engleski

Personality and attachment to friends

Previous research has extensively documented the important role of attachment styles in adolescent and adult close relations. However, few studies aimed at mapping the adult attachment styles into the wider personality structure. This study explores the personality correlates of two attachment dimensions in friendly relations – anxiety and avoidance. For this purpose, modified Brennan's Inventory of experience in close relations (Kamenov and Jelić, 2003) and NEO PI-R measuring five personality dimensions (Costa and McCrae, 1992) were administered to the sample of 352 university students. Results have shown a variety of relations between two attachment dimensions and personality traits, both at the domain and facet level. Also, significant gender differences were found both for attachment anxiety and avoidance, with females being more anxious in friendly relations and males being more avoidant. Due to the observed gender differences separate analyses were conducted for both sexes, and revealed somewhat different pattern of correlations for female and male students. Attachment anxiety in female sample is thus positively correlated with neuroticism and negatively with agreeableness and conscientiousness, while neuroticism is the only significant correlate of anxiety in friendly relations for male students. Avoidance in friendships shows similar negative correlations with extraversion and agreeableness both in male and female sample. Attachment avoidance is also related to low openness, but only for females.. Regression analyses demonstrated that high neuroticism and low agreeableness are significant predictors of attachment anxiety in females, while in males high neuroticism remains the only predictor of anxiety in friendly relations. Low extraversion and agreeableness predict attachment avoidance in friendships both for female and male students.

adult attachment; friendly relationships; personality

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