Research Paper about Attachment Style

An attachment style can shape multiple aspects of a person’s life (e.g., likes, dislikes, worries, job career, relationships). In my social psychology class, we briefly discussed this topic, and my professor explained that our experiences shape our attachment style, and with therapy, or other traumatic experiences, they may change over time. 

For my research, I sought out to find a correlation between attachment style and memory. If a person’s attachment style can affect numerous aspects of their personal life, why can it not affect their memory? To find out whether there is one, this essay will consist of multiple sections that look further into this idea. First, I will discuss previous research on the topic, and then, given the information I found formulate my own hypothesis and method to test it. 

Literature Review

A person’s attachment style is typically formed in infancy and childhood. Experiences are shaped by their caregivers or other attachment like figures (Simpson et al., 2010). The treatment and behavior towards the child are the big factor into what kind of attachment they will obtain. 

Securely attached individuals find it much easier to trust, depend, and be intimate with relationships in their life, whether these relationships are platonic or romantic. Less secure individuals may fall under two categories, avoidant or anxiety. Both have their own difficulties they attend to that securely attached individuals do not. Avoidant individuals prefer independence, emotional distance, and psychological autonomy (Simpson et al., 2010). Anxiously attached individuals crave a codependency and emotional closeness, but fret that their partner will hurt them or not meet their needs (Simpson et al., 2010).

 Less securely attached individuals are more likely to create false memories (Simpson et al., 2010). One reason for this is because false memories form in the retrieval process, and people’s experiences and the external forces play a huge factor in how it is recalled (Hudson & Fraley, 2018). Additionally, less secure individuals subconsciously have coping mechanisms that block them from recalling events and situations the way they happened (Cao et al., 2018; Kohn et al., 2011). Other research explains that the way a person recalls arguments can affect their perception they hold for their parents, which this perception is subject to change depending on their attachment style (Dykas et al., 2010). 

As discussed previously, the attachment style a person holds can affect multiple aspects of their life, leading psychologists to wonder how it can affect our memory too. Just as I was curious about the topic, these researchers wondered the same. The purpose of each study was similar in the fact that they wanted to see if there was a correlation between attachment styles and memory, but each study has their own unique approach to memory, i.e., they examine different aspects of memory in relation to attachment style. 

Attachment and Parental Conflict

In this first study, Dykas et al. (2010) were highly interested in adolescent-parental conflict, and how the attachment style both child and parent have may affect their recollection of an argument. They hypothesized that adolescents who hold a less secure attachment would recall the argument with their respective parent more negatively than it occurred. The same was hypothesized about parents, i.e., if the parent had a less secure attachment, they would believe that their adolescent would recall the situation more negatively. Our attachment styles can create perceptions about the respective person whether we realize it or not. If an adolescent has a less secured attachment, they are more likely to hold a negative perception about the other person. These perceptions can create less favorable interactions when they recall an event (Dykas et al., 2010). 

Unlike their original hypothesis, their research shows that if an adolescent is securely attached and has a positive view of their mother, they will remember the event as less negative, and if the adolescent has a less secure attachment, their negative perception will not affect how negative or positive the argument was (Dykas et al., 2010). However, if the adolescent recalled an event with their father, the opposite occurred. Negative perceptions yielded the event as more negative, and positive perceptions did not recall the argument any more or less negative than it happened. 

Attachment and False Memories

In a similar study, Hudson and Fraley (2018) explains that our attachment style can affect how we recall events with our romantic partners. Attachment styles predict errors of emissions, or the discrepancies in recalling an argument (Hudson & Fraley, 2018). They hypothesized that the less securely attached an individual is, the more likely they will be to create false memories with their romantic partner. 

Using a primer, and five different studies, Hudson and Fraley completed their research. The results of the study showed that there was a correlation between a less secured attachment style and the creation of false memories. The main culprit for this is that less secured individuals are more likely to encode memories incorrectly due to commission errors (Hudson & Fraley, 2018). 

Attachment and Negative Memories

The researchers used information found by Bowlby’s 1980 study to create a background for this experiment. Bowlby discovered that individuals with less secured attachments, more specifically anxious individuals, subconsciously utilize a coping mechanism named postemptive suppression when recalling any event or situation. In their experiment, they hypothesized that less secure individuals would utilize postemptive suppression if they had to recall a negative memory. 

Their findings were significant as it supported the idea that individuals with an anxious attachment style utilize this coping mechanism. Additionally, they noted that less securely attached individuals who fall on the spectrum of avoidant attachment either did not have the mental capacity to utilize this mechanism, or they did not attempt to use it (Kohn et al., 2011). Lastly, they also found evidence that self-regulation can prevent the utilization of this mechanism. These findings are extremely significant for future projects with this topic.

Attachment and Romantic Relationships 

Previous research has shown that less secure individuals often perceive their social environments in negative ways (Simpson et al, 2010). They find it extremely difficult to trust and be intimate with those who are close to them. It is also known that their attachment style directly affects their retrieval process. In this study, the researchers were curious in examining self-relevant information and how it affects autobiographical memory. Their hypothesis stated that less secure individuals will recall more negative memories than secure individuals. 

They found that attachment orientations remain stable, and given the circumstances, memories will be distorted depending on how distressed the individual was during the encoding process (Simpson et al., 2010). Individuals do not respond to what happens in an argument with their partner, they respond to what they believed happened, i.e., their inner working model only remembers specific actions even if they never happened (Simpson et al., 2010).

Attachment and Platonic Relationships

Internal working models, also known as IWM’s, are vital in our memory process. IWM’s were the basis for this study, as they sought out to see if there was a causal relationship between IWM’s and episodic memory. In their research, they hypothesized that one, older adults would recall more external details in memory. Secondly, recalling internal details is dependent on the   attachment style the individual has. Lastly, there would be no difference among secure and insecure individuals when completing attachment-irrelevant and imagination tasks (Cao et al., 2018). 

To understand this study better, it is vital to know that the participants had to recall attachment-relevant and attachment-irrelevant scenarios. Subsequently enough, securely attached individuals created more internal memories in both attachment-relevant and attachment-irrelevant cases. Less secure individuals were less likely to recall the events so vividly, as they are more prone to suppressing their memory (Cao et al., 2018).