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EFFECTS OF ATTACHMENT STYLE ON BIAS IN LANGUAGE ABOUT A ROMANTIC PARTNER
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Toskos, Alexia C.
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Spring 2021
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2021
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2043_Andre_Gavrin.pdf
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This paper looks at whether there is a relationship between attachment style in romantic relationships and vocabulary usage. Previous work has demonstrated that people tend to use abstract generalizations to describe positive actions of people in their in-group but concrete situational language to describe negative actions of people in their in-group. The present study examines whether people show a similar bias when describing the actions of romantic partners, and whether attachments style modulates this bias. Anxiously attached participants were predicted to use more abstract vocabulary when recalling a positive story and more concrete language when recalling a negative story than avoidantly attached participants. This is due to the tendency for anxiously attached individuals to hold their partner in a very high regard (Shi, 2003), which is expected to exacerbate the language bias. Participants were asked to write positive and negative stories about their romantic partners, which were coded for concreteness. They were also asked to answer questions using a short version of the Experiences in Close Relationships Scale (ECR; Wei et al, 2007). The results indicated a higher concreteness score for positive stories compared to negative stories, which was the reverse of what was predicted. There was no significant relationship between attachment style and concreteness scores for the positive or negative stories. This study fails to support previous research on relationship biases .
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