Romantic love conceptualized as an attachment process
Hazan and Shaver's paper is the one that carried attachment theory into adult life. Its proposal is that romantic love is an attachment process of the same kind studied in infants, and that the three patterns observed between children and caregivers have recognisable adult counterparts in how people approach closeness, dependence and the fear of being abandoned. They tested it with a questionnaire, including a newspaper survey, asking people to choose which of three short descriptions best matched their experience of relationships, and found the proportions falling out broadly in line with the infant classifications, along with differences in what people reported about their relationships and about their childhoods. The paper opened the large adult attachment literature. It also began the split this vault records elsewhere, since the self-report measure it introduced overlaps only weakly with the developmental interview. This page describes the argument from public material, because no abstract of the 1987 paper is publicly available.
Hazan and Shaver's paper is the one that carried attachment theory into adult life. Its proposal is that romantic love is an attachment process of the same kind studied in infants, and that the three patterns observed between children and caregivers have recognisable adult counterparts in how people approach closeness, dependence and the fear of being abandoned. They tested it with a questionnaire, including a newspaper survey, asking people to choose which of three short descriptions best matched their experience of relationships, and found the proportions falling out broadly in line with the infant classifications, along with differences in what people reported about their relationships and about their childhoods. The paper opened the large adult attachment literature. It also began the split this vault records elsewhere, since the self-report measure it introduced overlaps only weakly with the developmental interview. This page describes the argument from public material, because no abstract of the 1987 paper is publicly available.
Written from the public account of the argument this paper introduced.
What our sources record
Reproduced as it was written when this source was checked, figures and all.
Study 1 was a mail-in questionnaire printed in the Rocky Mountain News, Denver: 620 self-selected respondents, ages 14 to 82, one forced-choice item. Self-classification came out at roughly 56 per cent secure, 25 per cent avoidant, 19 per cent anxious.
Where we use it
- What the Crib Actually Decides, Why We Care
Reliability of this reference
The link below was matched against the publisher's record on title, first author and year, and all three agree.
The source
https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.52.3.511
DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.52.3.511