Babies don't have many options in the toolbox when it comes to coping with stress. They can cry, summoning anyone within range to tend to their needs, or they can self-soothe. Most parents are quite familiar with the first coping method, and researchers have spent a lot of time studying the attachment of babies to their caregivers.
Adults have more options when it comes to coping with stress, but many return to the strategy of looking to others for security and support. Adults have the advantage over babies of being able to look farther afield than the next room over for assistance, such as to family, therapists, or clergy.
Adults also have the ability to engage in coping methods or rituals, such as using religion to find meaning and comfort in the face of hardship, and thereby get themselves through difficult times. The prototypical adult attachment relationship, that of romantic partnership, is often the first source of support for adults. Yet if the romantic relationship is a source of stress, the other sources of support become more important.
Pollard, Riggs, and Hook, in "Mutual Influences in Adult Romantic Attachment, Religious Coping, and Marital Adjustment" (PDF, 94KB), published in the October issue of the Journal of Family Psychology, looked at the associations among romantic attachment anxiety and avoidance, positive and negative religious coping, and marital adjustment in a community sample of 81 heterosexual couples.
As with infant attachment, adult romantic attachment can also be viewed through the lenses of attachment anxiety (a negative model of self, fear of rejection or abandonment, and a strong desire for closeness) and attachment avoidance (a negative model of the other and discomfort with and devaluation of closeness, self-disclosure, and dependence).
Those with low attachment anxiety and avoidance demonstrate attachment security (which contributes to positive emotional and relationship outcomes), whereas those with high attachment anxiety and avoidance are at risk of psychopathology, ineffective coping, and marital dysfunction. Positive religious coping strategies predict better mental, physical, and spiritual health, whereas negative religious coping strategies are linked to elevated psychological distress.
Pollard et al. hypothesized that positive religious coping would buffer the impact of attachment insecurity on marital adjustment by providing an alternate way of dealing with stress, and they tested the Implicit Internal Working Model Correspondence model of attachment and religiosity by investigating associations between the romantic attachment strategies of the two members of the participating married couples and their use of both positive and negative religious coping.
Pollard et al. found that romantic attachment avoidance was associated with less positive religious coping and that romantic attachment anxiety was associated with more negative religious coping. Positive religious coping buffered the problematic relationship between attachment avoidance and marital adjustment, but it did not attenuate the negative impact of attachment anxiety on marital adjustment.
Furthermore, it was associated with better marital adjustment only for those low in attachment anxiety. The results also unexpectedly showed that negative religious coping reduced the negative impact of partners' attachment anxiety on respondents' marital adjustment.
Overall, the results suggest that attachment theory is a useful approach to conceptualizing religious coping, highlight the complex relationships between attachment dimensions and religious coping methods, and lend themselves to future research and applied work with adults and couples.
Citation:
Pollard, S. E., Riggs, S. A., & Hook, J. N. (2014). Mutual influences in adult romantic attachment, religious coping, and marital adjustment. Journal of Family Psychology, 28(5), 615-624. doi: 10.1037/a0036682
Note: This article is in the Social Psychology & Social Processes topic area. View more articles in the Social Psychology & Social Processes topic area.