Mario Mikulincer, Israel Orbach
1995
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0
Influential Citations
203
Citations
Quality indicators
Journal
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
Abstract
One hundred and twenty Israeli students were classified into secure, avoidant, and anxious-ambivalent attachment groups. They completed scales that tap the construct of repressive defensiveness and recalled early personal experiences of anger, anxiety, sadness, and happiness. Secure people reported moderate defensiveness and low anxiety and had easy access to negative memories without being overwhelmed by the spreading of the dominant emotional tone to nondominant emotions. Anxiousambivalent people were unable to repress negative affects, reported high anxiety, had easy access to negative memories, and could not inhibit emotional spreading. Avoidant people reported high levels of defensiveness and anxiety and showed low accessibility to negative memories. The discussion emphasizes the parallel between a person's interaction with the social world and the makeup of his or her inner world. Attachment theory (Bowlby, 1969, 1973,1980) highlights individual differences in the way people regulate inner distress and relate to others. According to Bowlby's theory, these individual differences result from early attachment relationships between a child and his or her caretakers. Parents' responsiveness to their infant's distress and their availability in threatening situations provide the infant with a secure base on which to handle inner tension and process negative emotions. These early experiences create inner representations of the attachment system (working models) and shape later patterns of habitual response to significant others and to distressing situations (attachment styles). In the present study we followed Bowlby's ideas and assessed the association between adult attachment styles and the regulation of negative emotions. As in research on attachment style in infancy (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978), studies on adult attachment have adopted the tripartite typology of secure, avoidant, and anxious-ambivalent attachment styles. Individual differences in adult attachment style seem to reflect expectations about whether significant others are emotionally available in stressful circumstances (Hazan & Shaver, 1987; Shaver & Hazan, 1988, 1993). Securely attached people have a strong secure base (Bowlby, 1973) and believe that significant others are available in times of need. In contrast, people with an insecure style, either avoidant or anxious-ambiv alent, perceive significant others as unavailable and have doubts about the relief others can bring in times of stress. However, these two insecure types differ as to the strategy they adopt for coping with their basic insecurity. On the one hand, avoidant people maintain distance from attachment figures, deny their