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Poster #203 - Adult Attachment and Daily Emotion Regulation: Strategy Selection and Effectiveness

Thu, March 21, 2:15 to 3:30pm, Baltimore Convention Center, Floor: Level 1, Exhibit Hall B

Integrative Statement

Introduction
Attachment influences how one self-regulates own emotions. The selection of emotion regulation (ER) strategies may reflect the broader attachment strategies that have developed to maintain proximity to the attachment figure. For example, anxiously attached individuals often exaggerate their negative emotions to ensure support from important others. Insecurely attached individuals may also lack some skills or psychological resources that limit the effectiveness of their ER. Consequently, they may obtain only limited emotional benefit from using constructive ER strategies (e.g., reappraisal).
Few studies have examined ER and attachment in daily life. Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) can be used to assess emotional experiences and ER multiple times per day. This allows to disseminate the use of ER strategies and their temporal effects on subsequent emotions. However, previous EMA-studies on attachment have not assessed daily ER (e.g., Sheinbaum et al., 2015).
We utilize EMA to examine how attachment orientations predict daily ER strategies and their effectiveness. We focus on strategies of reappraisal, suppression and rumination. First, we hypothesize that the attachment orientations direct one’s daily use of ER strategies: high anxiety predicts rumination; high avoidance predicts suppression; and low avoidance and low anxiety predict reappraisal. Second, we hypothesize that low anxiety and low avoidance foster the effectiveness of reappraisal on subsequent negative emotions.

Sample and methods
Participants were 111 adults (M age = 26; 89% female), recruited from university student population.
Adult attachment was assessed in the beginning of the study using ECR-R (Fraley et al., 2000). The questionnaire assesses attachment anxiety (a=.93) and avoidance (a=.90).
Our EMA-procedure involved 7 daily mobile phone assessments over the period of 7 days. At each assessment, the participants reported their ER and emotions using Likert-scales. Single-item questions assessed the use of reappraisal (“I thought about the situation in a more positive way”), suppression (“I avoided showing my negative emotions”) and rumination (“I thought over and over again about the negative situation and feelings”). Four items assessed negative emotions.
Age, sex and SES were used as covariates in Generalized Estimating Equation.

Results
High attachment anxiety predicted the use of rumination, and low avoidance (but not low anxiety) predicted the use of reappraisal (Table 1). Surprisingly, high avoidance predicted less use of suppression. Attachment anxiety and avoidance did not moderate the effectiveness of reappraisal. Instead, avoidance moderated the effects of rumination: Highly avoidant individuals experienced an especially steep increase in their negative emotions after ruminating (Figure 1).

Conclusions
In daily life, anxiously attached individuals seem to both exaggerate and hide their negative emotions from others. Although these results were only partially hypothesized, they can be understood to reflect attachment strategy that aim to maximize closeness with others. The picture emerging for avoidantly attached individuals was more complex. The low use of suppression and reappraisal may indicate their defensive experience of oneself as highly self-reliant, but emotional vulnerability may become apparent in situations where they ruminate. Finally, reappraisal seem to function similarly among individuals with different attachment orientations, indicating the therapeutic potential of training constructive ER.

Authors