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Adults with the anxious–preoccupied attachment style often find themselves in long-lasting, but unhappy, relationships. [70] [71] Anxious–preoccupied attachment styles often involve anxiety about being abandoned and doubts about one's worth in a relationship. These kinds of feelings and thoughts may lead people to stay in unhappy relationships.
Analysis of the ECR and ECR-R reveal that the questionnaire items can be grouped into two dimensions of attachment. One group of questionnaire items deal with how anxious a person is about their relationship. These items serve as a scale for anxiety. The remaining items deal with how avoidant a person is in their relationship.
The anxious-preoccupied attachment style has been associated with a heightened vigilance towards emotionally significant social cues, as evidenced by increased activation in the amygdala during social appraisal tasks. [9] This may contribute to the tendency to be overly concerned about the availability and responsiveness of attachment figures.
Anxious-preoccupied people with anxious-preoccupied attachment tend to be hypervigilant to signs of danger and worry or catastrophize about symptoms. In health care appointments, their narrative is full of intense negative emotion but is relatively sparse in the specific detail desired by health care providers.
In adulthood, they hold a positive model of self and others, therefore, feeling comfortable with intimacy and autonomy. On the contrary, adults who develop a fearful-avoidant internal working model (negative self, negative others) construct defense mechanisms in order to protect themselves from being rejected by others.
For example, if the sight of a snake in a movie scene triggers someone to have a full-blown panic attack, or if someone goes to great lengths to avoid a snake-themed ride at an amusement park, or ...
A child with the anxious-avoidant insecure attachment style will avoid or ignore the caregiver – showing little emotion when the caregiver departs or returns. The child will not explore very much regardless of who is there. Infants classified as anxious-avoidant (A) represented a puzzle in the early 1970s.
Like dismissive-avoidant adults, fearful-avoidant adults tend to seek less intimacy, suppressing their feelings. [ 8 ] [ 121 ] [ 122 ] [ 123 ] According to research studies, an individual with a fearful avoidant attachment might have had childhood trauma or persistently negative perceptions and actions from their family members.