In honor of Valentine’s Day, here’s one more article about love, specifically about the psychology of romantic relationships. For 25 years, a group of researchers has been observing 78 people and evaluating the way they experience and express emotions in the context of important relationships. They’ve found links between the subjects’ earliest experiences of attachment and their feelings in later relationships.
The study began when the subjects were babies and has run for 25 years so far; the subjects have been observed at four points in their lives (as babies, in early childhood, in adolescence, and in early adulthood). The researchers have been testing the predictions of John Bowlby’s model of attachment, which describes people’s attachment styles as being secure or insecure (anxious, avoidant, or ambivalent were the “insecure” categories, I believe). Bowlby proposed that our attachment style is partly a product of our interactions with our earliest caretakers, and that it influences subsequent relationships throughout our lives.
The longitudinal study did indeed find correlations between a person’s experience and expression of emotions across the lifespan that’s been studied so far (although the researchers make the point that the attachment style you learn in childhood is only one factor in a complicated situation, so it’s not like it defines your destiny). See this press release from the APA for more information.
Does this provide some sort of empirical evidence for Freud’s theories (shudder)? I mean, Freud was a little crass about it, but doesn’t this study imply that all our experience of adult relationships is shaped by the way we felt about our parents when we were little?
I gather that Freud thought parent-child relationships all more or less followed the patterns he perceived. Attachment theory says that there is a link between your early and later relationships, but doesn’t specify what the content of everyone’s early relationships is likely to have been (as I think Freud did to some extent).