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Emotional extremes and attachment in conflictual romantic relationships
Abstract
Three studies explored people's experience of intense emotion in conflictual and non-conflictual romantic relationships. All studies showed that when subjects reported how they generally experienced emotion in their relationship, people in highly conflictual relationships reported equally intense positive emotion and more intense negative emotion than people in non-conflictual relationships. Study 3 also showed that when subjects described their emotional reactions to specific happy times in their relationship, people in more conflictual relationships reported more love and marginally more idealization of their partners than people in less conflictual relationships. There is some evidence that women in high conflict relationships differ from women in low conflict relationships on certain personality variables. High Conflict women score higher than Low Conflict women on preoccupied and avoidant attachment style dimensions, report a more manic love style, are greater sensation seekers, and report a general tendency to experience extreme affect in all aspects of their lives. The relevance of these findings for increasing our understanding of the formation of emotional bonds in conflictual relationships is discussed.
Subject Area
Personality psychology|Social psychology|Womens studies
Recommended Citation
Morgan, Hillary Jean, "Emotional extremes and attachment in conflictual romantic relationships" (1993). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9408317.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9408317