Charles S. Carver

Adult Attachment Qualities

An area of work that many people have found fascinating over the past few years is identified with the term "adult attachment." Following from the work of researchers studying infant attachment, Phil Shaver and Cindy Hazan first suggested that adult romantic relationships could be conceptualized in terms of the qualities of relationships that were first identified by the infant researchers. Adults with a secure attachment pattern act differently in many respects from adults with an avoidant attachment,and both act differently from adults with an anxious-ambivalent attachment. At some point I became interested in some questions relating to this conceptualization. Pursuing that interest, I created a measure of adult attachment qualities which distinguishes between two aspects of ambivalence, and which measures an aspect of security apart from the absence of insecurity. One issue of interest to me concerns the relations between attachment qualities and other models of personality traits. Another issue is how these attachment qualities play themselves out in people's decisions and actions.

Carver, C. S. (1997). Adult attachment and personality: Converging evidence and a new measure. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 23,865-883. [abstract]

Kim, Y., & Carver, C. S. (2007). Frequency and difficulty in caregiving among spouses of individuals with cancer: Effects of adult attachment and gender. Psycho-Oncology, 16, 714-723. [abstract]

Carver Home  

Research Interests