Insecurity, stress, and symptoms of psychopathology: contrasting results from self-reports versus interviews of adult attachment

Abstract

This report was designed to clarify links among self-reports of psychiatric symptomatology, stress, and adult attachment insecurity, as operationalized using measures drawn from both the developmental and social psychological literatures. Based on a sample of 160 college students, this study demonstrated that insecurity reflected in the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) was associated with self-reports of psychiatric symptomatology principally for individuals experiencing high levels of life stress (consistent with a diathesis-stress model) whereas self-reports of attachment-related avoidance and anxiety correlated robustly with psychopathology under conditions of both relatively high and low life stress (consistent with a risk model). Results provide further evidence that social psychological and developmental approaches to the assessment of adult attachment-related variation are associated with domains of adaptation central to Bowlby's account of human development in empirically distinct ways.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 73 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.