My research focuses on uncovering the processes that lead people to experience similar thoughts and emotions across different relationships. The framework of adult attachment theory, coupled with social-cognitive paradigms, has been especially useful in guiding my research.

The Impact of Important Relationships on Interpersonal Dynamics
A substantial portion of my work centers on how experiences in past relationships influence experiences in new and ongoing relationships. Accordingly, I have examined how individuals use working models of attachment relationships to guide their perceptions of new people (Brumbaugh & Fraley, 2004). Interestingly, I have found that even when new individuals bear no resemblance to past partners, existing representations of past partners continue to impact how novel people are experienced. These results suggest that working models may guide the interpretation of new people, regardless of the actual qualities of those people. These findings are also congruent with ideas that have been laid out by attachment theorists, namely, that representations of significant others bias perceptions of one's social surroundings in ways that are consistent with one's beliefs, even in the absence of appropriate information (Collins, 1996).

This line of my research has also revealed differences in the operation of parental and romantic working models (Brumbaugh & Fraley, under review). For instance, exposure to new individuals who resemble a partner increases concerns about rejection, yet decreases defensiveness, however this is not the case if the novel person resembles a parent. People also appear to be most attracted to those who are similar to romantic partners, over people who resemble parents or unfamiliar people. These findings suggest that meaningful differences exist in the ways that relationship-specific working models influence people and are applied to new situations.

The Function of Attachment Relationships
I am also interested in the functions that close relationships serve. One project that I am currently working on that addresses this theme examines how people move on to form new romantic relationships after a break up and the possible purposes of so-called "rebound" relationships. A rebound relationship is generally defined as one that is initiated shortly after the dissolution of a prior romantic relationship, before the feelings of the previous relationship are resolved. It is typically viewed as a quick fix or substitution used to avoid the emotional repercussions of a breakup. Fortunately, I have access to a sample of couples who were involved in a year-long longitudinal study. I am examining the participants whose relationships dissolved during that period and am comparing those who have remained single to those who have "rebounded." This study will allow me to investigate how individuals incorporate new partners into their lives and the possible functions that those new partners serve.

I have also examined the function of close relationships through the lens of evolutionary psychology. This work was driven by questions concerning why it is that adult humans pair-bond, while most other animals do not form close emotional bonds to mates. In order to examine the evolution of adult attachment (i.e., pair-bonding), we applied comparative methods to archival data collected on diverse samples of mammalian species (Brumbaugh & Fraley, 2006; Fraley, Brumbaugh, & Marks, 2005). Two main hypotheses were tested. The first, the paternal care hypothesis, is that adult attachment serves to enhance fitness by providing an additional caregiver for offspring. The second hypothesis, the neoteny hypothesis, is that adult attachment may be a byproduct of humans' prolonged immaturity. We found that adult attachment in non-human species was positively associated with a variety of factors such as paternal care, developmental immaturity, small social groups, and small body size. When we reconstructed the evolution of adult attachment, we found that the association between paternal care and adult attachment may be functional, but the association between adult attachment and developmental immaturity is likely due to shared ancestry between species. These findings indicate that although paternal care and neoteny are both related to adult attachment, it is paternal care that appears to be functionally related to pair-bonding in humans.

Mate Selection
Another focus of my research is aimed at determining how partners are selected and at uncovering individual differences in the ability to detect undesirable features in others. Examining the processes underlying mate selection is the topic of my dissertation work. Prior research has found that overall, both secure and insecure people explicitly report the strongest attraction to secure partners (Frazier et al., 1996; Klohnen & Luo, 2003). My current work is driven by the following question: if people tend to report being most attracted to partners who are secure, why do a sizeable number of people nevertheless end up with partners who are insecure and make them unhappy? I am examining a relatively novel explanation for why people sometimes choose insecure partners, namely, that people can have opposing feelings and desires for potential mates, some of which lead them to prefer well-adjusted mates and others that draw them to qualities that are destructive to relationships. Specifically, I am addressing three questions pertinent to the selection of insecure partners. First, I am examining if people's reported goals may conflict with their underlying desires for mates. Second, I am examining whether conflicts between the desire for positive feedback and the desire for security may sometimes lead people into accepting partners who provide complementary feedback over partners who provide security. Third, because relationship formation is an interactive two-way process, I also am examining the other side of the partner selection process by investigating whether inconsistencies exist between the real personalities and the presented personalities of insecure people. By examining these possibilities I hope to determine why it may be that people sometimes end up with insecure partners in spite of their professed desires to find a secure mate.

In a similar study on mate selection processes and attraction, my colleagues and I are examining whether explicitly reported partner preferences are predictive of attraction to people who indirectly exhibit those qualities through their photographs. There are various problems with the sole use of self-report preference measures to understand the role of preferences in assortative mating. In this study, we investigated how personality traits are related to attraction preferences when using a more ecologically-valid assessment of attraction. Attraction preferences were measured by statistically conceptualizing a "preference" as a within-person correlation between an individual's ratings of attraction to various targets and the consensually observed characteristics of those targets. Such preference measures were collected on a large number of individuals using a large number of male and female target pictures, and were related to individuals' personality traits, attachment style, and age. These indirect preference estimates showed modest relationships with corresponding self-rated preferences, and showed expected relationships with personality traits. For instance, extraverts showed differential attraction to targets with "sex-typic" characteristics (masculinity or femininity) and "agentic" characteristics (e.g., seductiveness, confidence). Agreeable, conscientious, and securely-attached individuals showed higher attraction to targets with "communal" characteristics (e.g., soft-heartedness, classiness, low deviance). Despite creating preference measures using different sets of photographs for men and women, most relationships between preferences and personality traits were similar across genders indicating the robustness of the observed personality-preference relationships. The study also showed that preferences changed somewhat with age, with older individuals showing an increased preference for communal characteristics. That these relationships were found using indirect, ecologically-valid measures of preferences punctuates the reality of individual differences in preferences, and suggests their necessary role in understanding assortative mating processes.

Future Research Directions
My research findings have inspired me to continue to look for patterns and continuities in relational patterns and decisions. In the future I plan to continue to research questions such as the following: Do people's desires for predictability and to confirm their existing beliefs sometimes sabotage their interpersonal growth? How do people select their social environments and what leads them to make those choices? How do people of different attachment types "fit" with their social environments and what are the features they value most in others? For instance, some people may be most satisfied when partners are secure, and others might be most happy when they feel that they are admired.

I am also curious whether there are individual differences in the ability to detect features indicative of security or insecurity in potential mates. Specifically, I plan to extend my dissertation work by examining how individual differences in attachment patterns may correspond to differences in person perception. This research trajectory also builds on my prior work in which we found that anxious individuals tended to perceive the offset and the onset of facial expressions of emotions earlier than other people (Fraley, Niedenthal, Marks, Brumbaugh, & Vicary, 2006). These results indicate that variation in attachment anxiety partially reflects differences in vigilance to emotional and social cues. My dissertation will provide me with data to examine individual differences in person perception as a function of attachment style. For instance, I will use videotaped data of people of varying levels of attachment security to determine how they are perceived by others. I am especially interested in interactions between the videotaped targets' attachment styles and the attachment styles of those perceiving them.

I am also interested in determining how relational patterns may be altered over time. In the majority of the adult attachment literature, researchers assess global working models (i.e., the way people generally think about close relationships), and not relationship-specific working models (i.e., the way people think about any one relationship in particular). One way that changes may occur is through the development of new or updated relationship-specific models, which then serve to update the global model. I would like to understand the processes that enable the construction of relationship-specific working models (e.g., the point at which relationship-specific models develop and the point at which global models are revised or specific models of past partners become irrelevant). I also plan determine whether the rate at which the new models develop is contingent upon one's security level.

In summary, I am most interested in discovering how working models of attachment and the processes underlying them may influence one's relationships. I believe that a combination of idiographic and nomothetic methods are best suited to answering these questions. I intend to continue to explore issues surrounding attachment continuity and gain further insight into how relationship patterns are sustained both over time and across relationships.

Current Research Projects

- Person Perception and Attachment
- Finding Mr. Wrong: Divergences in Mate Preferences and Mate Selection
- The Rebound Study: Break-ups and the Formation of New Romantic Attachments
- The Boring Study: What Makes a Person Boring?

Current Lab Members

Peryl Grossman
Kristen Lembo

An online version similar to my transference of attachment study is available on-line and can be found here.
This on-line version examines which significant others from our lives (moms, dads, best friends or lovers) have the greatest impact on how we interpret new people we meet.