Adult romantic attachment orientations reflect different ways in which people regulate and cope with negative emotions in relationships. In our prior NIMH grant, we documented how stressful events differentially affect personal and relational well-being (e.g., marital satisfaction and depression) in people who have different attachment orientations (secure, avoidant, or ambivalent). The current application has two major aims: (1) to follow a large sample of first-time parents across a chronically stressful life transition (having a baby), documenting systematic changes in marital satisfaction and depressive symptoms in wives and husbands with different attachment orientations; (2) to investigate how different attachment orientations are associated with different modes of information processing in controlled, experimental studies. Study 1 will be a 2-year, multi-wave transition to parenthood study designed to expand upon and clarify our previous research. Studies 2-4 will be laboratory investigations involving long-term dating couples subjected to different kinds of acute stressors. Specifically, Study 2 will examine (a) how people with different attachment orientations perceive the emotional support they give to and receive from their romantic partners when resolving relationship problems, (b) the kinds of attributions they make for their partners? supportive or unsupportive behaviors, and (c) how their memory for events related to support changes over time. Studies 3 and 4 will investigate how attachment orientations and situational factors affect selective exposure to information regarding one?s partner/relationship. Study 3 will test whether highly ambivalent persons selectively seek and attend to negative relationship information when their attachment insecurities have been activated by unsupportive acts from their partners. Study 4 will test whether highly avoidant persons defensively exclude information concerning their romantic partners? emotional states and needs when such knowledge could activate their attachment systems. This new research should shed light on how three facets of information processing-selective attention, memory, and social construal (attribution)-are associated with increases vs. declines in personal and relational well-being in stressful situations.
Showing the most recent 10 out of 11 publications
