Personality, Attachment, and Control Lab

BACKGROUND. I have been examining how people mentally represent their most important relationships, and how these representations affect subjective experience and behavior. Key aspects of such mental representations are likely to be evaluative processes that help individuals quickly and effortlessly assess their environments and one’s self on basic dimensions (Bowlby, 1969, pg. 105): Are other people supportive or cold, dependable or unreliable? Am I likeable or unlikable, worthy or unworthy, able or unable? Given that such evaluative processes are assumed to operate, for the most part, automatically, without effort or intention, and at times outside of individuals’ conscious awareness (Bowlby, 1969; Crowell & Treboux, 1995), I have developed and validated (Zayas & Shoda, 2005) a version of the Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998) designed to assess automatic reactions elicited by a specific individual. In contrast to self-report measures that rely on people being aware and truthfully reporting their feelings, the IAT is a reaction time measure that assesses automatic reactions to thoughts of significant people that occur instantaneously and can be considered "gut"-like. The mother-IAT, for example, assesses the extent to which thoughts about one’s mother automatically activate thoughts of supportiveness and warmth (versus thoughts of rejection and indifference).
FINDINGS. Individuals for whom thoughts of their romantic partner most strongly activated positive reactions reported greater satisfaction in their relationship, greater emotional commitment, and more positive expectations about the future of their relationship. In contrast, individuals for whom thoughts of romantic partner only weakly activated positive thoughts reported less satisfaction, emotional commitment, and positive expectations. With regard to attachment security, individuals for whom thoughts of one’s partner most strongly activated positive reactions also reported greater security in their adult romantic relationships. In contrast, people for whom thinking about their partner elicited only weak positive reactions reported greater feelings of insecurity. Such findings support the long-standing assumption that key cognitive and affective processes underlying feelings of attachment security are mental representations of others, particularly, the extent to which such mental representations automatically activate positive reactions. Perhaps the most intriguing finding involved the mother-IAT, which was designed to assess automatic reactions elicited by one’s mother. Individuals who showed stronger automatic supportive associations with one’s mother were more likely to report greater feelings of security with an adult romantic partner. Most interesting, automatic reactions to thoughts of partner and mother were moderately correlated with one another (r= .5), but explicit attitudes towards mother and partner assessed through self-reports were not (r= .01). Thus, at an implicit (i.e., automatic) level, there was a clear relation between positive reactions to partners and mothers, but at an explicit (i.e., conscious) level, there was little evidence supporting this link. These results are consistent with the idea derived from attachment theory that representation of one’s mother, which presumably formed early in life, serves as a “template” from which representations of subsequent relationships, such as with adult romantic partners, are formed (Bowlby, 1969).
CURRENT PROJECTS. Several current and future projects are direct outgrowths of this research. First, using a longitudinal design, I am currently working to identify developmental precursors to such reactions; for example, do early life experiences predict automatic reactions elicited by the mental representation of ones’ mother? This research is also examining how early life experiences relate to cognitive control processes in adulthood. A second research project is examining the extent to which such evaluative processes generalize to other people; for example, does a person who automatically evaluates his partner positively also have strong positive reactions to close friends, colleagues, an unknown person on the street?

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