Adult attachment, memory for in-session emotion, mood awareness, and client session evaluation: An affect regulation perspective

This study examined (a) relations between client adult romantic attachment and minimizing and maximizing strategies of emotion regulation with regard to memory for affect associated with first-session therapy events, (b) the relations between attachment and mood awareness (mood labeling and mood monitoring), (c) relations between attachment and initial ratings of emotion associated with therapy events, and (d) relations between attachment, affect ratings, and evaluations of the first session as valuable or comfortable. Participants were 80 undergraduate volunteer clients who participated in 2 counseling sessions with 16 counseling trainees. Prior to the first session, clients completed measures of adult attachment and mood awareness. After the first session, clients identified two emotional events (a pleasant- and an unpleasant-emotion event) that occurred during that session, rated positive and negative affect experienced during the events, and evaluated the session. One week later, clients rated positive and negative affect they remembered feeling during the first session events, and again evaluated the first session. Clients then completed a second counseling session, and afterwards evaluated that session. Both anxiety and fearful-avoidance were associated with a maximizing strategy of emotion regulation with regard to memory for negative affect associated with the unpleasant-therapy event, i.e., negative affect was remembered as being greater than initially rated. Dismissing-avoidance was not associated with any memory bias. Fearful-avoidance was inversely related to mood labeling. Neither anxiety nor dismissing-avoidance was significantly related to mood awareness. Both anxiety and fearful-avoidance were positively related to initial ratings of negative affect experienced in conjunction with the unpleasant-emotion therapy event. Dismissing-avoidance was not related to initial affect ratings. Contrary to expectation, evaluations of the session as valuable or comfortable were not related to attachment, emotion, or attachment x emotion interaction effect variables.