Attachment styles and interpersonal approach and avoidance goals in everyday couple interactions

Sixty undergraduates at a public university in the northwest United States recorded their approach and avoidance communal (closeness), uncommunal (distance), agentic (assertion), and unagentic (submission) goals during a total of 836 naturalistic interactions with romantic partners. They also completed a self-report measure of attachment style. Secure attachment predicted more approach than avoidance goals, especially agentic goals. Avoidant attachment predicted goals to avoid and not to approach closeness and submission. Anxious attachment predicted more intense and inconsistent goals; for example, anxiety predicted focusing more on avoiding distance yet less on creating closeness and predicted more within-person variability across interactions in goals to approach distance, avoid closeness, avoid assertion, and avoid submission. In sum, the study revealed strong relationships between enduring attachment styles and momentary interpersonal goals in everyday life. 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. The theory suggests that interactions with significant others influence our mental models of the self, others, and interpersonal relationships. These mental models, in turn, influence our thoughts, feelings, and actions in subsequent interpersonal situations. Contemporary models of adult attachment typically conceptualize individual differences in attachment as variations along two continuous dimensions: attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance (e.g., Brennan, Clark, & Shaver, 1998; Crowell, Fraley, & Shaver, 1999). Anxiety and avoidance reflect different ways of experiencing and coping with insecurity (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2003). People prone to attachment anxiety worry that relationship partners will reject them, abandon them, or judge them unworthy of love and care. Their thoughts, feelings, and actions tend to focus on their partner and especially on whether their partner is available and responsive. In contrast, people prone to attachment avoidance feel uncomfortable with closeness and dependency. They harbor pessimistic beliefs about others and relationships. They tend to dismiss the importance of intimacy and interdependence in close relationships and instead assert their independence and self-reliance. Anxiety and avoidance are independent dimensions; that is, people can be high on both dimensions (often labeled a fearful-avoidant style), low on both (a secure style), high in anxiety but low in avoidance (a preoccupied style), or high in avoidance but low in anxiety (a dismissing style). People with a secure attachment style experience themselves as generally capable and worthy of affection and experience others as generally trustworthy Kenneth D. Locke, Department of Psychology, University of Idaho. I thank Gwen Mitchell for helping me enter the data. I presented data from this study at the 2007 meeting of the Society for Interpersonal Theory and Research. Correspondence should be addressed to Kenneth D. Locke, Department of Psychology, University of Idaho, Moscow, ID 83844, e-mail: [email protected]. Personal Relationships, 15 (2008), 359–374. Printed in the United States of America. Copyright 2008 IARR. 1350-4126=08