Insecure attachment predicts ambivalent social threat and reward perceptions in romantic relationships
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although theoretical perspectives on adult attachment forward relational ambivalence as a defining characteristic of at least some forms of insecurity, work demonstrating an ambivalent structure to the relational attitudes of insecure individuals has been rare. The current research examines the similarity and intensity of perceptions of social threat (i.e., concerns over rejection) and social reward (i.e., opportunities for intimacy) in romantic relationships. Using a sample of 1004 participants, evidence for relational ambivalence was found for both anxious and avoidant attachment. Individuals high in anxious attachment reported relatively similar and intense threat and reward perceptions, whereas individuals high in avoidant attachment showed evidence of similar, but not intense, threat and reward perceptions. Thus, the weighing of prospects for rejection and intimacy in romantic relationships arguably leads to what researchers traditionally think of as ambivalence for those high in attachment anxiety, but something more akin to indifference for those high in attachment avoidance. More broadly, this work provides a set of tools and methods for carefully examining ambivalence in close relationships.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".