Research Interests
Enhancing Attachment Security
A Paradigm Shift
People develop expectations about trusting others, comfort with emotional bonds, the desirability (or undesirability) of being close to others, and whether one is valued or loved by others. The normative processes involved in establishing such attachment patterns are well-understood, not only in humans but in many mammals, based on their lived experiences with being nurtured and loved versus hurt or neglected, and being accepted and liked versus rejected or ignored or abandoned. Others exert a powerful influence in how we experience these moments, such as parents in early childhood, close friends and broader peer groups in adolescence, and relationship partners or bonded friends in adulthood.
Adults who have experienced salient moments in which their interpersonal needs have thwarted will tend to exhibit discernible patterns of insecure behavior, thoughts, and emotions:
Attachment anxiety reflects doubts about one’s self-worth and overreliance on others, and attachment avoidance reflects fierce independence, avoidance of emotional bonds, and distrust of others.
A lot is known about how these attachment patterns become established and their detrimental effects on relationships. Chronic attachment anxiety causes people to demand a lot from their partner, which leads to anger and conflict; chronic avoidance causes people to withdraw from their relationship when they need to be engaged and present, which leads to disappointment and distance.
These insecure patterns are studied as if they are immutable, and yet we know from a handful of studies, clinical practice, and our own observations that they can change.
Our lab examines interactions that redirect and reinforce greater attachment security.
Insecurities that have developed from past experiences may be likely to change with new, powerful experiences that contradict the insecure moments that a person has come to expect. Relationship partners often provide attachment bonds, and many partners can also provide powerful experiences that reinforce security. When people experience breakthrough moments – as when anxiously attached individuals important and special in the eyes of others, or avoidantly attached individuals take pleasure in providing effective help to others – partners can be important in amplifying the meaning of these events and ensuring that an insecure person has a strong and positive take-home message from the event. Partners can champion a person’s secure moment and help the person achieve a new understanding about themselves. (This is reasoning that John Holmes developed about interpersonal trust, and Hal Kelley championed in the inferential process that underlies new traits.)
The aim of this research is to identify specific partner actions and insecure-person inferences that trigger increases in attachment security over time.
The Attachment Security Enhancement Model
Our lab has contributed to a paradigm shift focused on adult interactions that disrupt insecure patterns and enhance security. We are testing predictions derived from the Attachment Security Enhancement Model, or “ASEM” (Arriaga, 2018; Arriaga & Kumashiro, 2019), and received support for this research program from the National Science Foundation (BCS-1531226).
The ASEM is a theory about partner behavior and critical moments that address, each, attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance (Arriaga et al., 2018; Arriaga & Kumashiro, 2021). The model looks at attachment processes through an Interdependence Theory lens (Arriaga, 2013).
One part of the model concerns effective responses when a person feels attachment anxiety or avoidance in the moment; effective partner responses protect relationships against strain and conflict when insecurities flare up. “Safe strategies” are partner responses that mitigate momentary anxiety (soothing worries, giving emotional support, providing encouragement and relational reassurance). “Soft strategies” are partner responses that mitigate momentary avoidance (preempting defensiveness or distancing, avoiding emotional pleas or intensity, providing “invisible support”).
A second part of the model concerns critical moment to revise an insecure person’s expectations and mental models that sustain their insecurity. Boosting self-confidence and self-efficacy can be particularly effective in reducing attachment anxiety over time. In a recent study (Arriaga et al., 2021), first-time parents caring for their newborn child reported lower attachment anxiety if they derived reassurance from their partner (a safe strategy). However, partner reassurance did not predict future declines in attachment anxiety. Instead, parents who felt self-efficacy in caring for their newborn became less anxiously-attached one year later, suggesting that newly-formed confidence in an important life domain disrupts and revises the working models that underlie attachment anxiety.
The ASEM also suggests that avoidant individuals become less so through moments that improve their mental models of others, through moments that highlight the benefits of being in a relationship (e.g., Rholes, Eller, Simpson, & Arriaga, 2021).
The broader theme is that people become more secure when they believe that their needs and desires are met by a responsive partner (Rice, Kumashiro, & Arriaga, 2020). But the challenge is to identify the specific processes that target specific features of attachment insecurity. The ASEM offers precisely that type of theory-driven specificity to guide research with transformative potential.
People are quick to accept that physical abuse is harmful, but they have blind spots in noticing the harmful effects of verbal abuse (yelling, name-calling, belittling or humiliating comments) and emotional abuse (e.g., controlling behavior, gas-lighting, turning others against a partner; Capezza & Arriaga, 2008). These blind spots are even more pronounced when people are asked to examine their own relationship and their partner’s abusive behavior.
My research has established that psychological abuse by a partner can cause “invisible harm” – measurable harm that may be misattributed to something other than a partner’s abuse.
One series of studies prospectively tracked women who had reported psychological abuse by their partner (Arriaga & Schkeryantz, 2015). Their level of personal distress increased immediately following new instances of abuse. However, they did not connect their increased distress to events in their relationship. When people are harmed by a partner, they often fail to trace the harm back to the partner.
Partner Aggression and Violence
This disconnect between the actual versus perceived harm from a partner is more likely to occur among people who are highly committed to their relationship.
People who are highly committed predict that they would be devastated if their relationship were to end, even if they are involved with an abusive partner. This turns out to be incorrect. Everyone, regardless of how committed they had been, felt happier than they had predicted they would be, and they felt much happier after their relationship ended than they had been (while in their relationship) to the extent that their partner was abusive (Arriaga, Capezza, Goodfriend, Rayl, & Sands, 2013).
Interestingly, level of commitment and being with an abusive partner are unrelated. However, high levels of commitment to an abusive relationship set into motion a dissonance process: When people seek love, support, and security but instead receive harmful behavior from a partner (Arriaga & Capezza, 2011), what they do next depends on how committed they feel to their relationship.
Highly committed people reconcile the discordant realities of loving someone and being hurt by that same person by downplaying the partner’s abusive behavior – such as suggesting that a partner was merely joking around, or justifying the partner’s behavior (Arriaga, 2002; Arriaga, Capezza, Goodfriend, & Allsop, 2018; Goodfriend & Arriaga, 2018).
Consider, for example, judgments of how severe a partner’s abuse needs to be to end a relationship. People who experienced abuse by a partner for the first time (onset of aggression) immediately shifted their judgment to be more tolerant, but only if they felt strong commitment (Arriaga, Capezza, & Daly, 2016; Study 2). A follow-up experiment confirmed that people tolerate abuse only when it pertains to their own relationship and they feel highly committed (Study 3).
There are rational reasons to continue a relationship. People who express surprise – even disdain and scorn – when a person endures violent behavior by a partner probably have never had a violent partner. The problem is not with those who endure violence; rather it’s that a partner becomes violent against someone who already felt committed. This line of research highlights how conditions that benefit relationships may not necessarily benefit individual partners.
Financial problems, mental health issues, incompatibilities, divergent expectations, boredom, lack of support from peers or family, or other stressors can cause problems. Yet many relationships endure because the partners have a strong sense of commitment that functions to protect against such threats.
What is the opposite of high commitment? It’s not low commitment. Rather, it’s a state of relational doubt, which creates vulnerability to new threats. Consider how people react if they learn something undesirable about a partner; strong commitment shields against such new information, but the same information weakens the relationship of people who feel only moderately committed (Arriaga, Slaughterbeck, Capezza, & Hmurovic, 2007).
Not all romantic involvements transition to committed relationships. The early stages can be smooth-sailing or a rocky road. Ximena Arriaga was an early pioneer in devising methods to study dynamic changes in relationships, reflecting not only what people experience on average but how they vacillate in ways that reflect unpredictability and other meaningful patterns.
Transitioning to a Committed Relationship
The formation of certainty (versus doubt) is depicted in this figure with four hypothetical individuals who evaluate their relationship multiple times over the course of weeks or months. Ann and Bob have ratings across time that average to the same level, as do Pat and Sam. But within each pair, there are differences in the extent that ratings fluctuate; the evaluations of Ann and Pat fluctuate much more than the evaluations of Bob and Sam, which only becomes apparent with multiple assessments that capture meaningful variation over time.
When people vacillate in their relational satisfaction, they struggle to develop the sense of certainty that sustains relationships; even people who are only moderately satisfied with their relationship – but their level of satisfaction is stable across time – are more likely to have a lasting relationship than people with higher but vacillating satisfaction (Arriaga, 2001).
Similarly, people who feel uncertain about their partner’s commitment to the relationship – their perceptions of the partner’s commitment vacillate across time – tend to have relationship that end (Arriaga, Reed, Goodfriend, & Agnew, 2006). In short, it is the stability of perceptions, as much as whether the perceptions are very positive or only moderately positive, that forms the basis of certainty and strong commitment.
These papers contributed centrally to understanding vulnerabilities in relationships and revealed that the absence of high commitment often points to doubt rather than low commitment. More broadly, the analysis of fluctuations provided a new approach for studying meaningful temporal dynamics in relationships, which became generative of new research directions for other scholars.