People in romantic relationships can detect attachment insecurities in their partners with considerable accuracy, but they also tend to view their partners through a biased lens. Recognizing these insecurities leads people to provide more love and comfort to their partners in daily life and during stressful moments. These findings show that Personality and Social Psychology Bulletinwe provide evidence that how we perceive our partner’s relationship anxiety influences how we support our partner.
Adult attachment orientations represent the typical way people think, feel, and behave in their closest relationships. These orientations generally fall into two broad categories of anxiety: attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance. Attachment anxiety describes an intense fear of abandonment, fear of not being loved, and a strong desire for intimacy. People with high attachment anxiety often monitor their relationships for signs that their partner might leave them.
Attachment avoidance involves a deep discomfort with intimacy, a strong preference for independence, and low trust in others. People who are high in attachment avoidance tend to distance themselves emotionally from their partners in order to protect themselves. These patterns of instability can be global, meaning they apply generally to how people view their intimate relationships. It can also be relationship-specific. That is, it only applies to the dynamics of certain romantic partnerships.
When partners feel insecure, it can increase conflict, reduce overall satisfaction, and worsen the relationship. To manage such negative consequences, partners can use certain buffering strategies. Buffering occurs when one person acts in a way that directly alleviates a particular anxiety in their partner. A recommended buffering strategy for anxious and attached partners is to provide reassurance that the relationship is secure. Reassurance involves direct expressions of love, devotion, and care to calm the anxious person’s fear of abandonment.
“Attachment styles have become part of popular culture, and many people confidently describe their partners as ‘anxiously attached’ or ‘avoidantly attached,'” says study lead author Elina Sun, who just received her doctorate in social psychology from Syracuse University. “That raised an interesting question for us: Are people actually good at identifying their partner’s attachment tendencies?”
Sun noted the extensive teamwork involved in the research, including Brett Jakubiak, associate professor of psychology at Syracuse University. “This project was a collaborative effort between several graduate students (Xiangjing Kong, Jason Mitala, and myself) and faculty (Brett Jakubiak, Jeewon Oh),” Sun said.
The authors wanted to understand the behavioral consequences of noticing these traits. “We also wanted to know whether those perceptions mattered,” Sun explained. “If someone deems their partner to be particularly anxious about the relationship, would they naturally feel more secure? Understanding these processes can tell us not only how accurately people understand their partners, but also how partners can help each other ease anxieties and strengthen the relationship.”
To examine this, the researchers used a framework known as the truth-and-prejudice model. Using this model, scientists can measure how accurately one person perceives another person’s characteristics, while also measuring systematic errors or biases in those perceptions. The original study included 108 undergraduate couples recruited from a private university in the United States. These couples had been dating for about a year and a half on average.
Participants completed a background survey assessing their own relationship-specific attachment anxiety and avoidance. In the same study, they reported how they perceived their partners’ relationship-specific attachment anxiety. Each partner then took turns discussing their personal goals for 8 minutes while being video recorded. These goals were personal goals and did not require the active involvement of a partner.
Researchers wanted to see if people who thought their partners were highly anxious could feel more secure when discussing these personal goals. After the discussion, participants rated how much consideration, dedication, and approval they showed toward their partner. The researchers found that people judge their partners’ relationship-specific attachment anxiety and avoidance with some accuracy.
But their perceptions were also shaped by three specific biases. First, a directional bias emerged. That is, people tended to overestimate how anxious their partner was compared to what they reported about themselves. Second, scientists focused on projection bias, which occurs when people assume their partner has the same attachment traits as themselves.
Third, this study provided evidence of complementarity bias. This bias occurs when individuals think their partner has the opposite type of anxiety because they are insecure themselves. For example, an anxious and attached person may incorrectly assume that their partner is highly avoidant and emotionally distant.
Although participants in the first study were aware of their partner’s anxiety, they did not feel particularly reassured while discussing personal goals. The authors suggest that discussing individual goals may not have caused enough visible psychological distress to trigger the need for comforting responses. Many of these discussions also took place over video calls, which may have limited natural expressions of emotional support.
To test different settings, the researchers designed a second study of 147 community couples in the northeastern United States. These couples were generally older, ranging in age from 20 to 73 years, and had lived together for more than 12 years on average. In this study, participants completed surveys about both relationship-specific attachment and overall attachment patterns.
After completing the initial survey, couples participated in a 10-day follow-up period using a method called ecological momentary assessment. This involved filling out a short questionnaire four times a day reporting how much physical, verbal, and practical affection you gave your partner in your daily life. After a 10-day follow-up period, the couples visited the lab and had two seven-minute discussions about their personal stressors.
Similar to the first study, the scientists found that people recognized their partners’ relationship-specific and overall attachment with moderate accuracy. In fact, participants were better at accurately judging their partner’s overall relationship anxiety than their current relationship specific anxiety. The same biases emerged again, with people overestimating their partner’s anxiety and exhibiting both projection and complementarity biases.
In the second study, perceived attachment anxiety predicted supportive behavior. People who believed their partner was highly anxious provided more love and security in their daily lives. They also provided more comfort and expressions of love when discussing personal stressors in the lab. This suggests that perceiving that their partner is anxious prompts people to use safe strategies to alleviate that fear during stressful moments and everyday interactions.
In addition to the main results, the scientists discovered unexpected patterns related to age and cultural assumptions in supplementary analyses. “We made some findings in some supplementary analyzes that surprised us,” Sun explained. “We expected that people might be influenced by common gender stereotypes when judging their partner’s attachment style. For example, they perceive women to be more anxiously attached and men to be more avoidantly attached, because these attachment patterns overlap with stereotypical female and male relationship behaviors.”
The data revealed a split between the two samples. “Interestingly, our second study found evidence consistent with this idea among older couples in the community, but not among younger undergraduate couples in our first study,” Sun told PsyPost. “While this is not one of our main findings and requires further research, it raises interesting questions about whether cultural beliefs about gender shape how people perceive their partner’s emotional needs and insecurities, and whether these perceptions may differ across generations.”
Overall, these studies highlight the complex nature of interpreting a partner’s emotions. “People seem to pay attention to their partners’ attachment-related tendencies, and that perception can shape their responses in relationships,” Sun said. “Although our perceptions aren’t completely accurate and are influenced by our own insecurities, they can still help us identify when our partners need reassurance.”
These judgments are partially biased, so relying solely on observation has its limitations. “At the same time, our findings suggest that it’s worth remaining curious about your partner’s actual experiences, rather than assuming you know exactly how they feel,” Sun added. “People tend to bring their own biases into how they view their partners, so open communication may be as important as intuition when trying to understand a partner’s needs.”
Although the findings of this study help explain how couples support each other, there are some limitations to keep in mind. This study relied entirely on self-report questionnaires to determine the true nature of a person’s attachment style. Because humans are not always completely self-aware, future research could use observational methods or reports from close friends to better define actual attachment behaviors.
The researchers also point out that the observed association does not prove a direct sequence of events. “One important limitation is that our study was correlational,” Sun noted. “Those who perceived their partners to be more anxiously attached tended to provide more reassurance, but we cannot conclude that those perceptions directly caused the reassurance; other factors may contribute to both.”
“Another thing to keep in mind is that our findings describe average patterns for many couples,” she says. “Not all couples fit these patterns. Some people are very accurate in perceiving their partner’s attachment tendencies, while others are much less accurate. Similarly, not everyone who perceives their partner to be anxious will respond with greater feelings of security.”
Looking ahead, the researchers hope to explore other ways partners respond to each other’s fears. “Our long-term goal is to understand how people use their perceptions of their partner’s attachment orientation to guide their relationship behaviors,” Sun said. “For this project, we focused on feelings of security because we think it is particularly helpful for people with high attachment anxiety.”
“Future research could examine whether attachment perceptions predict other forms of support, conflict behaviors, caregiving, and communication across different relationship contexts,” she said. “Ultimately, we hope this research will help partners identify how to most effectively address each other’s emotional needs and strengthen their relationships.”
The study, “Perceptions of Providing: How a Partner’s Attachment Perceptions Produce a Feeling of Security in Romantic Relationships,” was authored by Elina R. Sun, Xiangjing Kong, Jason A. Mitala, Jeewon Oh, and Brett K. Jakubiak.
