Attachment theorists have emphasized that attachment-anxious individuals are ambivalent in their relational tendencies, wishing to be close to their relationship partners but also fearing rejection. Here we report 6 studies examining the contribution of attachment anxiety and experimentally induced relational contexts (both positive and negative) to explicit and implicit manifestations of (a) attitudinal ambivalence toward a romantic partner and (b) motivational ambivalence with respect to the goals of relational closeness and distance. Attachment-anxious individuals exhibited strong attitudinal ambivalence toward a romantic partner, assessed by both explicit and implicit measures. They also exhibited strong motivational ambivalence regarding closeness (both explicit and implicit), and this motivational conflict was intensified in relational contexts that encouraged either approach or avoidance tendencies. Participants who scored relatively high on avoidant attachment proved to be implicitly ambivalent about distance issues but mainly in negative relational contexts. Several alternative interpretations of the results were considered and ruled out.

One of the core premises of adult attachment theory (Bowlby, 1973; Mikulincer & Shaver, 2007) is that attachment insecurities, conceptualized in terms of anxiety and avoidance, are important for understanding the desires and concerns that organize people’s interpersonal decisions and actions. In the six studies reported here, we focused especially on the dimension of attachment anxiety and tested the theoretical proposition that this form of insecurity involves considerable ambivalence between approach and avoidance tendencies when one is regulating closeness and also involves ambivalent attitudes (positive and negative) toward relationship partners (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2003, 2007; Shaver & Hazan, 1993). Although Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, and...