Attachment and Faith Development

Recent research has shown the relationship between an attachment to caregivers and an attachment to God, an attachment to God and adult attachment, attachment to God and religiosity, and attachment and spiritual maturity, but has failed to examine the link between attachment and faith development (which includes not only the relational but also the imaginative nature in the questioning and answering process regarding philosophical notions of existence). The current project investigated the relationship between adult romantic attachment (cf. Brennan et al., 1998) and Fowler's (1981) stages of faith development in an undergraduate sample at a private, religious university (N = 95). Attachment anxiety (but not attachment avoidance) predicted faith development, such that the higher the attachment anxiety, the lower the stage of faith development. ********** Over the past few decades, research on attachment has investigated its development in infancy (Ainsworth, 1973; Ainsworth, Blehar, Walters, & Wall, 1978; Bowlby, 1969), transition to adult romantic relationships (Bartholomew & Horowitz, 1991; Brennan, Clark, & Shaver, 1998; Hazan & Shaver, 1987; Simpson, 1990), and predictiveness for other personality traits, such as emotional responses to life stress (Collins, 1996) and selfesteem and perceived confidence (Bylsma, Cozzarelli, & Sumer, 1997), as well as neuroticism, extraversion, locus of control, openness to experience, and Christian fundamentalism (Mickelson, Kessler, & Shaver, 1997). More recently, researchers have examined a relationship between attachment and issues of faith (Beck, 2006; McDonald, Beck, Allison, & Norsworthy, 2005; TenElshof & Furrow, 2000), suggesting that attachment to caregivers is reenacted in an attachment to God. However, this new direction of research has not directly investigated the role of attachment in the development of faith. Moreover, the association between attachment and spirituality remains somewhat unclear. Attachment Throughout the past three decades, researchers have begun to explore how individual differences in attachment influence lives. At the conception of attachment theory, Bowlby (1973; 1977) sought an explanation of the evolutionary process that maintains proximity between infants and caregivers, even in the face of danger or threat. Bowlby (1969) was the first to present the idea that early caregiving experiences, that is, mothers noting and attending to an infant's signals of distress or fear, arc internalized as working models in children. Expanding on these ideas, Ainsworth and colleagues (Ainsworth, 1973; Ainsworth et al., 1978) developed the Strange Situation, a system for evaluating and classifying mother-infant dyads into different attachment categories. From this research, Ainsworth identified three types of attachment in infants: secure (in which infants were distressed upon mothers' departures but were comforted upon their returns), anxious-ambivalent (in which infants displayed obvious stress upon mothers' departures and return), and anxious-avoidant (in which infants were undisturbed by their mothers' departures and uninterested upon their returns). Later, Main and Solomon (1986, 1990) identified a fourth attachment classification: disorganized/disoriented (in which infants seemed confused and used both proximity seeking and avoidance behaviors). Adult attachment. According to Bowlby (1969), attachment behavior and the influences of early attachment relationships are central to relational functioning throughout the lifespan. Because working models of childhood relationships are internalized, they lead to expectations and beliefs both about the self and about others in later relational contexts. With this in mind, Hazan and Shaver (1987) began the tradition of applying attachment theory to peer and romantic relationships in adulthood. Using the typologies corresponding to the Strange Situation (secure, avoidant, and anxious), the authors created three vignettes to describe adult versions of these styles. …