Each month our editorial team sifts through hundreds of papers and curates notable findings—for practitioners and informed readers who want to stay current with the evidence. Subscribe to the monthly Research Digest for expert analysis and concise summaries of key papers.
This review looked at 13 studies of attachment in people with borderline personality disorder (BPD) or BPD traits. Every study found a strong link between BPD and insecure attachment. The insecure types most often seen were labeled unresolved, preoccupied, and fearful. The authors note that differences in how attachment was…
Attachment theory, described about 40 years ago, explains stable ways people form close bonds. This review sums up brain imaging and cognitive studies that link adult attachment styles (secure, avoidant, anxious, resolved/unresolved) to how people feel about and think about others. It proposes that attachment style shapes quick judgments of…
Researchers ran eight studies to test whether people with an avoidant attachment style (people who feel uncomfortable with closeness) are more likely to be interested in other romantic partners and to be unfaithful. Across the studies, people high in avoidant attachment had more permissive attitudes about infidelity, paid more attention…
Researchers studied 85 married couples (170 people) to see if worries about close relationships (attachment anxiety) link to stress hormones and immune cells. People with higher attachment anxiety had higher saliva cortisol across three days and lower counts of several T-cell types in blood. The study is observational, mostly white…
This review explains attachment theory and temperament and how they relate to parenting. It says infants need close, responsive relationships with caregivers. Parents who respond quickly and appropriately tend to raise securely attached children. Secure attachment is linked with more curiosity, self-reliance, and independence in childhood and often with greater…
This systematic review looked at 37 studies (2,006 people) that used gold-standard interviews to measure adult attachment and objective tests of emotion regulation. It found a clear link between a person’s attachment representation and how they regulate emotions. People with secure attachment showed balanced emotion regulation. Insecure or unresolved attachment…
This study surveyed 393 Italian adults aged 18–62 (219 in stable close relationships and 174 singles) to see how adult attachment styles relate to psychological well-being. People in stable relationships reported higher well-being than singles. Singles were more likely to show attachment traits such as discomfort with closeness, treating relationships…
Researchers surveyed 92 couples about imagined sexual and emotional cheating. They used statistical models and found that how much people saw the cheating as a threat to the relationship was the strongest factor linked to saying they would break up. Forgiveness partly explained that link for both types of infidelity.…
Researchers tested 269 people (about 76% female, median age 21) using a virtual ball-tossing game that simulated social rejection. They measured two kinds of pathological narcissism (vulnerable and grandiose), adult attachment style, and emotional reactivity before and after the rejection. People higher in vulnerable narcissism tended to feel more insecure…
This study looked at people who were left by a partner in the past 6 months (136 people, mean age 30.4). It asked about short-term “dysfunctional” behaviors after a breakup, such as persistent calls or messages, threats, sending unwanted objects, and attempts to defame an ex. People with a secure…
The study measured very early brain responses to emotional and neutral pictures in 119 undergraduate students (91 female, mean age 23.5 ± 3.6). It compared 30 fearful-avoidant people with 32 secure, 28 anxious-preoccupied, and 29 dismissive-avoidant participants. Fearful-avoidant individuals showed patterns in the early ERP components P1 (110–165 ms) and…
The authors developed and tested the Relationship Sabotage Scale (RSS) to measure self-defeating patterns in romantic relationships. They ran three studies with a total of 1,365 English-speaking people from varied gender, sexual, and cultural backgrounds. After initial exploratory analyses, a confirmatory factor analysis supported a final 12-item scale with three…
