Feeling Lonely? Here Are Some Tips for College Students

The transition to college can be lonely, especially for those vulnerable to feeling anxious in interpersonal relationships. If you have ever felt alone when you are surrounded by people, you know loneliness is not only about how many friends you have, but also about not feeling connected to others as much as you would like. But one thing a person can forget is that how you interpret social interactions matters in how lonely you feel, and those interpretations can depend both on your way of relating to others and your way of viewing yourself.

Some individuals have a negative view of self but a positive view of others, which results in an anxious attachment style—meaning concern about the stability or security of the relationship. In their desperate attempts to avoid the psychological pain of loneliness, people with anxious attachment styles tend to get support by clinging to others or trying to control others to meet their needs, in part because they see themselves as helpless and have difficulty regulating their feelings of distress on their own.

But maybe this pattern can be altered. If people with more positive views of self tend to feel less lonely because they interpret social interactions more positively, then maybe that’s where change can start. Breaking a cycle of negative self-views and negative interpretations is especially important for first-year college students who are confronted with leaving home for the first time, making new friends, attempting challenging coursework, and trying to figure out who they are in this new environment.

How We View Ourselves And Others Matters In Loneliness

In our study, we asked first-year college students about their attachment styles (which could be anxious, for example, or avoidant), their overall feelings of self-esteem, their loneliness, and the different types of support they receive from others—where support could mean information, tangible items/services, emotional support, sense of belonging, validation, or opportunity to help others.

Indeed, both their self-view and their view of others affected feelings of loneliness in students with anxious attachment styles. Students who were more anxious in relating to others tended to have lower self-esteem and their maladaptive strategy of trying to engage others may have intensified their unsatisfied needs for support, which is in turn related to more loneliness. Emotional support and receiving tangible help and information from others were particularly important in reducing feelings of loneliness. It may be that students with more anxious ways of relating feel close to others when they receive emotional and practical support, but feel lonely if these specific needs are not met.

We think these findings could help diversify coping skills for first-year students adjusting to college. Targeting negative self-views by highlighting individuals’ strengths and helping the individual “reframe” negative beliefs about themselves—“I have the tools and skills to deal with negative emotions” instead of “I am helpless” —might be effective in changing the filter that these students have about themselves, which affects how they interpret social interactions. Building self-esteem can help students perceive social interactions in a more positive light. They can now say, “They are being nice to me because I am a good person” instead of “They are being nice to me to get something from me. If not, why would they be nice to someone like me?”

First-year students who are prone to anxious ways of relating to others may also benefit from feeling a strong emotional bond with at least one other person, such as family members or friends from high school. They can go to such a person for important decisions or advice if they are having problems or have an emergency. These types of support can help these students feel more intimate with others and protect against feelings of isolation.

Know Your Pattern And Learn More Effective Ways To Communicate And Deal With Negative Emotions And Thoughts

The results from this study are even more relevant in the current climate in which most college students have experienced disruptions in social support due to COVID-19-related restrictions. Considering the recent increases in anxiety and loneliness among college students, interventions targeting self-esteem by highlighting their strengths and more effective and healthy ways of engaging with others may help students learn how to ask directly for emotional support, advice, or tangible help—instead of indirectly trying to engage others by making catastrophic evaluations of the situation, dwelling on negative emotions, and/or being hypervigilant to cues of rejection.

Therapists at college counseling centers may consider helping first-year students who struggle with feelings of loneliness and who have these ineffective behavioral patterns by understanding where they come from (such as early behavioral patterns of engaging with parents) and by guiding them to develop more effective interpersonal skills. Strengthening self-esteem and the ability to better deal with negative emotions are learnable skills.


For Further Reading

So, C., & Fiori, K. L., (2022). Attachment anxiety and loneliness during the first year of college: self-esteem and social support as mediators. Personality and Individual Differences, 187, 111405. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2021.111405
 

Christine So is a doctoral student in Clinical Psychology at Gordon. F. Derner School of Psychology, Adelphi University. Her research focuses on the social relationships of young and older adults.

Even the People Most Reluctant to Touch Others Benefit From It

In the current pandemic times, we are all particularly aware of how important interpersonal touch (or its lack) is. But do all people equally benefit from touch? Our studies seek to better understand whether the people who claim not to like touch and physical proximity to others (those high in attachment avoidance) actually benefit less from touch. Attachment avoidance is one way of approaching close relationships, whereby a person tends to highly value their independence and autonomy, as well as to dislike or undervalue psychological intimacy. Often because of relational experiences in childhood, they see others as unreliable, unavailable, and uncaring.

Touch is an inherent experience of human relationships. More and more research is showing how touch that is meant to be affectionate in close relationships is associated with important benefits: higher well-being, more positive emotions, and reduced physiological stress (like blood pressure or heart rate), to name only a few.

However, we still have little knowledge about whether touch equally benefits everyone. We suspected it wouldn’t. In particular, as relationship researchers, we know that not all people equally enjoy proximity (physical and psychological). People with a so-called avoidant attachment style have reported in previous research that they like touch less and engage in it much less than the average. Thus, they were the perfect candidates to investigate people who could benefit from less touch. However, recent research has shown that despite their claimed aversion to interpersonal proximity, these people can benefit from and even appreciate several positive relationship experiences (like receiving support or sharing daily positive activities). Given these newer results, we thought that, in contrast to our original speculation, avoidantly attached people could actually benefit from touch, but as a result of engaging in it less, their well-being would be negatively affected.

So, we studied these questions. In a first study, we asked people to report on their typical level of touch in their relationship, their attachment style, and their well-being. In a second study, we observed couples having conversations about emotionally laden topics and measured how much they touched each other during this time. Finally, we asked other couples to complete online diaries for a month and to report how much they touched each other and how happy they felt each day.

In all three studies, like in previous research, we found that touch was associated with higher psychological well-being and with the experience of more positive emotions. We also replicated the result that more avoidantly attached people report lower well-being (except in the second study) and less touch. Most importantly, in none of the studies did the more avoidant people report a lower link between touch and well-being; that is, they benefit as much as any other people from the very touch they claim to dislike. This underlines how physical proximity and affection are important aspects of close relationships and how both can benefit people, independently from their personal preferences (note that this was touch occurring within a romantic relationship and was most probably consented to).

Finally, the fact that people higher in attachment avoidance do engage in less touch with their partner helps explain why they report lower well-being and less positive emotions. This shows us how important interpersonal closeness is for well-being. It might indeed even be considered a basic human need, because, even if one values distance and autonomy as well as dislikes affectionate touch (like avoidantly attached people do), disengaging from the universal need to be close to others undermines one’s well-being.

In the current pandemic crisis and the associated distancing measures taken around the globe, the present results underline that nobody might be immune to being kept physically distant from others. 


For Further Reading

Debrot, A., Stellar, J. E., MacDonald, G., Keltner, D., & Impett, E. A. (2020). Is touch in romantic relationships universally beneficial for psychological well-being? The role of attachment avoidance. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167220977709

Chopik, W. J., Edelstein, R. S., van Anders, Sari M., Wardecker, B. M., Shipman, E. L., & Samples-Steele, C. R. (2014). Too close for comfort? Adult attachment and cuddling in romantic and parent–child relationships. Personality and Individual Differences, 69, 212–216. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2014.05.035

Stanton, S. C. E., Campbell, L., & Pink, J. C. (2017). Benefits of positive relationship experiences for avoidantly attached individuals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 113(4), 568–588. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000098
 

Anik Debrot is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. She studies close relationships with a focus on affectionate behaviors. She is also a psychotherapist and develops and evaluates internet interventions.

Why Do People Fall into the Trap of On-again/Off-again Relationships?

You’ve probably known people who have gotten stuck in a repeated loop in a dating relationship—and maybe it’s even happened to you. They’re together. They’ve broken up. They’re back together again. No, they’ve split up.  Now they’re giving it another shot….  What’s going on?  Are certain types of people just more likely to get into this kind of on-again/off-again relationship?

In my previous research, I had tested whether people who fall into this cycle differ on any of the “Big 5” personality characteristics—extraversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, or neuroticism. I didn’t find that people in on-again/off-again relationships (what I’ll call “on-off” or “cyclical” partners for shorthand) differed on any of these personality dimensions from those who did not have a history of breakups and renewals (”non-cyclical partners”). But many people—including students, journalists, and fellow relationships researchers—kept asking, “it’s got be their personality, right?” So I wanted additional evidence.

For this study, my colleagues and I took a different approach. Rather than looking at personality characteristics, we focused on ways that people approach their relationships, what we called relationship dispositions. Relationship dispositions are ways in which people view the purpose and functioning of close relationships, such as their beliefs about how partners should act and how much intimacy there should be in a relationship.

To examine major relationship dispositions that might be related to on-off cycling in relationships, we first assessed attachment style. Researchers tend to measure people’s attachment style with two dimensions: attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance. Attachment anxiety pertains to people’s fears of being abandoned by their relationship partners; attachment avoidance pertains to people’s fears of being too close in a relationship.

These two sets of fears develop early in our lives based on our interactions with our caregivers, particularly our parents, and tend to be relatively stable across our relationships throughout life. Studies have found that people who are higher in attachment anxiety are more likely to have reconciled their romantic relationships. But, we thought that people higher in attachment avoidance might engage in on-again/off-again relationships to avoid becoming too close.

In addition to attachment, we also assessed destiny and growth beliefs about relationships. People with destiny beliefs think that relationships are either “meant to be” or not. In contrast, people with growth beliefs think that relationships can be improved with work and cultivation. Finally, we also assessed communal orientation—the degree to which people believe that partners should help each other without the expectation of repayment. Those with a higher communal orientation see their relationship more as a collective—as a “we.”

We surveyed more than 200 adults ranging in age from 19 to 66 who were currently in a romantic relationship. Their relationships varied from casually dating to married. We made sure that half of our sample was currently in an on-again/off-again relationship to allow us to compare cyclical and non-cyclical partners. The partners who were in an on-again/off-again relationship reported that they had gotten back together after breakups an average of almost three times on average.

So what did we find? Similar to previous research, on-off partners reported lower relationship quality compared to non-cyclical partners. They were less satisfied with their relationship, expressed greater uncertainty about the status of their relationship, and felt more relationship disillusionment.

But on-off and non-cyclical partners did not differ on any of the relationship dispositions we measured. For example, on-off partners were not more anxious, they did not hold greater destiny beliefs, and they did not have a less communal orientation than partners in non-cyclical relationships.

Yet, even if on-off and non-cyclical partners do not differ on any given relationship disposition, the ways in which the dispositions are associated with relationship quality might differ. However, we found few differences between on-off and non-cyclical partners here as well. Overall, the relationship dispositions were linked with relationship satisfaction, commitment, and uncertainty in similar ways for both types of partners. The few exceptions suggested that the relationship dispositions were more weakly linked to relational quality for on-off partners. For example, on-off partners who had higher growth beliefs did not have as much commitment as non-cyclical partners with similar levels of growth beliefs.

Overall, then, on-off and non-cyclical partners don’t differ very much in their dispositional approaches towards relationships or in the effects of these dispositions on their relational quality.  This finding supports research suggesting that on-again/off-again relationships are created by the dynamics between the two partners. Relationship cycling has more to do with how the two partners interact and manage conflict as a couple than with their individual personalities or orientations toward relationships.


For Further Reading

Dailey, R. M., Zhong, L., Pett, R., Scott, D., & Krawietz, C. (2019). Investigating relationship dispositions as explanations for on-again/off-again relationships. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. https://doi.org/10.1177/0265407519861156

Knee, C. R. (1998). Implicit theories of relationships: Assessment and prediction of romantic relationship initiation, coping, and longevity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 360–370. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.74.2.360

Mikulincer, M., & Shaver, P. R. (2012). Adult attachment orientations and relationship processes. Journal of Family Theory and Review, 4, 259–274.

Mills, J., & Clark, M. S. (1994). Communal and exchange relationships: New research and old controversies. In R. Gilmour & R. Erber (Eds.), Theoretical approaches to personal relationships (pp. 29–42). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

 

René Dailey is an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

People’s Faces Can Give Clues about What Kind of Partner They Are

New dating applications—such as Taffy, S’More, and Willow—market themselves as the next generation of dating tools that allow users to prioritize social connection over appearance.  Rather than asking users to construct a profile with pictures of themselves and a short personal description (as first-generation dating apps did), platforms like S’More and Willow display blurry pictures of users that gradually clear up as users converse with each other.  

These new dating apps have emerged in response to criticisms that older dating apps place excessive importance on looks when seeking a romantic partner. Yet, perhaps appearance can provide useful information about a person. Research has shown that, in addition to obvious features such as gender, age, height, and weight, people can infer more subtle characteristics from others’ appearance, including their political orientation, personality (for example, their level of extraversion), and even music preferences.

We were interested in exploring whether people could also identify someone’s attachment style based on a first impression. Attachment style is the extent to which people perceive that their relationships are capable of meeting their needs and are a source of comfort during difficult times. People’s attachment styles can be described along two dimensions: anxiety and avoidance.

Individuals who are high in attachment anxiety fear rejection and often worry about whether their partners truly love and care about them. Those high in attachment avoidance feel uncomfortable being close to others, and so they tend to seek emotional distance in their relationships. People high on both dimensions exhibit signs of both attachment anxiety and avoidance (they are concerned both about being rejected and about getting too close), and people low on both dimensions are referred to as “securely attached.”  Securely attached people both see themselves as worthy of love and feel comfortable being close to their partner.

Knowing someone’s attachment style quickly, such as from a glance at their face, could certainly help people understand what kind of person they may be meeting for a first date. So, we conducted two studies to test whether people could identify a stranger’s attachment style based only on facial cues. In two studies, we took pictures of 331 university students posing with neutral facial expressions and also measured each person’s attachment style. These photos were then shown to a group of research participants who rated each person’s level of attachment anxiety or avoidance based only on their photo. We also measured the attachment style of these participants.

Across both studies, we found that participants could identify men’s levels of attachment anxiety and avoidance from their facial appearance better than chance guessing. However, participants were not able to identify women’s attachment anxiety or avoidance above chance.  But why do only men’s faces seem to carry subtle hints about their attachment style?

One possibility is that people’s emotional habits as a result of their attachment style affect their facial appearance. For example, people high in attachment anxiety, who frequently experience negative emotions, may have specific facial cues relating to negative emotionality that hint at their anxious attachment style. But maybe things that many women do to change their appearance—for example, wearing makeup—mask these cues, so these cues are visible only in men’s photos.    

We also found that participants’ own attachment anxiety biased their judgments of others’ attachment styles.  Participants who were more anxiously attached perceived the people in the photos as more anxiously attached.  This bias affects anxiously-attached individuals’ behavior in relationships. People who are higher in anxious attachment may give their partner more care and attention than the partner needs, which may cause the partner to withdraw and confirm the anxiously-attached person’s view that they are unloved.

All in all, our research shows that there are hints of men’s attachment style in their faces. Moreover, people’s own attachment style can bias what kind of partner they think someone else is. Understanding the role that facial appearance and attachment style play in romantic decision-making can provide more insight into how romantic relationships unfold.


For Further Reading

Alaei, R., Lévêque, G. MacDonald, G., & Rule, N. (in press). Accuracy and bias in first impressions of attachment style from faces. Journal of Personality. https://doi.org/10.1111/ jopy.12540.

Alaei, R., & Rule, N. O. (2016). Accuracy of perceiving social attributes. In J. A. Hall, M. Schmid Mast, & T. V. West (Eds.), The Social Psychology of Perceiving Others Accurately (pp. 125-142). Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781316181959.00

 

Isabelle Vanasse Grosdidier is a lab manager in the MacDonald Social Psychology and Research Lab at the University of Toronto.

Ravin Alaei is a medical student at McMaster University. He obtained his PhD in psychology in 2019 from the University of Toronto, working under Dr. Nicholas Rule.

People Who Say They Don’t Need Other People Actually Care about Close Relationships

As human beings, we are all predisposed to relate to other people. We have an inherent desire to form and maintain interpersonal relationships. And we all long to feel accepted and supported by others. Researchers in social psychology refer to this as the need to belong. This need explains why we usually form relationships easily and can be so reluctant to end them, even when they prove to be maladaptive or harmful. The importance of relationships is also evident in the fact the emotions we experience most intensively usually take place within the context of our relationships. Think about the intense happiness you experienced when you started a new romantic relationship or the strong pain you felt when a close friend or lover betrayed you. Studies show that forming and maintaining relationships not only makes us happier, but also benefits our mental and physical health.

If the need to belong is a fundamental human need, we should expect to find it in all individuals without exceptions—in much the same way all people need food and water. However, people with a dismissive avoidant attachment style don’t seem to have a need to belong. People with a dismissive avoidant attachment style are often described as lacking the desire to form or maintain social bonds, and they don’t seem to value close relationships. These people report, for example, that they are comfortable without close emotional relationships and prefer not to depend on others. The mere existence of people who say they don’t need others would seem to cast doubt on the fundamental nature of the need to belong.

But a closer look at people with a dismissive avoidant attachment style shows that their dismissiveness may be a defense against real or imagined separation or rejection. Perhaps people develop a dismissive-avoidant style to prevent the strong negative emotions that result from social rejection. Is it possible, then, that dismissive individuals also have a strong need to belong—but have learned to suppress it as a defense against potential rejection?

To test this idea, we exposed people with a dismissive avoidant attachment style to social success or acceptance, instead of social rejection. The idea behind our studies was simple. If the need to belong is indeed universal, then even individuals who claim not to care about social relationships should feel happy after receiving positive social feedback. In fact, we expected that dismissive individuals might react even more positively to social approval than nondismissive individuals would. If people with a dismissive style feel like they have missed out on the opportunity to satisfy their need to belong, they should be especially sensitive to acceptance. If, on the other hand, dismissive individuals truly don’t care about social relationships, as they claim, then they should respond less favorably to positive social feedback than people without a dismissive attachment style.

In the first study, dismissive and nondismissive students were led to believe that they were participating in a two-part study along with three other students. They began by completing a personality questionnaire that they would exchange with the other students. Among other things, this questionnaire measured their dismissive attachment style. After seeing what they thought were the other students’ questionnaires (which we had actually prepared in advance), they were asked to rank the other three students in terms of how much they would like to interact with them face-to-face in the second part of the study. Those who were ranked highest by all other participants, they were told, would get to choose their interaction partner first. Those who were not ranked highest would be assigned a partner.

Next, half of the students were told that they had received the highest ranking and the other half were told that they were not ranked highest. Then, students completed measures of self-esteem and mood.  The results clearly showed that people with a dismissive avoidant attachment style do care about social approval. After learning that other students had ranked them first as potential interaction partners, dismissive avoidants—who claim they don’t care about social acceptance or belonging—reported higher self-esteem and positive mood than did non-dismissives who got the same positive feedback.

Our second study tested the same idea in a different way. This time dismissive and nondismissive students completed a questionnaire that they were told could assess their levels of a personality trait named “surgency” (which doesn’t really exist). Half the students were told that this personality trait predicts future interpersonal success, with lots of friends and long-lasting, fulfilling romantic relationships. The other half of the students learned that surgency predicts future individual success—that people who score high on surgency often accomplish a great deal, publish books, discover new things, or make contributions to whatever their professions are.

After completing the questionnaire, students received what they thought was their surgency score. These scores were either high or relatively low. After learning their scores, students rated their self-esteem and mood. Once again, people with a dismissive-avoidant style showed that they did care about relationships. Dismissive avoidant students reported higher self-esteem and positive mood than non-dismissives—but only when told that surgency predicts future interpersonal success. In other words, students with a dismissive style were clearly pleased when they were told they possessed a trait that would lead other people to like and accept them.

These two studies showed that people with a dismissive avoidant attachment style may have an even stronger need for acceptance than most other people. People who have dismissive avoidant attachment styles clearly have a need to feel connected to others.  But because they have buried this need under a shell of indifference, it can only be glimpsed by giving them a taste of what all people need and desire most—inclusion and acceptance from others.


For Further Reading

Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 117, 497–529. 

Bartholomew, K. (1990). Avoidance of intimacy: An attachment perspective. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 7(2), 147-178.

Carvallo, M., & Gabriel, S. (2006). No man is an island: The need to belong and dismissing avoidant attachment style. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 32(5), 697-709.

 

Mauricio Carvallo is an associate professor at the University of Oklahoma who studies attachment, social perception, the self, close relationships, and discrimination.

Shira Gabriel is an Associate Professor at SUNY Buffalo, the Editor of the journal Self & Identity, and an Associate Editor of the SPSP Character and Context blog.

The Appeal of Sexism to the Romantically Insecure

Although gender equality has come a long way, many people still hold sexist beliefs, such as believing that women are malicious and seek power over men (hostile sexism) or that women ought to be cherished and protected by men (benevolent sexism).

Both hostile and benevolent sexism are considered “sexist” because they help to maintain gender inequality. In fact, despite the romantic tone of benevolent sexism, it can have particularly negative consequences for women. For example, people who agree with benevolent sexism tend to behave in patronizing ways that undermine women’s opportunities for success.

One understudied question involves how sexism is shaped by people’s romantic relationships. In particular, we wondered whether sexist beliefs are related to people’s insecurities about romantic attachment.

There are two basic types of emotional tendencies that people may display within their romantic relationships. Some people have a good deal of anxiety about whether their romantic partners care enough about them. Psychologists would say that people who worry a lot that their partner will leave them are high in attachment anxiety

Other people worry about becoming too emotionally close to their romantic partners. Although they want to be close to their partners, they worry about being too dependent on them and would prefer to have more emotional distance in their relationships. Psychologists would say that these people are high in attachment avoidance.

To study how these two types of attachment insecurity—attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance—might be related to sexism, we asked other researchers for data that included measures of heterosexual people’s attachment styles (both attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance), as well as measures of their sexist beliefs (both hostile and benevolent sexism). We gathered 22 datasets, comprising 4,860 people in all.  We then tested how people’s attachment styles related to  their sexist beliefs. Our results showed that men and women who were higher in attachment anxiety—those who worried about not being loved sufficiently—tended to agree more with both hostile sexism and benevolent sexism. In other words, the more that people worry about not being sufficiently loved, the more likely they are to believe that women want power over men, as well as to believe that women need to be taken care of. 

Our findings for attachment avoidance—worries about being too dependent on one’s partner—were a little more complicated. Here we found a relationship between attachment avoidance and sexist beliefs for men but not for women. Men who were higher in attachment avoidance rejected benevolent sexism more than men who were less concerned about being too dependent. In other words, the more that men wanted to be close to their romantic partners without being too dependent on them, the less likely they were to believe that women needed to be protected and taken care of.

What about hostile sexism and avoidance? Here we found a connection just for men who were in committed romantic relationships. Specifically, men who worried more about being too dependent on their partner and were in romantic relationships were more likely to believe that women want power over men.

In some ways this was our most striking finding: Men who worry about being too dependent on others and are in romantic relationships tend to be higher in hostile sexism than single men with similar worries about dependence.

Our research is consistent with the idea that one reason people hold sexist beliefs is because they want to be loved and worry about being rejected by their romantic partner. Therefore, our research suggests that to understand gender inequalities fully, we need to consider both inequality at a societal level as well as the way people vary in their relationship needs.


For Additional Reading:

Fisher, M. I., & Hammond, M. D. (2019). Personal ties and prejudice: A meta-analysis of romantic attachment and ambivalent sexism. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 45(7), 1084-1098. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167218804551

Hammond, M. D., & Overall, N. C. (2017). Dynamics within intimate relationships and the causes, consequences, and functions of sexist attitudes. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 26(2), 120-125. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721416686213

Hart, J., Hung, J. A., Glick, P., & Dinero, R. (2012). He loves her, he loves her not: Attachment style as a personality antecedent to men’s ambivalent sexism. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38, 1495-1505. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167212454177

Glick, P., & Fiske, S. T. (2001). An ambivalent alliance: Hostile and benevolent sexism as complementary justifications for gender inequality. American Psychologist, 56, 109-118. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.56.2.109
 

Molly I. Fisher is a doctoral candidate in Psychology at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. She is interested in how sexist attitudes influence the way people seek support from those around them. 

Matthew D. Hammond is a Lecturer in Psychology at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. His research examines how people’s endorsement of sexist attitudes influences and are influenced by interpersonal processes.

I, You, or We: Pronouns Provide Hints to Romantic Attachment Styles

Sometimes people wish they had greater insight into how their partner really feels. Recent work in social and personality psychology dives into the stories people tell about their romantic relationships, and finds that those prone to avoidant attachment, are less likely to use the word “we” when talking about these relationships.

The results appear in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

“The pronouns individuals use when narrating their previous experiences from within their romantic lives provide a clue as to their corresponding attachment styles,” says Will Dunlop (University of California, Riverside), lead author of the research.

Typically, attachment styles are represented by two factors – anxiety (reflecting the degree to which an individual is preoccupied with, and fears losing, his or her romantic partner) and avoidance (reflecting the degree to which an individual feels uncomfortable getting close to, and depending upon, his or her partner).

Dunlop and colleagues reviewed over 1400 observations drawn from seven studies, and then explored relations between adult romantic attachment styles and pronoun use.

They found that both anxious and avoidant attachment styles correlated positively with I-talk and negatively with we-talk, but once they accounted for participants’ demographics and personality traits, the correlation for anxious attachment and pronoun use was no longer significant. But for avoidant attachment types, the lack of the use of “we” talk held strong.

Dunlop suggests that the way individuals describe their romantic experiences could offer insights into how that person might behave and interact in romantic relationships as well.

“Anxious and avoidant attachment styles capture individual differences in the ways people think, feel, and behave in romantic relationships," says Dunlop. "Given that those with higher levels of avoidant attachment were found to demonstrate lower levels of we-talk when describing experiences from their romantic lives, considering the use of we words (e.g., us, ours) in the disclosure of previous romantic experiences may offer indication of one’s avoidant tendencies. This is a relatively novel and indirect way of gauging avoidant attachment, as individuals are typically unaware of the pronouns they use.”

For future research, Dunlop is curious as to the clues narratives from other domains (e.g., one’s professional life) may offer for attachment and other markers of adjustment. He also wonders what link, if any, there may be between the pronoun use and people’s overall love life satisfaction.


Study: Dunlop, W. L., Karan, A., Wilkinson, D., & Harake, N. (2019). Love in the First Degree: Individual Differences in First-Person Pronoun Use and Adult Romantic Attachment Styles. Social Psychological and Personality Sciencehttps://doi.org/10.1177/1948550619847455

The Ebbs and Flows of Attachment Insecurity

Consider the following relationship scenario: Jamie and Sam are in a committed and loving relationship. Jamie has always thought of Sam as a supportive, loving, and dependable partner. Recently, however, Jamie has been experiencing doubts about their relationship – there are times that Jamie feels secure in their relationship, but there are other times that Jamie questions where she can truly rely on Sam and feels insecure in their relationship. This relationship scenario is not uncommon. Relationships often feel turbulent and tumultuous.

What consequences might relationship ‘ups and downs’ have for peoples’ relationship satisfaction? Are some individuals more susceptible to the potential impact of relationship fluctuations? A study recently published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology explored these questions by examining the prevalence and consequences of peoples’ fluctuations in their attachment security towards their current intimate partner.

Attachment Security: Developmental History and Future Expectations

Attachment security is one of the most well-studied individual differences in relationship research. According to attachment theory, peoples’ early life experiences with caregivers provide the foundation of how people expect to be treated in their close relationships. People high in attachment anxiety have had caregivers who have provided them with inconsistent care, and so worry about whether their loved ones truly care about them. People high in attachment avoidance have experienced constant rejection from caregivers, and so distance themselves from others in order to avoid being hurt again. People who are low in attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance are considered ‘secure’. Secure individuals have had consistent and responsive caregiving and feel comfortable and safe in close relationships.

So how do these attachment histories impact peoples’ expectations about the future of their current intimate relationships? Unsurprisingly, Girme and colleagues found that secure people (who were low in attachment anxiety or attachment avoidance) expected their current relationships to be more stable and consistent in the future (Study 1). But if secure individuals expect their relationships to be stable, what happens when secure people experience inconsistencies (or fluctuations) in their feelings of relationship security (like with Jamie’s feelings about her partner Sam)?

Prevalence and Consequences of Within-Person Fluctuations in Attachment Security

In order to assess how common fluctuations in attachment security really are, and the impact that greater fluctuations have on relationships, Girme and colleagues asked people to report on their attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance towards their current relationship partner multi-times across a year (Study 2) or two years (Study 3). Although the longstanding view in the attachment literature has been that peoples’ attachment insecurities remain relatively stable over time, Girme and colleagues found that most people tend to experience quite dramatic and significant fluctuations in their attachment security towards their intimate partner over time.

When secure people experienced greater fluctuations in their attachment anxiety or attachment avoidance, their relationship satisfaction declined over time. The authors argue that the ups and downs in attachment security violate secure individuals’ expectations of having a stable relationship, which undermines their relationship wellbeing.

Interestingly, although insecure people (who were high in attachment anxiety or attachment avoidance) were more unsatisfied in their relationships, experiencing greater fluctuations in attachment security did not have a strong impact on insecure peoples’ relationship satisfaction. This is likely because insecure people expect relationships to be turbulent and inconsistent, and so are less fazed when confronted with ups and downs in their relationships.

Attachment Security: A Dynamic and Flexible System

Contradictory to long-standing views, attachment security is not as stable as we once thought. People’s relationship-specific attachment security is dynamic and flexible. Although secure people may be more susceptible to greater fluctuations in their felt security, it appears the ups and downs in attachment security are an adaptive process – they reflect important changes in peoples’ relationship environment. Understanding how peoples’ expectations help brace them for the inevitable ups and downs in relationships may shed light on how couples, like Jamie and Sam, can grow together and build even stronger relationships through the ebbs and flows of attachment-related experiences.


Written by: Yuthika U. Girme, Assistant Professor, Simon Fraser University.

Yuthika Girme is an Assistant Professor at Simon Fraser University. Her primary research goals involve identifying the ways people can effectively provide support and generate closeness in their romantic relationships. Her research focuses on how contextual factors and partners’ relationship insecurities can help explain when providing support can be beneficial or costly.

Journal Article: Girme, Y. U., Agnew, C.R., VanderDrift, L. E., Harvey, S. M.,  Rholes, W. S., & Simpson, J. A. (2018). The Ebbs and Flows of Attachment: Within-Person Variation in Attachment Undermine Relationship Wellbeing across Time. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 114, 397-421.

Psychologists Say Our ‘Attachment Style’ Applies to Social Networks Like Facebook

A new investigation appearing this week in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin suggests a strong association between a person’s attachment style — how avoidant or anxious people are in their close relationships — and their perception and management of social networks like Facebook.

“Attachment style, thought to play a central role in romantic and parent-child relationships, was found to also play a role in people’s broader social network of friends,” said Omri Gillath, professor of psychology at the University of Kansas, who headed up the research. “The findings show you can predict the structure of people’s social networks and the way people manage their networks from their personality.”

Gillath and co-authors Gery Karantzas of Deakin University in Australia and Emre Selcuk of Middle East Technical University in Turkey focused on a specific personality trait — attachment style — which varies from one person to another.

“Attachment theory describes how people are creating bonds in their lives,” said Gillath, who studies close relationships and their underlying mechanisms. “Attachment style is basically a relationship style. It’s the way we think, feel and behave in our close relationships. It’s known to affect relationship processes and emotion regulation. People can be secure or insecure — and if they are insecure, anxious or avoidant in their attachment style.”

Gillath said those with an insecure attachment style have issues relating to trust and closeness.

“If you’re high on attachment avoidance, you’re trying to avoid intimacy and tend not to trust others — downplaying the importance of emotions and relationships,” he said. “Conversely, if you’re high on attachment anxiety, you’re very concerned with rejection and abandonment and tend to be overwhelmed by emotions. Being low on both— securely attached — associates with long, stable, satisfying relationships.”

The new paper describes four separate studies that lend insight into the interplay between attachment style and how people manage and perceive friendship networks. Participants in the studies first were benchmarked for attachment style, then evaluated for the “tie strength” and “multiplexity” of their friendship networks.

“‘Tie strength’ is how close the ties in your networks are — we asked people to report this in different ways,” Gillath said. “It could be how intimate they feel with people in their network or how frequently they interact with these people. ‘Multiplexity’ is how many roles are filled or functions are served by network members. For example, you can be my co-worker, play basketball with me, or we can engage in political activism together. Further, network members can fulfill roles such as instrumental or emotional help, or informational function. The more roles fulfilled and functions served, the higher the multiplexity. The higher the tie strength and multiplexity, the more benefits one gains from her network.”

Gillath said the study suggests attachment insecurity associates with fewer benefits gained from one’s social network. “We found people high on attachment anxiety or avoidance had weaker tie strength,” he said. “Further, people high on avoidance reported lower multiplexity.”

The researchers also looked at how people manage their networks, including how they initiate, maintain and dissolve ties. “For some people, it’s very easy to, for example, start new relationships, and maintain — or stay in touch — with existing ties,” Gillath said. “For others, it might be much harder, or less likely to happen.”

The KU researcher and his colleagues found attachment style also predicted these tendencies. For example, people high on attachment avoidance were less likely to initiate and maintain, and more likely to dissolve network ties.

“Surprisingly, people high on anxiety were expected to be less likely to dissolve ties — they’re often concerned about being rejected or abandoned and want to merge with their relationship partners, which made us think they would be less likely to dissolve ties,” Gillath said. “However, they were found to report higher tendency for dissolution than nonanxious people.”

Gillath said due to their high levels of concern and desire to merge with others, anxiously attached people may end up pushing members away.

“Network members may feel smothered and dissolve the ties,” he said.

In other words, anxious people reported that other network members are dissolving ties with them, whereas avoidants reported on dissolving ties with others. Either way, insecure people were higher on tie dissolution than secure people.

“To obtain these data, we asked participants to report on the number of their friends, how close they were with friends and the roles their friends fulfilled,” Gillath said. “This is something you can’t just look at one’s Facebook page and figure out.”

Another interesting finding has to do with the size of a person’s social network.

“We found the more friends you have in your network, the lower your tie strength and multiplexity — size dilutes the quality of your networks ties,” Gillath said.

In another aspect of the study, the authors used “primes” to boost participants’ attachment security, finding it made people more likely to initiate social ties and less likely to dissolve them (for the latter, especially among those high on avoidance or anxiety). Security priming also improved people’s maintenance of relationships on social networks, especially among people high on attachment anxiety or low on attachment avoidance.

“If you want to establish causality you have to engage in experimentation, and priming is the way we did it,” Gillath said. “There are different ways to enhance attachment security. You can ask participants to think about a relationship that made them feel secure or an event that made them feel loved or supported. You can also expose them to specific words like ‘love’ or ‘hug.’ Once we do that, we want to see if that changes how people think about network management and, in turn, how that affects network characteristics. We found that priming indeed influenced management in that it made people more likely to initiate and less likely to dissolve ties. This, in turn, leads to higher tie strength and multiplexity.”

The researchers said these findings suggest that attachment security leads to better management and more beneficial outcomes people could gain from their social networks.

“There are many things that can be bad about social networks, if you tend to search for hours on your exes and do Facebook lurking and are not involved in relational process — that can lead to jealousy and all kinds of negative emotions,” he said. “However, if you’re using your social networks for fulfilling or serving your attachment needs — such as a secure base or safe haven — that’s likely to result in positive outcomes.” 


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Psychology of Parenthood Tip Sheet

May and June seem to revolve around family in the United States, with Mother’s Day on May 14th and Father’s Day on June 18th. The end of the school year and star of summer months can also signal families spending more time together.  Discover what social and personality psychology can show us about the close relationship dynamics of parents and parenthood in this month’s SPSP tip sheet.

Experts

Personality change and parenthood

Wiebke Bleidorn
Associate Professor, University of California, Davis
http://pclab.ucdavis.edu/

Professor Bleidorn examines the conditions, mechanisms, and consequences of personality change. Her current research involves questions about the cultural and social conditions under which people change, the genetic and environmental mechanisms that account for change, and the consequences of these changes for psychological functioning and important life outcomes.

Parenthood, Couple’s Relationships, & Children’s Development

Galena Rhoades

Research Associate Professor and Associate Clinical Professor, University of Denver
Phone: 303-871-4280
https://portfolio.du.edu/grhoades

Dr. Rhoades research is on romantic relationship development and functioning, and the related implications for children and adults. Her research projects and collaborations include studies of cohabitation, mechanisms of change in couple interventions, infidelity, spouses' perceptions of one another, relationship processes and psychopathology, as well as adolescent adjustment.

From the Journals

Stability and Change in Self-Esteem During the Transition to Parenthood Wiebke Bleidorn, Asuman Buyukcan-Tetik, Ted Schwaba, Manon A. van Scheppingen, Jaap J. A. Denissen, Catrin Finkenauer. Social Psychological and Personality Science, vol. 7, 6: pp. 560-569. , First Published April 29, 2016.

Bleidorn and colleagues show changes in self-esteem affect mothers more than fathers after the birth of the first child. These changes are most notable in the year after the child is born, and result in lasting declines among mothers’ self-esteem.

The Costs of Suppressing Negative Emotions and Amplifying Positive Emotions During Parental Caregiving Bonnie M. Le, Emily A. Impett Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, vol. 42, 3: pp. 323-336. , First Published February 10, 2016.

How do parents feel when they regulate their emotional expressions in ways that do not match their genuine feelings? Research suggests that parents’ attempts to suppress negative and amplify positive emotions during childcare can detract from their well-being and high-quality parent–child bonds.

Understanding When Parental Praise Leads to Optimal Child Outcomes: Role of Perceived Praise Accuracy Hae In Lee, Young-Hoon Kim, Pelin Kesebir, Da Eun Han. Social Psychological and Personality Science, First Published December 22, 2016.

Parents and teachers praise children, but too much or too little praise can have negative effects. In this study, researchers show the importance of basing praise of children on actual performance and the need to pay careful attention to how praise is perceived by the child.

Parents Reap What They Sow: Child-Centrism and Parental Well-Being Claire E. Ashton-James, Kostadin Kushlev, Elizabeth W. Dunn Social Psychological and Personality Science, vol. 4, 6: pp. 635-642. , First Published March 14, 2013.

Ashton-James and colleagues show that link between child-centrism and well-being stands in contrast to recent arguments about the pitfalls of overinvestment in children. Their results dovetail with a growing body of evidence that personal well-being is associated with investing in others rather than oneself.

In Case You Missed It

How Asian American 'Tiger Mothers' Motivate Their Children

Researchers at Stanford University delved deeper into Amy Chua’s ‘tiger mother’ approach, and their research sheds light on key fundamental differences in parenting methods between Asian Americans and European Americans. - May 2014

A Father's Love is One of the Greatest Influences on Personality Development

A father’s love contributes as much — and sometimes more — to a child's development as does a mother's love. That is one of many findings in a new large-scale analysis of research about the power of parental rejection and acceptance in shaping our personalities as children and into adulthood. -  June 2012.

The Skills that Make Us a Good Partner Make Us a Good Parent 

Being a good partner may make you a better parent. The same set of skills that we tap to be caring toward our partners is what we use to nurture our children, researchers found. However, the researchers found that how you care toward your partner does not relate to how your partner behaves as a parent. – December 2012


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With over 7500 members, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) is the largest organization of social psychologists and personality psychologists. SPSP's mission is to produce and disseminate knowledge about personality and social psychology, facilitate the careers of students and professionals, and recognize and promote achievements in personality and social psychology.