Relationships Among Attachment Style, Hook-up Attitudes, and Mental Health

“Hook-up” is a term used to describe casual sexual encounters with strangers or acquaintances, without any formal commitment. The current study aimed at understanding the relationship between college students’ motives and attitudes towards hooking up, as well as their attachment styles and their mental health. A total of 147 Union College students responded to a Google Forms Survey, where they were asked to answer questions about their attachment style, sexual background, casual sex attitudes, hook-up motives. They also filled out the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (Rosenberg, 1979), Social interaction Anxiety Scale (Mattick, 2019), and the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (Radloff, 1977). As hypothesized, a significantly higher percentage of people in the securely attached group (83.3%) reported that their most recent sexual experience was a romantic one, as compared to people in the insecurely attached group (56.9%). Nearly half of the insecurely attached students reported their most recent sexual experience was either a hook-up or a “friends with benefits” situation. In addition, the secure group had significantly higher levels of self-esteem, and lower levels of anxiety and depression than the insecure group. As predicted, students’ attitudes towards casual sex correlated with the number of “sexual partners with no future” they have had. However, neither variable was significantly correlated with any of the mental health scores. I had predicted that the four attachment styles would be related to the various hook-up motives. However, only the dismissing attachment style was shown to be negatively correlated with the social relationship motive. This supports the prediction that dismissively attached individuals would tend to avoid close relationships and therefore would be less likely to hook-up with intentions of it ever developing into a relationship. The preoccupied attachment group (another form of insecure attachment) showed the poorest mental health levels, in contrast to my prediction that the fearful attachment group would have the worst overall mental health. These results suggest that attachment style may be related to one’s overall mental health, as well as to the type of sexual experiences sought out by college students. More research needs to be done to determine a relationship between mental health and college students’ motives for hooking up.