Adult attachment insecurity is positively associated with medically unexplained chronic pain
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Attachment insecurity (i.e. anxiety in relationships and/or discomfort in close relationships) is associated with self-reports of physical symptoms, medically unexplained symptoms and health conditions involving pain. Medically unexplained chronic pain (MUCP) may represent a particularly severe form of symptom reporting that is also characteristic of individuals with insecure attachment. This study investigated relationships between adult attachment style ratings and past-year MUCP in a sample of the general U.S. population and the ability of attachment style ratings to account for variance in past-year MUCP beyond that accounted for by potential confounders. METHOD: Data from the National Comorbidity Survey Replication (N = 5645) were used. Attachment was assessed with an interview-administered version of a commonly used self-report measure of secure, anxious and avoidant attachment. MUCP was assessed with a brief interview. Depressive and anxiety disorders were included as covariates and were assessed with a fully structured interview based on DSM-IV criteria. RESULTS: The past-year prevalence of MUCP was 2.45% (95% CI = 2.07-2.83). The two insecure attachment styles (i.e. anxious and avoidant) were positively associated with MUCP. These associations remained statistically significant after adjusting for demographic variables and depressive and anxiety disorders. When the two insecure attachment styles were considered together, only avoidant attachment remained significantly associated with MUCP. CONCLUSION: Attachment insecurity ratings were positively associated with past-year MUCP and remained so after statistically adjusting for depressive and anxiety disorders. Further research aimed at understanding the mechanism(s) responsible for the association between attachment insecurity and MUCP is warranted. SIGNIFICANCE: Consistent with earlier research regarding transient physical symptoms, medically unexplained chronic pain was associated with attachment insecurity. Understanding the mechanisms responsible for this association could guide treatment innovations.
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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 | 0.010 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".