| Description |
This study examined the relationship between attachment styles, individuals' narratives of their transgressions, and indicators of well-being. We asked 82 university students (56 females and 26 males) with an average age of 21.85 (SD=3.99) to provide six narratives of times they hurt another individual as well as answers to attachment style and well-being measures. The resulting stories were coded for the presence of several specific scripts, and the analyses focused on use of each script, an individual's dominant script, and the extent to which individuals used more or fewer scripts (variability). 91% of the participants had a dominant script. This study yielded several main findings: 1. Although on average participants in our sample used 3 distinct scripts across their narratives to explain their wrongdoings, they had the tendency to have one dominant approach (i.e. modal script) in making sense of these events. The most common modal scripts were ‘victim was responsible' (45.12% of participants), ‘inexplicable actions' (25.61%) and ‘side-effect of pursuing another goal' (15.85%), 2. The number of transgression narratives individuals chose to provide correlated positively with their rated satisfaction of their basic psychological needs, specifically their need for relatedness, 3. Higher levels of avoidance were found to correspond with higher levels of script variability, 4. Avoidance was negatively related to explaining the harmful action to be the result of pursuing some other goal, and 5. Both attachment anxiety and avoidance are negatively correlated with well-being. Implications of the findings for attachment and narration identity are discussed. |
