Holding on & letting go: romantic attachment and fading affect bias

ABSTRACT

The current research examined the phenomenon of fading affect bias – the tendency for affect associated with negative events to fade more than affect associated with positive events – within the context of romantic relationships. Participants recalled and evaluated positive and negative relationship-specific and non-relationship autobiographical events. Participants also completed measures of attachment avoidance and anxiety. Multi-level modeling demonstrated fading affect bias for relationship and non-relationship events, but that affect fade was shaped by attachment orientations. Specifically, higher attachment anxiety, and lower attachment avoidance predicted greater importance of relationship events which predicted lower fading of affective intensity of memories. Thus, attachment anxiety sustained, while attachment avoidance suppressed the affect of relational memories. We discuss implications of these findings for relationship maintenance.

KEYWORDS:

• Autobiographical memory
• attachment
• memory in relationships
• emotions
• fading affect bias

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/723qx/.

Open scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/723qx/.

Notes

1. We included all participants regardless of relationships status because attachment is about person-level stable measures. That is, participants do not need to currently be in a relationship to have different ways of processing relationship-relevant memories.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes on contributors

Matthew T. Crawford

M.T. Crawford is a senior lecturer in the School of Psychology, Victoria University of Wellington.

Matthew D. Hammond

M.D. Hammond is a senior lecturer in the School of Psychology, Victoria University of Wellington

Claire Marsh

C. Marsh is a PhD student in Clinical Psychology, School of Psychology Victoria University of Wellington