Abstract
Attachment models were hypothesized to influence interest in an unfamiliar peer's conversational ideas by supplying default expectations for rewards that others provide. Having positive models of others would enhance attention to and memory for the peer's remarks. Undergraduates rated themselves on secure, dismissing, preoccupied, and fearful attachment styles and several weeks later acted as participants or observers in short or long conversations with scripted confederates. Immediately after the conversations, they took recall tests about the confederate's remarks. Recall of the confederate's ideas was positively correlated with measures of positive models for others, which were computed from the attachment style ratings, but the correlation was qualified in regression analyses by interactions between the attachment measures and conversation role, length, and sex composition of the student-confederate dyad. Results are discussed in terms of attachment-related motives and experience in same-sex and opposite-sex relationships.
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