Читать книгу The Handbook of Solitude - Группа авторов - Страница 37

People enter social interactions with knowledge and attitudes that they acquired during past interactions with the same relationship partner, or they transfer and apply knowledge and attitudes based on previous relationships (Brumbaugh & Fraley, 2006). These cognitive construals include a person’s goal structure (the goals he or she frequently seeks during social interactions) and knowledge about self and others (beliefs about one’s worth, skills, and efficacy; beliefs about a partner’s likely motives and actions). These construals can bias feelings and behavior during an interpersonal interaction via top‐down, schematic processes that favor attention to and encoding of information that reinforces expectations and encourages the ignoring or dismissal of information that invalidates expectations. More important, these construals are parts or offshoots of a person’s attachment orientation, and they are among the main vehicles by which these orientations would shape relational cognitions, feelings, and behaviors and bias relationship satisfaction and stability.

A host of studies have shown that attachment orientations are associated with the goals that people pursue in interpersonal interactions. Specifically, more avoidant people are more likely to prioritize distance‐related goals, whereas more anxious people are more likely to prioritize closeness‐related goals (e.g., Greenwood & Long, 2011; Van Petegem et al., 2013). For example, in a longitudinal study, Van Petegem et al. (2013) found that anxious attachment among adolescents measured at one time point predicted lower levels of autonomy goals within a family context a year later. In another study, Fraley and Marks (2011) found that avoidant people implicitly preferred distancing in a motor task in which participants were instructed to push or pull a lever in response to lexical stimuli. More avoidant participants were faster to push the lever away from themselves when presented with the word “Mom.”

There is also evidence that people differing in attachment orientations also differ in the way they perceive others. Numerous studies have shown that individuals who score higher on attachment anxiety or avoidance have more negative explicit and implicit views of relationship partners, hold more negative expectations concerning their relationship partners’ behavior, and tend to explain a partner’s hurtful behavior in more negative terms (e.g., Chavis & Kisley, 2012; Collins et al., 2006). For example, Baldwin et al. (1993) examined the cognitive accessibility of expectations regarding a partner’s behavior, using a lexical‐decision task, and found that avoidant people had readier mental access to representations of negative partner behaviors (e.g., the partner being hurtful) than did secure people. In addition, Collins et al. (2006) found that less secure people, either more anxious or avoidant, tended to attribute a partner’s hurtful behavior to the partner’s personality and bad intentions and were more likely to believe that this behavior was likely to destroy the relationship.

Hundreds of studies, summarized in the second edition of our book (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2016), have demonstrated that attachment insecurities, expressed as either anxiety or avoidance, also tend to have detrimental effects on the quality and stability of social and personal relationships during adolescence and adulthood. In both cross‐sectional and prospective studies of both dating and married couples, less secure people have reported lower levels of relationship satisfaction and higher rates of relationship instability (see Mikulincer & Shaver, 2016, for a review). Self‐reports of attachment insecurities have also been associated with friendships characterized by relatively low levels of trust, closeness, mutuality, and satisfaction (e.g., Bippus & Rollin, 2003; Chow et al., 2016; Granot & Mayseless, 2012). Moreover, attachment insecurities reduce the quality and success of flirtation and dating interactions (e.g., McClure & Lydon, 2014; McClure et al., 2010), undermine the quality of interpersonal communication (e.g., Beck et al., 2014; Wegner et al., 2018), and increase the amount and severity of interpersonal conflicts and the reliance on less adaptive ways of managing these conflicts (e.g., Brassard et al., 2009; Creasey, 2014; Overall et al., 2013).

The conclusion that attachment insecurities put people at risk for troubled, unstable relationships is further supported by studies assessing people’s profiles of interpersonal problems (e.g., Bailey et al., 2018; Bartholomew & Horowitz, 1991; and see Hayden et al., 2017, for a meta‐analysis). Attachment anxiety is consistently associated with a higher overall level of interpersonal problems and with notable elevations in problems related to being submissive, exploitable, and overly intrusive/demanding. Avoidant attachment is usually associated with problems related to being overly competitive, cold, and socially withdrawn. In the next section, we turn to experiences of being alone and show that the negative representations of others, interpersonal problems, and low‐quality relationships of insecure people not only make being together difficult and often painful but also bias people’s attitudes toward solitude, interfere with the capacity to be alone, and promote feelings of loneliness.