Journal of Research in Personality
Originally Posted: April 3, 2018
New research from SMU psychology professor Nate Hudson shows that healthy attachment within relationships can be improved by having people repeatedly reflect on their close relationships.
- • Participants were repeatedly primed with attachment security across 4 months.
- • As compared with a control group, security priming increased security across time.
- • Priming attachment anxiety repeatedly produced similar results to priming security.
Contemporary models of personality development suggest that state-level changes that are maintained for long periods of time have the potential to coalesce into more enduring trait-level changes. In this research, we explored whether repeatedly increasing participants’ state-level attachment security via priming might educe trait-level changes over the course of four months. Results indicated that both repeated security and anxiety primes were effective in reducing participants’ trait levels of attachment anxiety over time. In contrast, neither prime generally affected participants’ well-being. The fact that both primes had similar results suggests that one “active ingredient” in attachment priming may be reflecting upon close relationships—irrespective of the valence of those relationships. Moreover, our findings are compatible with the notion that repeated or prolonged changes to state-level security have the potential to coalesce into trait-level changes. READ MORE