On a summer stroll through the woods, young couple Sara and Bill descend a winding rocky path from the wooded area to a secluded spot on the shore of a river below. After several yards, the path steepens and narrows, and the wind picks up. Sara becomes uneasy and worries she may slip off the edge of the now treacherous slope, but Bill is right there next to her and she feels supported. After a few more yards, though, Sara notices that Bill has dropped back and can’t hear her over the sound of the blowing wind.
Sara is not in any real danger—the couple are actually safe and sound in a virtual reality lab. Social psychologist Nancy Collins, PhD, and her colleagues at the University of California, Santa Barbara’s (UCSB) Close Relationships Lab are using this “virtual cliff” scenario, and others like it in which couples interact under stressful circumstances, to study the very real phenomenon of adult attachment.
More than 50 years ago, researchers first described the attachment bonds that children form with their parents. A couple of decades later, psychologists Phil Shaver, PhD, and Cindy Hazan, PhD, began to recognize that adults in romantic relationships also developed similar kinds of attachments to each other. Their classic paper on adult attachment, published in 1987 while Collins was in graduate school, was a major influence on her early research, which touched on how individual differences in adult attachment styles influence relationship outcomes. Since then, she says, she’s used attachment theory as a framework for understanding well-being and relationship functioning in adult close relationships.
“In our work, we try to draw analogies between the way that parents can help a child cope with distress and what we see in adult relationships,” she says. “What we’re looking for are the types of interactions that are most effective in creating a safe haven and a secure base for both members of the couple.”
Collins and her team focus on understanding not only the dynamics of close relationships in adulthood but also how those relationships help people thrive mentally and physically. They take a biopsychosocial perspective and use multiple methodologies including experimental, observational, and daily diary studies. Studies in the Close Relationships Lab have illuminated what it takes to be a supportive partner and the neurobiology underlying adult attachment. The researchers also explore the unique contributions of both verbal and physical support, as well as how social support can be modulated by factors such as physical activity.
Examining connections
Collins opened the Close Relationships Lab at UCSB in 1999, after earning her PhD in social psychology at the University of Southern California and then spending four years as a professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Over the years, she has sought to examine individual differences in people’s capacity to seek care from others and to respond compassionately to others’ needs. Early on, she built a space in the lab resembling a cozy living room, where couples could feel at home as they were discreetly videotaped (with their permission) during various interactions. Many of those interactions revolved around one partner enduring a manufactured stressful event, such as giving a speech in front of an audience or counting backward by 13, while Collins and her team either experimentally manipulated the other partner’s social support or, in other studies, observed naturalistic partner support and coded it as either effective or ineffective.
In one typical study, Collins demonstrated that insecure participants viewed both low- and high-support messages from their partners as unsupportive (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 87, No. 3, 2004opens in new window). In a more recent study, participants who received a loving message from their partners showed lower cortisol reactivity to the speech-giving task—and cortisol reactivity decreased more in participants who were most stressed about giving the speech. This result has potentially important health implications, given that prolonged cortisol reactivity can promote cardiovascular disease (article in preparation).
While Collins was bringing the link between support and partner health into focus, a pair of her graduate students, Lauren Winczewski, PhD, now an assistant professor of psychology at Napa Valley College, and Jeff Bowen, PhD, now a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University, became interested in what it takes to be an effective support provider. Winczewski zeroed in on the concept of empathic accuracy and the idea that in order to be truly responsive to the needs of a loved one, one must understand what he or she is thinking and feeling.
In a variation of the stressful speech task, the researchers recorded partners discussing a personal or relationship stressor. The participants then reviewed the tape of the interaction and reported what they thought their partners were thinking and feeling during the discussion.
The researchers measured two forms of empathy: emotional empathy, or compassion, and cognitive empathy, which is the ability to accurately understand a partner’s thoughts and feelings (Psychological Science, Vol. 27, No. 3, 2016opens in new window). “We showed that the most responsive caregivers were those who were high in both emotional and cognitive empathy,” Winczewski says. “You can understand exactly what your partner is thinking and feeling, but without feeling a caring motivation to help them, you might not provide the type of high-quality support that cultivates the best relationships.”
Bowen came into Collins’s lab particularly interested in language style matching—a form of behavioral mimicry that has been shown to lead to positive rapport. He and Collins hypothesized that good caregivers and those who are effective at asking for help would tend to match their partner’s way of speaking (word usage) in a way that created an emotional connection. The researchers found that greater matching in social support conversations was indeed associated with more positively rated conversations. But in conflict-filled conversations, greater matching was associated with more poorly rated conversations (Journal of Language and Social Psychology, Vol. 36, No. 3, 2017opens in new window).
“Synchrony had largely been thought of as a beneficial phenomenon across the board, but we were finding evidence that mirroring could actually elevate some of the more negative aspects of a conversation if you were at odds or discussing an area of conflict,” Bowen says. “These results really underscore just how much of what we’re doing in relationships isn’t conscious.”
Attachment gets physical (and virtual)
Giving a speech can be stressful, but graduate student Heidi Kane, PhD, now an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Dallas, wanted to find another way to get the heart racing in her attachment studies. So, she and Collins, with help from UCSB colleague Jim Blascovich, PhD, built the virtual cliff environment featuring a narrow path winding around a mountain. The virtual setting serves as an adult analog of the “Strange Situation,” a classic experimental paradigm developed by Mary Ainsworth in the 1970s that assesses a child’s attachment security by placing him or her in a novel, frightening environment, with or without a parent.
The UCSB researchers hooked up one member of a couple to the virtual reality goggles. Participants could peer over the side of the virtual cliff and see the canyon that they would fall into if they slipped. They could also hear the wind blowing and rocks falling as they walked. Replicating findings seen with parents and children, the researchers found that participants in the presence of a responsive partner felt more calm while walking close to the cliff, but that participants in the presence of an unresponsive partner felt no more supported than if they were alone—and actually physically withdrew from their partners on a subsequent task (Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 48, No. 1, 2012opens in new window). “These findings show that emotional security in adulthood—as in childhood—hinges primarily on perceived responsiveness and not on the mere presence of a close other,” Collins says. “Just as in the empathic accuracy study, emotional responsiveness plays a key role in making support work.”
Collins’s lab has also used neuroimaging to identify brain correlates of romantic relationship characteristics. Former postdoctoral researcher Bianca Acevedo, PhD, found that newlyweds with higher levels of altruism toward their partners showed greater responsivity than those with lower levels of altruism, in brain regions related to emotion and emotional memory, when viewing happy or sad pictures of their partners’ faces as compared with strangers. She also found that individuals reporting greater altruism toward their partners showed stronger brain responses to their partner’s face in the same regions associated with pair-bonding and attachment. The strength of these results was modulated by genetic variants of oxytocin and vasopressin, molecules known to play a role in social behaviors, empathy and pair-bonding (Behavioral Neuroscience, Vol. 133, No. 1, 2019opens in new window).
What other factors facilitate support? That’s the question driving the research of graduate student Paige Harris. She and Collins have recently been looking at the role physical activity can play in close relationships. “The idea is that engaging in physical activity may enable us to regulate our emotions, improve our mood and provide physiological benefits that then help us be better partners,” Harris says. So far, the researchers have focused on daily diary entries about physical activity and whether they predict responsiveness to partners. Eventually, they will bring couples into the lab to perform moderate physical activity and run experiments to look for social benefits.
In another recent study, Collins and graduate student Delancey Wu have been using the stressful speech task to determine the relative effectiveness of physical affection, verbal support and a combination of the two in reducing physiological stress reactivity in a loved one. Wu and Collins are also collaborating with UCSB colleague Heejung Kim, PhD, to study how affectionate touch differs across cultures. “There was a lot of touch work in the 1990s showing that different cultures have different touch frequencies or different touch behaviors, but they never actually looked at how those different behaviors affected relationship outcomes,” Wu says. “So, we are testing people in the U.S., the U.K., France, Japan and South Korea to see whether or not touch has a different impact depending on culture, or whether there is a universal effect.”
“Just the other day, Delancey and I were looking over videotape of the couples, and it’s so beautiful to see how partners respond to physical affection, how much they genuinely appreciate it,” Collins says. “I think close relationships are more important than ever before, and I don’t think people will ever stop needing and wanting that support. The couples that I see are so inspiring, and I’m so happy to have spent my career learning from them.”
