Person-situation interactions as predictors of variations in attachment

Abstract

Existing work on the contribution of life events and person characteristics to changes in attachment has mostly overlooked interactions between events and characteristics. Using 15 common events and ten personality characteristics in a multi-wave longitudinal study of 6,566 people, we examined whether person characteristics moderate the impact of life events on change in attachment. Although we found more interactions than were expected by chance, they did not consistently involve specific events or person characteristics and had small effect sizes. The largest number of event-person interactions were observed for changes in attachment security, followed by anxiety and avoidance. We found a similar number of interactions between events and within-person variation in person characteristics and “traditional” PxE interactions where the person characteristics are stable. These results suggest the need to look at both the traditional PxE interactions and the way dynamically varying person characteristics interact with events to understand changes in attachment.