Applying lessons from the person–situation debate to attachment theory and research

Abstract

2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. The person–situation debate was fundamentally concerned with the issue of consistency (Fleeson & Noftle, 2008). According to the traditional trait perspective, people are consistent across time, situations, and behavioral content. Conversely, the social cognitive perspective argues for inconsistency, proposing that one’s momentary thoughts, feelings, and interpretations of events have a fundamental influence on behavior. In general, attachment theory has a strong bias toward consistency, viewing people as having stable attachment styles. At the same time, from its very beginning, it was clear that attachment also has a dynamic, situationally-responsive quality. The first method developed to assess attachment style, Ainsworth’s strange situation procedure, used reactions to a set of situations, to classify infants into categories, launching a tradition of attachment-related typology. Hazan and Shaver (1987), who extended Bowlby’s theory, transferred this typology to adult relationships. Following traditional trait approaches, attachment researchers have studied coherence in attachment from infancy to adulthood, stability across adulthood, and prediction of various outcomes from attachment styles. After years of research into the correlates of attachment types or styles, however, recently more attention has been given to state-based attachment processes, generating a parallel line of research. In this line, social cognitive approaches have guided researchers to study the accessibility of association networks and attachment schemas, relationship-specific attachments, and the effects of life events on attachment. Despite the theoretical commonll rights reserved. alities of these literatures, the two lines have yet to be systematically integrated, and this is where lessons from the person–situation debate are useful. Personality trait research has begun to connect the trait level of analysis to the state level, by aggregating personality-relevant behavior across states within daily life, revealing simultaneously high stability and high variability (Fleeson, 2007). Attachment research is beginning to empirically address similar questions of consistency, taking into account situational influences and relationship contexts (Gillath & Shaver, 2007; Fraley, 2007; La Guardia, Ryan, Couchman, & Deci, 2000); however, still little is known about attachment fluctuation and functioning in the moment, and their links to attachment style. These gaps in the literature partly stem from the lack of a state attachment measure. To deal with this issue, we (Gillath, Hart, Noftle, & Stockdale, 2009) have developed and validated a new state measure that will be useful for connecting the trait and state levels of analysis in attachment research. Answering how much fluctuation exists in attachment-related beliefs, feelings, and attitudes will reveal the relative consistency of attachment styles. Such findings will also contribute to a broader grasp of consistency, contrasting the narrower, theoretically-derived attachment constructs with the broader, empirically-derived Big Five. It is already clear that attachment styles, much like personality traits, are consistent in some respects and inconsistent in others. Looking to the future, attachment research will benefit by applying the lessons of the person–situation debate to answer how and why attachment fluctuates in everyday life. Shoda, Mischel, and Wright (1994) conceptualized the situation–behavior profile to demonstrate and explain behavior variability in E.E. Noftle, O. Gillath / Journal of Research in Personality 43 (2009) 260–261 261 personality. This concept, and others like it (see Fleeson, 2007), could be profitably introduced in to attachment research to investigate both nomothetic and idiographic situational contingencies of attachment behaviors.