Abstract

The current study investigated how activation of young adults' attachment schemas influence their social information processing, cognitive attributions, and feelings relating to stressful interpersonal situations with their mothers, fathers, best-friends, and romantic partners. Participants (N = 132, mean age = 24) completed a measure of anxious and avoidant attachment (Brennan et al., 1998), made attributions about self and others in response to stressful interpersonal vignettes, and then were given a recall task. Hypotheses were guided by two models: (1) Schema-Consistent Processing (i.e., attachment style should facilitate recall by assimilating belief-congruent information); and (2) Processing Limits (i.e., attachment-related memories should interfere with information processing resources upon activation of similar memories). Consistent with the Schema-Consistent Processing model, those who had higher attachment anxiety recalled themselves more negatively. Three other findings were not consistent with either processing model: (a) females who were lower on attachment avoidance recalled more feelings; (b) participants who were more avoidant tended to recall a greater number and more emotionally intense thoughts about self; and (c) the higher the level of attachment anxiety, the less likely one was to recall a combination of positive and negative thoughts about others. The overall pattern of results suggests the need for several processes to explain how internal working models of attachment influence interpretation of negative interpersonal situations.