Close relationships strongly affect people’s health and wellbeing. However, anxious expectations of rejection, known as attachment anxiety, and beliefs that romantic partners can’t be trusted, known as attachment avoidance, often undermine relationship happiness. New research from the University of Minnesota's College of Liberal Arts explores how phenomena such as attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance lead to harmful relationship outcomes for romantic partners and their families.
The study, published in Nature Reviews Psychology, was co-authored by Jeff Simpson, a professor of psychology in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota. Simpson co-authored the research with Nickola Overall with the University of Auckland and Paula Pietromonaco with the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
"This paper reviews what is currently known about how people with relationship insecurities tend to have negative interactions with their close family members and how these negative interactions often "spillover" to negatively influence daily interactions with other family members,” said Simpson.
The study found that:
- Romantic attachment insecurities and negative responses that occur during stressful couple interactions frequently "spillover" to impact other types of relationships, such as those between parents and children or co-parenting interactions.
- Partners may be able to contain these spillover processes, reducing the likelihood that romantic attachment insecurities will produce negative outcomes for couples or their families.
- By counteracting expectations of rejection, partner behavior that conveys commitment and trustworthiness can neutralize the destructive responses and poor outcomes typically arising from attachment insecurities.
"This paper presents a new model describing how spillover processes operate across different types of relationships,” said Simpson. “It also reveals how negative spillovers can be stopped, creating more harmony in daily family interactions.”
Moving forward, there is a need for a broader, more integrative approach to understanding how romantic attachment shapes couple and family functioning across more diverse samples of people, and researchers must develop methodological innovations that capture spillover processes across a wider range of couple and family contexts.
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- Social Sciences
- Family and social relationships
