Heart rate variability moderates the association between attachment avoidance and self-concept reorganization following marital separation

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Abstract

Despite substantial evidence indicating that relationships shape people's self-concept, relatively little is known about how people reorganize their sense of self when relationships end and whether this varies as a function of people's beliefs about relationships. In this report, we examine the prospective association between self-report adult attachment style and self-concept recovery among 89 adults following a recent marital separation. People high in attachment avoidance are characterized by the tendency to deactivate (i.e., suppress) painful attachment-related thoughts and feelings, and, following Fagundes, Diamond, and Allen (2012), we hypothesized that highly avoidant people would show better or worse self-concept outcomes depending on their ability to successfully regulate their emotional experience during a divorce-related mental recall task. We operationalized self-regulation using respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) and found that highly avoidant people who showed RSA increases across our divorce-related mental activation task (DMAT) evidenced improvements in their self-concept over three months. In contrast, highly avoidant adults who showed RSA decreases during the DMAT showed no improvement (or a worsening) in their self-concept disruptions over the subsequent three months. These results suggest that RSA, an index of heart rate variability, may provide a window into self-regulation that has the potential to shed new light on why some people cope well or poorly following the loss of a relationship. Discussion centers on the potential mechanisms of action that explain why some people are able to successfully deactivate attachment-related thoughts and feelings whereas other people are not.

Highlights

► This paper focuses on self-concept recovery following divorce. ► Respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) was a moderator of self-reported adjustment. ► People high in both attachment avoidance and RSA fared best over time. ► People high in attachment avoidance and low in the RSA fared worse over time.

Introduction

“I found myself in the kitchen cleaning my oven, and in the middle of it I was saying, ‘Am I doing this because Nancy would have wanted me to clean the oven?’ Or was it that I really wanted to because the oven was dirty? Or using the brand of toothpaste that she bought, or other little things. I hope that when I am through, it will be more me than someone else” (Man, about thirty having experienced a divorce; quoted in Weiss, 1975, p. 69).

As the opening quote suggests, the banalities of everyday life can be potent reminders of what we have lost when marriage comes to an end. In the face of this loss, many divorced adults are charged with revising their basic sense of self: Who am I without my partner? Who are my friends? How should I structure my time and organize my life? Romantic relationships play a large role in shaping our self-concept (Agnew, 2000, Aron et al., 1991), and it follows that self-concept reorganization is an important task when recovering from a romantic separation (Lewandowski et al., 2006). People who are successful in reorganizing their sense of self often cope well with a breakup, whereas people who struggle to define their sense of self in the wake of a separation report considerable psychological distress (Mason et al., 2011, Slotter et al., 2010). One way of minimizing the potential negative impact of a loss on self-identity is to deactivate the attachment system (Dozier and Kobak, 1992, Kobak et al., 1993, Fraley and Bonanno, 2004). In this report, we use a psychophysiological research paradigm to explore the idea that people who are efficient at suppressing attachment related themes—both in terms of what they say and how their body responds when they confront an attachment-related stressor—will evidence minimal disruptions to their self-concept in the wake of a marital separation.

As an emotion regulation strategy, deactivation involves suppressing attachment-related thoughts and feelings, and this process often involves becoming hyper self-reliant when faced with threats to felt security (Hesse, 2008, Mikulincer and Shaver, 2007). According to attachment theory (Bowlby, 1969/1982), infants whose attachment bids are frequently met with caregiver unresponsiveness or rejection learn to respond to their own distress with emotional deactivation, and in so doing, are able to preserve the availability of these caregivers. Infants who exhibit this behavioral pattern in the Strange Situation Procedure are considered to be avoidantly attached to their caregiver(s) (Ainsworth et al., 1978). Later in development, this tendency to deactivate or avoid attachment-related themes becomes a habitual emotion regulation strategy that may aid self-organization in the short-term but has the potential to cause problems in the long-term (Cassidy, 1994, Hesse, 2008, Kobak et al., 1993; however, for a competing view, see Fraley and Shaver, 1998).

Within the adult attachment literature, attachment avoidance is considered one of two individual differences in attachment styles (the other being attachment anxiety, see Mikulincer and Shaver, 2007) that organize the way people think, feel, and behave in close relationships. Whereas a robust literature indicates that people high in attachment anxiety—that is, people who tend to cope with threats to felt security with repeated and often maladaptive efforts to restore the attachment bond—typically report difficulty coping with a relationship separation (Davis et al., 2003, Lee et al., 2011) and greater self-concept confusion after a breakup (Slotter and Gardner, 2011), the evidence for attachment avoidance is mixed. Some findings demonstrate that people high in avoidance can successfully deactivate the attachment system and, in so doing, cope well with a breakup (Fraley and Bonanno, 2004), and this finding is consistent with other literature demonstrating that avoiding painful feelings can be beneficial following other types of loss experiences (cf. Bonanno et al., 1995). However, the results of other studies indicate that people high in avoidance do poorly over time (Birnbaum et al., 1997), suggesting that avoiding attachment-related distress, though potentially effective in the short-term, can be damaging over the long run.

To resolve discrepancies in the literature on avoidance and coping, Fraley and Bonanno (2004) suggested that a key distinction is between dismissing and fearful avoidance. Whereas dismissing avoidance is defined by high levels of attachment avoidance without concomitantly high anxiety, fearful avoidance is defined by high levels of both avoidance and anxiety (Bartholomew, 1990). Following the death of their spouse, for example, adults who reported high levels of dismissing attachment reported coping as well with loss as more secure adults (those reporting low levels of both avoidance and anxiety), but adults who reported high levels of fearful avoidance had the worst outcomes. This research suggests that avoiding attachment-related thoughts and feelings may serve an adaptive function if adults can successfully deactivate the attachment system, but not all adults who report attachment avoidance may be able to succeed in this endeavor. As an emotion regulatory strategy, suppressing attachment-related thoughts and feelings requires sustained effort and can be costly (in terms of psychological and physiological resources) when maintained over time (e.g., Gross and Levenson, 1993). When deactivation and suppression fail, highly avoidant people evidence greater attention to loss-related themes and make more negative self-relevant attributions (Mikulincer et al., 2004).

Given these findings, we seek to determine whether the ability to reorganize one's self-concept following a major life loss depends on the ability to successfully deactivate the attachment system and to suppress negative affect related to the loss. Because emotional suppression requires self-regulatory effort, we operationalize self-regulation using respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), the natural logarithm of the variance of the heart period within the frequency bandpass associated with respiration (i.e., ~ 0.14 to .40 Hz), which reflects parasympathetic vagal influences on the heart (Beauchaine, 2001, Berntson et al., 1997, Porges, 1995, Porges, 2007). The vagus nerve provides inhibitory regulation of the heart, moderates RSA withdrawal during task demands requiring attention and emotion, and is believed to be adaptive, preparing the body to free metabolic resources and permit sympathetically-driven coping responses (Frazier et al., 2004, Movius and Allen, 2005, Rottenberg et al., 2005). Vagal tone is typically indexed by RSA during periods of rest; higher levels of resting RSA are hypothesized to covary with self-regulatory capacity (Hagemann et al., 2003) and autonomic flexibility (Friedman and Thayer, 1998, Thayer and Lane, 2000) for dealing with environmental challenges and physiological demands.

Recent theory (e.g., Thayer et al., 2009) and empirical evidence (e.g., Butler et al., 2006) indicate that RSA increases during task demands are associated with self-regulatory effort. For example, in a study asking women to suppress or reappraise their emotions following sad films, Butler et al. (2006) observed increases in RSA from a baseline task. Segerstrom and Nes (2007) tested the idea that cardiac vagal control would track specifically with self-regulatory strength by designing experimental conditions that forced participants to exert self-control: participants were instructed to resist or indulge in eating cookies. Participants assigned to resist the cookies (and eat carrots) evidenced less of a decrease in heart rate variability (HRV) from a baseline task relative to the participants who were permitted to eat the cookies. In other research, alcoholics who reported an ability to resist alcohol temptations, which presumably requires a high degree of self-regulatory effort, evidenced increases in HRV when asked to think about social situations that likely involve alcohol consumption (Ingjaldsson et al., 2003).

Smith et al. (2010) recently observed that stressful marital interactions are associated with a decrease in resting heart rate variability (as measured by RSA) and that this decrease was mediated by husbands' greater negative affect and perceptions of wives' controlling behavior during a negative interaction task. The authors interpreted this finding to suggest that women who demonstrated a greater decrease in resting RSA may have experienced a greater self-regulatory challenge in managing husbands' negative affect during the interaction task. Taken together, these studies suggest that resting RSA (often referred to as vagal tone) is associated with self-regulatory capacity (and can therefore be depleted as a function of task demands), whereas cross-task changes in RSA are associated with self-regulatory effort.

Using these findings to generate predictions about how people might cope with loss, Fagundes et al. (2012) examined how stress-related changes in RSA moderate the prospective association between attachment avoidance and depressive symptoms following a painful loss (e.g., a romantic breakup, the death of a close friend or relative) in adolescence. In line with others (Fraley and Bonanno, 2004), Fagundes et al. (2012) reasoned that people high in avoidance who can successfully deactivate attachment-related thoughts would show positive adjustment following a loss event, whereas people high in avoidance who cannot deactivate attachment-related thoughts would show poor adjustment. Because the successful deactivation of attachment-related thoughts and feelings requires emotion regulatory effort, these authors examined stress-related changes in RSA as their moderator of interest. To the extent that stress-induced changes in RSA are positively associated with self-regulatory effort, people high in avoidance who demonstrate increases in RSA during stress should have the emotion regulatory skills to successfully deactivate the attachment system when faced with a loss event. This is precisely what was found: highly avoidant adults who showed stress-related increases in RSA reported the fewest post-loss depressive symptoms, but their high avoidance counterparts who showed RSA decreases during stress reported the highest levels of post-loss depression (Fagundes et al., 2012).

The present study is a conceptual replication and extension of the Fagundes et al. (2012) report. We extend their work in two primary ways. First, Fagundes et al. (2012) examined RSA changes in response to a standard speech-math stressor. This is an ideal way to elicit stress-related changes in parasympathetic functioning, but, at the same time, physiological functioning in these tasks is dissociated from the experience of loss. In the present study, we examine RSA changes as adults think about their relationship history and recent separation experience. In prior reports (Lee et al., 2011, Sbarra et al., 2009) we have shown that assessing physiological responding while adults reflect on their separation experience provides a proximal means of assessing the physiological correlates of how people naturalistically think and feel about the separation itself. Although acute stress paradigms are important for assessing generalized cardiovascular reactivity, tracking physiological responses in the context of reflecting over one's separation provides enhanced ecological validity. Second, the focus of our report is how high avoidance people reorganize their sense of self in the wake of a marital separation. The essential question here is whether the Fagundes et al. (2012) paradigm is of value for understanding self-reorganization. To date there exists no empirical research on self-reorganization following divorce. The absence of this research is conspicuous since most major reviews of divorce adjustment identify self-reorganization as a critical step in the recovery process (Hetherington and Kelly, 2002) and calls for research in this area date back over 30 years (Weiss, 1975).

Given these shortcomings, this paper examines two main hypotheses. First, based on Fagundes et al.'s (2012) prior research, we hypothesize that people high in avoidance who exhibit increases in RSA during a divorce-related recall task will show improved self-concept reorganization following their separation experience whereas high avoidance people who exhibit RSA decreases during the same task will exhibit no improvement in their self-concept or a worsening in their reports of divorce-related self-concept disturbance. Second, based on prior work demonstrating that people high in attachment anxiety experience more self-concept confusion when relationships end (Slotter and Gardner, 2011), we expect to replicate this effect in the current study. In addition, we examine the three-way interaction among attachment anxiety, avoidance, and RSA to explore the possibility that poor self-concept outcomes are limited largely to people high in both anxiety and avoidance who also show decreases in RSA across the divorce-related recall task.

Section snippets

Participants

Participants were 89 (31 men) community-dwelling adults (mean age = 40.1 years, SD = 9.75 years) who reported having been in a relationship with their former partner for over 14 years (SD = 10.1 months) and having experienced a marital separation, on average, 3.4 months before entering the study (SD = 2.5 months). Fifty percent of the participants reported that they initiated the separation and 47% reported that their partner initiated the separation (the remaining participants did not report on this

Results

Table 1 presents the zero-order correlations among the LOSROS and predictor variables. The LOSROS variable was significantly positively correlated with attachment anxiety at the initial and again at the 3 month follow-up assessment, but unassociated with attachment avoidance at either of these points, which indicates that people reporting high attachment avoidance were equally likely to report many or few self-concept disturbances following the separation. In addition, RSA (during the MER task

Discussion

Romantic separations alter how we see ourselves and the clarity with which we see ourselves (Agnew, 2000, Lewandowski et al., 2006, Mason et al., 2011, Slotter et al., 2010). Furthermore, this loss of self-concept clarity—the extent to which we are certain about who we are—is associated with poor emotional adjustment to a breakup (Slotter et al., 2010), and recent data suggests that improvement in self-concept clarity is a leading indicator of improvement in psychological well-being following a

Conclusion

Despite substantial evidence indicating that relationships shape people's self-concept, we know relatively little about how people reorganize their sense of self when relationships end. One group of people who may be susceptible to prolonged self-concept disruptions is those who are unsuccessful in their attempts to suppress painful attachment-related thoughts and feelings about a breakup. People high in attachment avoidance are characterized by the tendency to deactivate (i.e., suppress) these

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    This research was supported by grants from the National Institute of Aging (AG#028454), the National Institute of Mental Health (MH#074637), and the National Science Foundation (#0919525) to the first author.

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