Women's Experience of Giving and Receiving Emotional Abuse
O’Hearn and Davis conducted a correlational study to determine if attachment style predicted receipt and infliction of emotional abuse. Subjects were a small sample of unmarried female college students in dating relationships (mean length of relationship = 14 months). Attachment was measured using both self-report and interview measures (RQ; Bartholomew & Horowitz, 1991). Emotional abuse measures gave results that were low to moderate for this sample.
The authors found the following results:
| Secure |
Negative associated to frequency of inflicting and receiving emotional abuse. |
| Preoccupied |
Positively related to receipt and infliction of emotional abuse. |
| Dismissive |
Positively related to inflicting emotional abuse. |
| Fearful |
Positively related to receiving emotional abuse and negatively related to inflicting it. |
Overall, degree of preoccupation was the aspect of attachment insecurity most consistently related to abuse across methods of measurement and types of statistical analyses.
Due to the cross-sectional nature of the study, it would be inappropriate to draw conclusions about causal relationship. However, it is entirely plausible that experience of emotional abuse within close relationships is one of the conditions that might transform one’s internal model of self and others and thus one’s attachment style.
This summary was contributed by Antoinette (Toni) Varley of Thames Valley University