Anxiety
and relationship perceptions
Compared
with less anxious persons, highly anxious individuals worry about being
abandoned and crave emotional support, closeness, and reassurance from their
romantic partners. These desires and worries motivate highly
anxious persons to monitor their partners and relationships closely for signs
of deficient or waning physical or emotional proximity.
Anxiety
also biases the way in which they perceive their romantic partners and
relationships. When asked to imagine their partners behaving
negatively toward them (e.g., “your partner does not comfort you when you are
feeling down”), highly anxious individuals make more negative attributions
about their partners’ behavior (e.g., “my partner is rejecting my desire for
closeness/intimacy”), believe that their partners are selfish and deliberately
unresponsive to their needs, question their partners’ love, feel less secure
about the relationship, and feel greater anger toward their partners than do
less anxious individuals.
The
hypervigilance of more anxiously attached individuals intensifies the
monitoring and appraisal of relationship-threatening cues. These
individuals thus interpret information in a manner that confirms their negative
expectations of attachment figures. These tendencies make highly anxious individuals
even more vulnerable to experiencing distress and concerns about the stability
and future of their relationships. Indeed, when they are distressed, highly
anxious individuals typically display emotion-focused coping strategies that
increase their distress, tendencies that could also lead them to view their
partners and relationships in a less positive light.
Highly
anxious persons experience more intense feelings and more variable highs and
lows in their relationships than others. Compared with less anxious
individuals, they also report greater distress, anxiety, and impulsiveness in
their social interactions; experience stronger negative emotions in their
romantic relationships and often are involved in stable but dissatisfying
romantic relationships.
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