Adult Attachment Styles: Relations with Emotional Well-Being, Marriage, and Parenting

Abstract

Adult Attachment Styles: Relations with Emotional Well-Being, Marriage, and Parenting* Brenda L. Vol!ing,** Paul C. Notaro, and Joelle J. Larsen The current study examined the pairings of adult attachment styles among married couples raising young children. Spouses in dual-secure marriages reported more love for their partner, less ambivalence about their relationships, were more integrated into their social net w orks, and felt more competent as parents than couples in dual-insecure marriages. Differences in relationship dynamics were fbund in secure husband-avoidant wife and secure wife-avoidant husband marriages. There was no relation between adult attachment styles, parenting behavior, and the securit of infant-parent attachments. Future work would benefit by focusing on the dyadic constellations of adult attachment styles and their implications for family relationships. Key Words: adult attachment, depression, marriage, parenting. John Bowlby once proclaimed that attachment relationships were important for humans across the life cycle and that attachment behaviors characterized human interaction from the cradle to the grave (Bowlby, 1979, p. 129). Early attachment research focused primarily on the development of infant-mother attachments, but attachment theory has recently come to the attention of investigators studying adult love relationships (see Feeney & Noller, 1996, for a review). Hazan & Shaver (1987) originally theorized that adult romantic love could be viewed as an affective bond comparable to that seen between infants and their primary caregivers. In their view, adult love relationships could be categorized along the tripartite system developed by Ainsworth and her colleagues (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978) to describe individual differences in infant-parent attachments. Hazan & Shaver (1987) not only developed a measure to classify adults into secure, avoidant, and anxious/ambivalent groups, but they also documented differences between avoidant, secure, and ambivalent respondents` love relationships, their beliefs (i.e., mental models) about self and others in these relationships, and recollections of their family relationships in childhood. Hazan and Shaver (1987) reported that secure adults described their love relationships as happy, friendly, and trusting, emphasized their ability to support and accept their partner despite their faults, and had relationships that tended to last longer than either avoidant or ambivalent respondents. The romantic relationships of avoidant respondents were characterized by a fear of intimacy and a discomfort with closeness, whereas the anxious-ambivalent respondents emphasized love as involving obsession, extreme sexual attraction and jealousy. Since the original findings of Hazan & Shaver (1987), numerous studies have continued to find strong empirical support for differences in relationship satisfaction, psychological well-being (e.g., self-esteem, depression) and childhood experiences as a function of secure, avoidant, and ambivalent attachment styles in adulthood (Bartholomew & Horowitz, 1991; Carnelley, Pietromonoaco, & Jaffe, 1994; Collins & Read, 1990; Feeney & Noller, 1990; Mikulincer & Erev, 1991: Pistole, 1989; Simpson, 1990). The current work contributes to the existing literature by examining similar constructs (e.g., models of self and others, relationship quality) in a sample of married spouses. Attachment and Marriage Many of the earlier studies of adult attachment styles used samples of college students to examine the relations between attachment and relationship quality. This restricts the generalization of the findings to the young adult period of development and the romantic or dating relationships typical of this population. Further work is needed that explains how adult attachment styles might be linked to relationship adjustment in more seriously committed or long-term love relationships, such as those between married couples. …