Article Published In Vol.3 (May-June-2015)

Relationship between Attachment and Personality Styles in College Going Students

Author : Anubha Srivastava

Attachment is an affectionate tie that one person or animal forms between himself and another specific one – a tie that binds them together in space and endures over time. Noftle and Shaver (2006) found that on average, secure attachment was consistently positively related to extraversion, agreeableness, emotional stability and conscientiousness. A high score on negative model of self, which is characteristic of fearful and preoccupied attachment, was on average strongly negatively related to emotional stability. Finally, dismissing attachment was consistently negatively related to extraversion and agreeableness. In line with their findings, we aimed to explore in this study the association between the attachment styles and the personality styles of college going students. For this purpose 100 male and 100 female (total 200) college going (undergraduate) students have been taken, and they were assessed using the Attachment Style Questionnaire (Feeney et al., 1994) and Eysenck Personality Questionnaire-Revised (Eysenck and Eysenck, 1991). In result it was found that there is a significant positive correlation between Neuroticism and the Preoccupied-Anxious Style of Attachment and there is a significant negative correlation between Extraversion and Avoidant Style of Attachment. And in females, Psychoticism and Neuroticism were significantly negatively correlated to Confidence (a measure of Secure Attachment Style).

Keywords: Attachment styles, Personality styles, College students.