preview

A Long Lasting Impact On Romantic Relationships

Better Essays
Open Document

In the field of developmental psychology, the attachment theory has been a key point to help researchers understand how relationships are formed between people after it was first proposed by Bowlby (1973) such as romantic relationships based on the premise of different attachment styles found (Bartholomew & Horowitz, 1991). However, the results regarding if infancy attachment styles affect adult romantic relationships is mixed, thus the main focus of this paper will be to see that various attachment styles present in infancy does have a long lasting impact on romantic relationships in adulthood. According to Bowlby (1973), all infants own a prepared a built-in psychobiological system that stimulates them to look out for their attachment …show more content…

The secure attachment is defined by people who are willing to be close and depend on people and scoring low on both dimensions (Bartholomew & Horowitz, 1991). Next, the anxious-ambivalent attachment style are those who crave for being close to their partner exaggeratingly and have fears that they would be deserted by scoring high in anxiety but low in avoidance (Bartholomew & Horowitz, 1991). The fearful-avoidant attachment style that crave and dread being close to their partner by scoring high on the anxiety and avoidance dimensions, while the dismissing-avoidant attachment style where they prefer to be independent and uphold emotional distance from their partners and scoring high in avoidance but low in anxiety (Bartholomew & Horowitz, 1991). A study conducted by Waters, Merrick, Treboux, Crowell & Albersheim (2000) involved having a total of 50 Caucasian participants who were first assessed in the Strange Situation when they were 1 year old being interviewed two decades later utilizing the Berkeley Adult Attachment Interview (AAI). It was found that 72 % of the participants possessed the same attachment style that they did when they were 1 year old, showing that attachment styles tend to remain steady in people’s lives (Waters et al., 2000). A strength of the study was that

Get Access