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Emotional reactions and regulatory responses to negative and positive events: Associations with attachment and gender

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Abstract

In two studies, we examined inter-individual variability in responses to both negative and positive events. In the first study, participants (119 college students) reported on negative and positive events from their own lives. The second was an experiment in which participants (133 college students) were given either negative or positive feedback about their personality. With negative events, more insecure individuals, especially anxiously attached, evidenced more intense negative emotional reactions and greater processing of (i.e., ruminating on) negative experiences. With positive events, securely attached individuals and less anxiously attached engaged in greater processing of positive experiences (maximized), whereas more insecure individuals tended to minimize positive experiences. Gender differences for emotion regulation were moderated by either attachment or event type. Findings for negative events generally coincide with prior research, and those for positive events provide new evidence that attachment style could affect how people react to positive events and emotions.

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Notes

  1. Most studies examine average levels of emotional intensity rather than levels from peak events as we did. As a result, we also examined average levels of NA and PA (across the 12 negative events and 12 positive events). For average NA intensity, both anxiety (β = .33, p < .001) and avoidance (β = .22, p < .01) predicted more intense NA, with the anxiety finding paralleling our result for NA intensity for the worst event. For the average PA, anxiety predicted more intense reactions (β = .24, p < .05) and similar to our finding for the peak, positive event there was a Gender × Event type × Avoidance interaction (β = −.21, p < .05).

  2. We had expected these thoughts to be self-focused thoughts characteristic of rumination and thus more prevalent for anxiously attached individuals. A posthoc interpretation of our findings was that these negative feedback-related thoughts instead comprised disparaging remarks toward the confederate, which is consistent with avoidant individuals being viewed as hostile (Kobak and Sceery 1988). Posthoc coding of these thoughts, based on whether they reflected negatively on the self versus the confederate, showed that for men in the negative condition, higher levels of avoidance related marginally to a higher number of negative thoughts about the confederate, r (10) = .59, p = .057, but not about the self, r (10) = .04.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Tiffany Barnes, Tammy Gray, and Gadi Wininger for their invaluable assistance with these studies.

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  1. Department of Psychology, West Virginia University, 53 Campus Drive, Morgantown, WV, 26506, USA

    Amy L. Gentzler

  2. Kent State University, Kent, OH, USA

    Kathryn A. Kerns

  3. West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV, USA

    Emily Keener

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Correspondence to Amy L. Gentzler.

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Gentzler, A.L., Kerns, K.A. & Keener, E. Emotional reactions and regulatory responses to negative and positive events: Associations with attachment and gender. Motiv Emot 34, 78–92 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-009-9149-x

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