Mastery matters most: How mastery and positive relations link attachment avoidance and anxiety to negative emotions

Abstract

Attachment avoidance and anxiety are associated with negative emotions. However, the mechanisms underlying these associations are not fully understood. We investigated environmental mastery and positive relations with others as two mechanisms behind the attachment–emotion link in a sample of 343 adults. As predicted, attachment avoidance and anxiety were related to greater fear, hostility, envy and depression through lower mastery. Contrary to our hypothesis, positive relations mediated only the attachment–depression link. In addition, by adopting a moderated mediation approach, we were able to show that mastery mattered most for individuals high on avoidance: The indirect effect of avoidance through lack of mastery on fear, hostility and depression (but not on envy) increased with higher avoidance scores. Contrary to our predictions, poor relationships did not matter more as sources of negative emotions as anxiety increased. These findings underscore that the emotional life of avoidantly attached individuals is especially jeopardised by poor mastery.

Keywords:

• Attachment
• Environmental mastery
• Fear
• Hostility
• Envy
• Depression

Acknowledgements

We want to thank our participants for devoting time and energy to this project and our research assistants Friederike Krusch, Fabian Löwenbrück and Monika Verbalyte, who did a wonderful job running the study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ As our study also included the Rosenberg Scale as a measure of self-esteem, we conducted an additional regression analysis with self-esteem as outcome. We found a significant interaction between avoidance and environmental mastery in predicting self-esteem, B = 0.12, β = 0.07, p = .042 (the association between mastery and self-esteem became stronger with greater avoidance). There was no interaction between anxiety and positive relations, B = 0.01, β = 0.01, p = .727.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Cluster “Languages of Emotion” at Freie Universität Berlin, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) as part of the German Excellence Initiative.