Cultural variation in adult attachment: The impact of ethnicity, collectivism, and country of origin.

Abstract

Unlike many social psychological theories that are limited by the Western cultural context in which they were developed, attachment theory is an exception in that it has been examined across cultures. However, existing cross-cultural research on attachment is limited in scope: there is little to no research on how attachment distributions vary based on ethnicity and religion, and it remains unclear which aspects of culture influence attachment outcomes. The current study expands the body of research on attachment theory by examining attachment as a function of country of origin, ethnicity, religious denomination, individualism/collectivism, and acculturation. We assessed attachment in an ethnically and religiously diverse sample that encompassed over fifty countries of origin, and found that attachment patterns varied based on region of origin, collectivism, acculturation, and ethnicity. These findings have broad implications, both for clinical usage and for empirical cross-cultural understanding.