Attachment Style and the Retrieval of Emotional Memories

Attachment theory suggests that early caregiver relationships shape emotional processing and social behavior across one's lifetime. However, there is relatively little research in the literature that has examined how attachment style may influence emotional memory retrieval. The present study investigated whether anxious and avoidant attachment styles predict characteristics of autobiographical memories, including pleasantness, intensity, significance, routine, vividness, and frequency of recall. A total of 117 undergraduate students from Union College completed the Experiences in Close Relationships-Revised (ECR-R) to assess attachment-related anxiety and avoidance. Participants then completed a word-cued autobiographical memory task in which they produced memories in response to positive, negative, and neutral cue words and rated each memory on several characteristics. A series of regression analyses examined whether attachment dimensions predicted these memory qualities. Overall, attachment style did not significantly predict most memory characteristics. However, anxious attachment was significantly associated with memory pleasantness and approached significance in predicting vividness. Avoidant attachment was not significantly related to any of the measured memory variables. These findings suggest that attachment may influence the emotional evaluation of memories rather than their broader structural characteristics, although the overall relationship between attachment and autobiographical memory appears to be modest.