning emotional organisation.

International Journal of Behavioral Development, Vol. 24, No. 3, 301-309 (2000)
DOI: 10.1080/01650250050118286


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