Adult Romantic Attachment: Theoretical Developments, Emerging Controversies, and Unanswered Questions

“When Hazan and Shaver (1987) began their work on romantic attachment, they adopted Ainsworth's three-category scheme as a framework for organizing individual differences in the way adults think, feel, and behave in romantic relationships.”

“…models with a larger research base, such as the 5-factor model of personality (see McCrae & Costa, 1999) or the two-dimensional model of attachment (Fraley & Shaver, 2000), may improve the discriminant validity of EMS and help place Young’s (1995) approach within a larger theoretical context.”

“Individual differences in attachment style can be assessed along two dimensions of insecurity, usually labeled attachment-related anxiety and avoidance (e.g., Bartholomew & Horowitz, 1991; Brennan, Clark, & Shaver, 1998; Fraley & Shaver, 2000).”

“Individuals who are insecurely attached in their adult romantic relationships may have difficulty trusting others or allowing others to get too close (Fraley & Shaver, 2000), which could lead to multiple, brief sexual relationships.”

“Thus, although initially used to describe early relationships, attachment theory states that attachment style continues to dictate the formation and maintenance of adult relationships (Bowlby, 1980; Hazan & Shaver, 1987; Fraley & Shaver, 2000).”

“When testing this theory in studies of adults, most researchers have focused on a person’s ‘‘attachment style’’*the systematic pattern of relational expectations, emotions, and behaviour that results from a person’s attachment history (Fraley & Shaver, 2000).”

“When testing this theory in studies of adults, most researchers have focused on a person’s attachment style: the systematic pattern of relational expectations, emotions, and behavior that results from a person’s attachment history (Fraley & Shaver, 2000).”

“While adult romantic partners are commonly identified as attachment figures (Crowell & Waters, 1994; Fraley & Shaver, 2000; Weiss, 1991), the current findings support the notion that romantic relationships may develop into attachment bonds among a minority of mid to late adolescents and primarily…”

“…style, in adults (Shaver &Mikulincer, 2004) and in children (Bowlby, 1973), is assumed to be based on two dimensions that reflect fundamental workingmodels of the self and of close others (Brennan, Clark, & Shaver, 1998; Fraley & Shaver, 2000; Griffin & Bartholomew, 1994).”

“Other researchers argued that these inner working models of relationships are dynamic and subject to change throughout the lifespan (Fonagy et al., 1996; Fraley & Shaver, 2000; Riley, 2010).”

“The field of adult attachment has developed greatly over recent years (Fraley & Shaver, 2000 ) and is currently influential in areas of personality and social psychology including social cognition (Stein, Jacobs, Ferguson, Allen, & Fonagy, 1998 ).”

“…36-item self-report measuring individual differences in adult attachment-related anxiety (i.e., anxiety and vigilance concerning rejection and abandonment) and avoidance (i.e., discomfort with closeness and dependency or a reluctance to be intimate with others) (Fraley & Shaver, 2000, pp. 142-143).”

“01868571 Fraley, R.C. & Shaver, P.R. (2000). Adult romantic attachment:”

“Categories of ‘secure,’ ‘preoccupied,’ and ‘avoidant’ (either dismissing or fearful) attachment have been constructed to represent the clinical prototypes for these dimensions [27,28].”

“In light of such observations, one of the greatest challenges for adult attachment theorists is to explain why the attachment system is active in human relationships, what functions it serves, and why it was co-opted by natural selection over the course of evolution (Fraley & Shaver, 2000).”

“…the current state of adult attachment research and theorizing have called on researchers to begin to pay serious attention to multiple working models of attachment (e.g., Fraley & Shaver, 2000; Pietromonaco & Feldman Barrett, 1997; Shaver & Mikulincer, 2002a, 2002b, 2004; Simpson & Rholes, 2002).”

“Researchers should attempt to distinguish among these potentially different kinds of individuals who score high on the anxiety dimension of the two-dimensional attachment space defined by Fraley and Shaver (2000).”

“Attachment-related anxiety refers to variation in the degree to which people are vigilantly attuned to attachment-related concerns (Fraley & Shaver, 2000).”

“For the purpose of the present paper, these two scales were considered sufficient to represent individuals location in the two-dimensional space defined by Anxiety and Avoidance and described by Bartholomew and Horowitz (1991) and Fraley and Shaver (2000).”

“This result was additionally supported by a small but substantial correlation between dependency and relationship duration at Time 1 (r ¼ 0.13, p Fraley & Shaver, 2000 ), and did not contribute to relationship continuation once relationship duration was controlled.”

“When testing this theory in studies of adults, most researchers have focused on a person’s ‘‘attachment style’’—the systematic pattern of relational expectations, emotions, and behaviors that results from a particular attachment history (Fraley & Shaver, 2000).”

“A Fourth Category of Attachment The three-category system of attachment styles has been well-documented in the literature since Bowlby’s original formulation of the concept (Fraley & Shaver, 2000).”

“They label these dimensions anxiety and avoidance (Brennan, Clark, & Shaver, 1998; Fraley & Shaver, 2000; Shaver & Mikulincer, 2003).”

“…of adolescents and adults, tests of attachment theory have focused on a person’s attachment orientation, or style—a systematic pattern of relational expectations, emotions, and behaviors conceptualized as the psychological residue of each person’s unique attachment history (Fraley & Shaver, 2000).”

“Fraley and Shaver (2000) have proposed that ambivalence and avoidance reflect two components or ‘‘subsystems’’ of the attachment system.”

“Second, there is currently substantial discussion about what constitutes an attachment relationship (Fraley & Shaver, 2000), and some of the specific relationships studied may not have involved true attachment figures.”

“…attachment patterns, as well as the high predictability of childhood attachment patterns leading to a corresponding adult pattern, indicate that the quality of the attachments that individuals form as children have enduring consequences and outcomes well into adulthood (Fraley & Shaver, 2000).”

“attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance can vary independently, both need to be low for an individual to have a socalled secure rather than insecure attachment style (Collins, 1996; Fraley and Shaver, 2000).”

“On one hand, research on attachment styles shows that internal working models play a key role in the ways that adults think about and respond to others throughout their lives and thus contribute to the dominant pattern of interactions between teacher and students (Fraley & Shaver, 2000).”

“The different dimensions of attachment can be understood in terms of patterns that guide responses to emotionally distressing situations such as bereavement (Fraley & Shaver, 2000; Mikulincer, Shaver, & Pereg, 2003).”

“…early life shape attachment representations; once formed, they serve as prototypic mental models of attachment relationships and influence adult attachment patterns with romantic partners and peers, at least to the extent that the caregiving environment remains stable (e.g., Fraley & Shaver, 2000).”

“According to adult attachment theory (Bowlby, 1973; Fraley & Shaver, 2000; Hazan & Shaver, 1987, 1994), previous relationship patterns can reemerge because the working models (i.e., mental representations) people hold of past relationships are highly accessible and are used to guide interpersonal behavior in novel cir…”

“EFT demonstrates excellent outcomes; research shows that 70–73% of distressed couples are no longer distressed at the end of therapy and 86% report significant improvement in their relationship (Johnson, Hunsley, Greenberg, & Schindler, 1999).”

“Some of these have already been discovered—for example, long-term mate preferences (e.g., Buss, 1989) and patterns of attachment and bonding (Fraley & Shaver, 2000; Gonzaga, Keltner, Londahl, & Smith, 2001; Hazan & Shaver, 1987; Hendrick & Hendrick, 1994; Kirkpatrick, 1998).”

“The avoidance dimension is conceptualized as a person's level of discomfort with intimacy (Fraley & Shaver, 2000; Hazan & Shaver, 1994).”

“Thus, they create a defensive memory structure in which they have little accessibility to painful memories (Fraley & Shaver, 2000), and they use emotional distancing strategies characterized by deactivation or downregulation of emotions (Fonagy, 2001).”

“The Experiences in Close Relationships Scale revised (ECR-revised; Fraley, Waller, & Brennan, 2000) was used to measure the two dimensions assumed to underlie individual differences in attachment, that is, attachment anxiety and avoidance.”

“Recent reviews conclude that the association between child–parent and later romantic attachment is of moderate strength (Crowell et al., 1999; Fraley & Shaver, 2000).”

“Fraley and Shaver (1998, 2000) have argued that the anxiety dimension measures the affective and attributional processes involved in monitoring and appraising events for signs of threat, whereas the avoidance dimension measures the strategies individuals use to regulate their attachment needs.”

“The stronger association of covert narcissism to anxiety attachment than avoidance attachment is also in keeping with contemporary attachment theory (Fraley & Shaver, 2000).”

“Furthermore, Fraley and Shaver (2000) suggest that anxiety could be considered a monitoring system and avoidance a behavioral orientation system.”

“There is a great deal of controversy in the attachment literature regarding the nature of attachment relationships, the dimensions underlying attachment security, and what different measures of attachment security assess (e.g., Fraley & Shaver, 2000; Shaver, Belsky, & Brennan, 2000; Shaver & Mikulincer, 2004).”

“For purposes of this study, the RSQ was scored consistent with the two-dimensional view of insecure attachment advocated by Fraley and Bonanno (2004) and Fraley and Shaver (2000).”

“In particular, each has proven implicated in the capacity for intimate and close relationships with friends and romantic partners (e.g., Fraley & Shaver, 2000; Shaver & Mikulincer, 2002; Thompson, 1999).”

“Adult attachment theory (e.g., Fraley & Shaver, 2000; Hazan & Shaver, 1994; Simpson & Rholes, 1998) draws on infant attachment theory (e.g., Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978; Bowlby, 1973, 1982) to explain individual differences in how adults create and sustain satisfying relationships.”

“Attachment anxiety, on the other hand, may act early in the regulation process by altering the emotional significance of sexual stimuli (i.e., reappraisal; see Fraley & Shaver, 1998, 2000).”

“In studies of adolescents and adults, tests of these theoretical ideas have generally focused on a person’s attachment style—the systematic pattern of relational expectations, emotions, and behaviors that results from a particular history of attachment experiences ( Fraley & Shaver, 2000 ).”

“According to attachment theory (Bowlby, 1969/1982; Fraley & Shaver, 2000; Hazan & Shaver, 1987; Mikulincer & Shaver, 2003; Rholes & Simpson, 2004), these individual differences reflect differences in internal working models of relationships that were first formed in the context of the…”

“To determine the depth (and sincerity) of these increases, we included an implicit, generalized measure of felt security in Experiment 3. This implicit measure tapped how quickly people associated themselves with the traits thought to underlie both high self-esteem (Leary et al., 1995) and attachment security (Barthol…”

“The behavioral systems conception (which encompasses emotion and cognition; Fraley & Shaver, 2000) allows changes in attachment across the lifespan within the same framework, and better representation of Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall’s (1978) functions that discriminated the three infant…”

“Theory conceptualizes romantic love as an attachment process and grants a special status to the romantic partner as an attachment figure in adulthood (Fraley & Shaver, 2000; Hazan & Diamond, 2000; Hazan & Shaver, 1987).”

“The other approach, most often used by researchers in personality and social psychology, was proposed by Bartholomew (1990 ), based on previous work by Hazan and Shaver (1987 ), and was developed further by Fraley and Shaver (2000 ) and Mikulincer et al.”

“Several attachment researchers have described the interplay of attachment in adult years (see reviews by Crowell, Fraley, & Shaver, 1999; Fraley & Shaver, 2000; Shaver & Mikulincer, 2002).”

“these interactions generate internal working models of the self and significant others that guide behaviors and perceptions about what relationships should be like [5].”

“…posited originally by Bowlby (e.g., Carnelley, Pietromonaco, & Jaffe, 1994; Griffin & Bartholomew , 1994), whereas others prefer the behavioral and emotional regulation perspective focused on the avoidant and anxiety dimensions (e.g., Fraley & Shaver, 1998; see Fraley & Shaver, 2000 for a review).”

“The anxiety dimension refers to individuals’ sensitivity to detecting and perceiving threats to their security or cues of rejection (Fraley and Shaver 2000).”

“This has been supported by a number of authors since (Fraley & Shaver, 2000; Fraley & Spieker, 2003; Fraley, Waller, & Brennan, 2000).”

“Fraley (Fraley & Shaver, 2000; Fraley et al., 2005) assumed that in these cases, the attachment system has been ‘co-opted’ by natural selection to serve other survival and/or reproductive functions.”

“…model that preoccupied individuals have a positive model of others and dismissing individuals have a positive model of self seem to be questionable both theoretically (Fraley & Shaver, 2000; Pietromonaco & Barrett, 2000) and empirically (e.g., Carver, 1997; Feeney, Noller, & Hanrahan, 1994).”

“IWMs are usually considered to be fairly stable over time (Bowlby, 1973; Cassidy, 2000; Fraley & Shaver, 2000), in part because the quality of interaction is presumed to remain the same and in part because IWMs are believed to direct attention selectively to representation-consistent information…”

“In pursuing these ideas in studies of adults, researchers have focused on a person’s attachment orientations — systematic patterns of relational expectations, emotions, and behaviors that result from a particular history of interactions with attachment figures [5,6,7 ].”

“Differences in the quality of child-attachment figure/caregiver interactions are the basis that shapes relational patterns or attachment orientation(Fraley & Shaver, 2000).”