Role of Attachment Orientation in the Perception of Support Provision

We examined how adult attachment styles influence human perception of support provision. We invited 119 couples to the lab, where they performed an exploration task. We also used pre- and post-exploration measures, including assessing adult attachment styles and partners' perception of support provided during the task. Three independent coders watched the videos of couples interacting and rated partners' support provision behavior. We utilized West and Kenny's (2011) truth and bias model to compare judgments (partners' perception of support received during the exploration task) with so-defined truth (combined rankings from coders). We used regression analysis to investigate how attachment orientation moderates the perception of support provision. On average, individuals tended to over-perceive helpfulness and under-perceive intrusiveness. Attachment avoidance was not a significant predictor of directional bias for helpfulness and intrusiveness. Results for the second exploratory hypothesis show those higher on attachment anxiety to have a weaker bias in underperceiving intrusiveness.