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[TikTok Clip] woman: Avoiders may try to dislike you in order to stop being anxious or pushy.
[CLIP: Opening music]
[TikTok Clip] Man: In the defense of people with avoidant attachment styles. Could you be more considerate?
Sheila Love: If you use social media and are interested in psychology, relationships, or dating, you can’t help but be attacked by so-called attachment styles.
So, do you have an “avoidant” or “anxious” attachment? If all your actions in relationships, and even your personality, seem to be tied to these types. , this issue becomes urgent.
I’m Sheila Love.what you are hearing Scientific Americanof Science, quickly.
We’ve talked about what it’s like to fall in love, and today we’re going to delve into the infamous style of attachment. Where do attachment styles come from and what is the true meaning of dating, falling in love and having a healthy relationship.
[CLIP: Ending music]
Love: I feel like I’m bragging, but when I took the attachment style quiz, I was told that I had a solid attachment style.
Amir Levine: Over the years, I have learned to truly value and appreciate the securities of this world. we tend to overlook them.
Love: Amir Levine, co-authored with Rachel Heller, Attachment: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Helps Find and Maintain Love, That’s where a lot of the new focus on attachment style came from. Amir sings the praises of those who persist.
Levine: They have a flair for relationships. Because they show up all the time, they’re always there, and there’s not much drama.we see them less and tend to focus [situations] When there is more conflict in our lives.
Love: By “fight,” he means other Style: Anxiety, Avoidance, Confusion. Simply put, people with avoidant attachments move away from intimacy.
Levine: Are they shy or trying to run away? Would you like to
Love: Anxious people, on the other hand, fear that their partner doesn’t love them, read every little text or lack of text as proof of that, and need a lot of reassurance.
Levine: How sensitive are they to changes in the availability of others?
Love: And people with disorganized attachments have a little bit of both. But where do these categories come from?They were described by psychoanalyst John Bowlby and psychologist Mary Ainsworth in the 1950s and his 1970s as the different kinds of things babies form for their caregivers. It stems from studies done on different types of attachment. But it wasn’t until his 1987 that the researcher applied these patterns to adults and their romantic lives.
philip shaver: Looking at Ainsworth’s work on attachment patterns in infants, our first insight was that the young adults we were studying had similar dynamics or similar properties.
Love: It was Philip Shaver, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California, Davis, who, along with then-graduate student Cindy Hazan, first asked whether children’s attachment theories were applicable later in life. I got
shaver: At that time, I created a questionnaire to capture the three patterns Ainsworth spoke of.
Love: At the time, their research was unfunded and was little more than speculation that adults could fall prey to these attachment styles.
shaver: actually take the first survey rocky mountain news.
Love: This was in 1985. About 1,200 responded within a week.Researchers analyzed the first 620 responses in a study published in 1987 and found that people bottom Sort into broad categories of anxiety, avoidance, or safety. That research has now been cited thousands of times.
shaver: What we used to see as highly speculative, volatile, etc. has turned into this monster.
Love: Has Philip ever seen TikTok about his attachment style?
shaver: I have never seen social media. i don’t pay attention to it. 5:40-5:45
Love: The hashtag #attachmentstyle currently has over 731 million views on TikTok, and perhaps for good reason. If you are in the world trying to meet people, be aware that some people avoid relationships and are terrified of intimacy, some are really worried about it, and some feel both. prize.
[TikTok Clip] Please, avoidant babes need as much love and understanding as insecure cuties.
Amir learned about attachment theory while doing a Child and Adolescent Psychiatry residency to help mothers with post-traumatic stress disorder connect better with their children.and when he was going through a breakup.
Levine: I didn’t know how to avoid it. Also, why would you want to keep your distance if it feels too close? You want to be with me.”
Love: This approach allowed Levine to understand partners’ avoidant and anxious responses to love.
Levine: I really experienced it as a revelation, a personal revelation. It really helped me understand all the different things that were going on in failed relationships and breakups.
Love: But of course, the widespread dissemination of psychological theories can lead to distortions. Online, attachment styles are treated as strict categories. You are either ‘avoidant’ or ‘anxious’. I had a friend who, when talking about dating, said: he is an evader. However, attachment styles are not as fixed as one might think.
Levine: Now they call it more “Attachment Orientation”.Do you get it [as] More continuum.
Love: There are no “types”, but a person can land in various locations along the four quadrants.
Levine: It may fall into a particular quadrant. Most of the time people fall into the same quadrant.
Love: But perhaps the biggest misconception about adult romantic attachment styles is that they are not directly related to how we are treated by our parents or our childhood attachment styles.
Levine: If anything, there is a very weak correlation. Research doesn’t support it at all.
Love: How we relate to each other comes from a variety of sources: friends, family, teachers, bosses, and all the people we have had relationships with throughout our lives. There is also a strong genetic and environmental component. And then there are the epigenetic influences, as studied by Sarah Merrill, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of British Columbia, of how social relationships during childhood alter gene expression.
Sarah Merrill: DNA methylation, a methyl group tag on DNA, can act as a biomarker of what is already happening in the DNA, or even change function in terms of how genes are transcribed.
Love: Most importantly, attachment styles are not fixed.
Levine: The reason I see this whole field so promising is that people can really change their attachment styles.
Merrill: I would argue that DNA methylation is also dynamic and not fatalistic.
Love: Adapting to a particular attachment style may not last forever. Within 4-5 years, 30% of people change their attachment style. And while a person may have a common attachment style, they find relationships where that style doesn’t express themselves.
Merrill: Even if their expectations of a relationship with that person or other person are characterized primarily by avoidance behavior and expectations, the relationship itself is safe.
Love: Avoidant or anxious attachment styles are not pathologies, even though they are talked about online. they are not mentally ill.
Levine: please think about it. For example, 25% of the population is avoidant. Not all 25% are pathological. In fact, there are studies that show that avoidance can actually be advantageous. And sometimes being anxious can be advantageous.
Love: So why is attachment style the darling of the internet?
Steve Lache: Basically, I saw the internet talking about Myers Briggs and the internet talking about astrology in the same way.
Love: Steve Rathje is a New York University psychologist who creates psychological content for TikTok. His attachment style has much in common with other personalities his metrics. Because attachment styles make it easy to label people. And people like it.
Rachet: On the internet, “I’m an INFJ and this is why I act this way” or “This is me an Aries” or “I’m a Capricorn”. It seems that attachment theory was essentially becoming a new version of this.
Love: This may also bring new ways of experiencing attachment styles. Philosopher Ian Hacking wrote about the “loop effect”. This happens when naming a behavior such as avoidant attachment leads people to label themselves with that name. People may then change their view of themselves and change their behavior to fit that label.
Rachet: What we know from previous research is that it’s often the most controversial, most controversial, or most surprising thing that goes viral. Takes on attachment theory that you might see, or ones you think are going viral, can sometimes seem like more extreme versions. not necessarily.
Love: There are many other important parts of a relationship besides your attachment style.
Merrill: For example, your ability to communicate has nothing to do with your attachment style. Your willingness to communicate may be related to that, but your ability to do so has nothing to do with your attachment style. Your ability to compromise has nothing to do with your attachment style.
Love: Then there are little things like, for example, compatibility, or whether you and your partner’s lifestyles match…
Merrill: Your morals and values, and all of that, are extremely important to making a relationship work.
Love: So, while there are some general truths to attachment theory, you can’t always find nuanced versions of it online, and caution should be exercised before pinning everything on it.
Rachet: I think it’s useful for everyone to reflect on who they are and why they are, and think about their childhood and everything. I think what’s harmful is starting to believe that something is scientifically established, or placing undue reliance on inaccurate beliefs.
Love: Please help if you can. But remember, attachment theory is just one of many ways to understand our behavior and emotions.
In the next episode of Love and Brain:
[CLIP: Panda sounds]
Megan Martin: She kept going to his side of the pen — and, you know, calling him to check in on him.and [it] felt like one of the very unhappy people Romeo and Juliet– a type of story or something. [Laughs]
Love: The story of Romeo and Juliet the pandas. Is it possible for animals to fall in love in the same way that humans do?
science fast Produced by Jeff Dervicio, Turika Bose and Kelso Harper. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith.
Don’t forget to subscribe to Science, Quickly. More in-depth science news, features, podcast and video, Visit ScientificAmerican.com.
for of Scientific American Science, I’m Shayla Love.
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