Adult attachment, working models, and relationship quality in dating couples

THE SUSCEPTIBILITY OF THREE ATTACHMENT STYLE MEASURES TO SOCIALLY DESIRABLE RESPONDING

This study investigated the susceptibility of three popular measures of attachment styles to impression management (other-deception) and unconscious defensiveness (self-deception). Specifically, responses to the Attachment Style Questionnaire, Adult Attachment Scale, and the Relationship Questionnaire were correlated with the Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding. Results indicate that all three measures are, to varying degrees, contaminated by impression management tendencies, while only the Relationship Questionnaire is free from a self-deceptive bias. These results have implications for interpreting responses to several frequently used measures of attachment styles, also for the theoretical issue of whether the avoidance attachment style is based on defensiveness.

Validating the McGill revision of the Depressive Experiences Questionnaire

Research has identified important psychometric differences between the original Depressive Experiences Questionnaire (DEQ; Blatt, D'Affliti, & Quinlan, 1976) and two of its most widely used revisions, which have failed to preserve the degree of between-scale orthogonality routinely observed with the original Dependency and Self-Criticism scales. The purpose of this study was (a) to examine construct validity for the recently developed McGill revision of the DEQ (Santor, Zuroff, & Fielding, this issue), which preserves between-scale orthogonality; (b) to compare the McGill revision of the DEQ with other existing revisions with respect to measures of personality, motivation, and interpersonal relatedness; and (c) to explore the correlates of items that appear to be responsible for maintaining the degree of orthogonality between measures of Dependency and Self-Criticism. Results suggest that (a) the McGill revision of the DEQ offers more valid estimates of the relations among dependency, self-criticism, and other theoretically relevant constructs, such as depressed mood and agreeableness, than other existing revisions and (b) items differentiating Dependency and Self-Criticism assess broad interpersonal orientations that can be characterized as communal or agentic. Results validate the newer McGill scales, further support the utility of the methods used in their development, and provide insights into the differences between Dependency and Self-Criticism.

Adult attachment styles, the desire to have children, and working models of parenthood

College students who had yet to marry and begin a family were asked about their desire to have children and their beliefs and expectations about themselves as parents (Study 1) and the characteristics of their prospective children (Study 2). Persons with more avoidant and anxious-ambivalent models of close adult relationships harbored more negative models of parenthood and parent-child relationships. These findings indicate that working models of parenting and parent-child relationships form well before marriage and the birth of children and that these models are systematically associated with attachment styles in adult relationships. The findings also suggest ways in which insecure attachments between child and parent may be influenced by the caregiver's models of parenting and parent-child relationships.

A New Measure for an Important Construct: The Attachment and Object Relations Inventory

This article describes the development of the Attachment and Object Relations Inventory (AORI). The AORI, a dimensional measure based on factor structure, was developed in response to the psychometric problems typical to attachment style measures that are categorical in nature. Test-retest reliability and internal consistency were high. A factor analysis of the 75 AORI items confirmed the existence of at least 6 factors and explained approximately 50% of the item variance. Convergent and discriminant validity of the AORI was supported through appropriate relationships with measures of depression, anxiety, and personality, and other measures of attachment and object relations.

Implicit personality theory and the five-factor model

The Big Five have not only been identified in ratings of knowledgeable informants, but also in ratings of strangers, in co-occurrence likelihood ratings of traits, in semantic similarity ratings of trait pairs, and in prototypicality ratings of acts for traits. This article describes the shared and distinctive characteristics of correlations among trait ratings and implicit personality theory and reviews studies that compare the structure of memory-based ratings and of on-line behavior counts. Three hypotheses suggested in the literature to account for these correlations are delineated and discussed: an accurate reflection hypothesis, a distortion hypothesis, and an overlap hypothesis. It is concluded that the distortion hypothesis, has been discredited and that an overlap model best accounts for the available evidence. This implies that traits are real and accurately perceived, provided that the judges have the necessary information.