Attachment and emotional experience in romantic relationships

According to attachment theory, individuals develop working models that organize their understanding of themselves and others in relationships. These working models should guide interpretation of ambiguous relationship events, and thereby affect emotional reactions to those events. In this study, individuals with different attachment styles--who hold different working models of attachment--read and rated their emotional reactions to ambiguous relationship scenarios presented via computer. The computer timed their reactions. They later provided explanations for why the events might have occurred and completed a measure tapping their beliefs about relationships. Respondents differed by attachment style in their emotional reactions across all scenarios, and their patterns differed depending on the type of scenario, as well. They differed in how quickly they responded to the emotion questions, indicating potential defensive processing among members of one attachment group. Respondents in also differed in their tendency to explain the events as caused by themselves or their partners. There were no differences on the measure of relationship beliefs. Results are discussed in terms of attachment theory.