The Study On The Relationship Between Adult Attachment, Jealousy And Emotion Regulation

The adult attachment refers to the strong and long relationship betweenindividuals and their companions currently. The attachment subject, different from theone in infancy, can be parents, friends, lovers, particular groups, or abstract formssuch as God and etc.. Individuals with different attachment style experience differentemotions and thereby adopt different emotion regulation strategy. Jealousy refers to acomplicated emotional complex mainly consisting of shamefulness, resentfulness andother negative emotions when compared with others in ability, reputation, status andsituations. Emotion regulation is the process of self management and changing oneselfor others. The paper first presents the literature review on the connotation,theory,measurement and related research of adult attachment, jealousy, and emotionregulation respectively. Then, the paper discusses the relationship between adultattachment, jealousy, and emotion regulation.421subjects are chosen from5universities and the Internet at random, most ofwhom are college students. Two different questionnaires are designed: one isExperiences in Close Relationships Inventory including Bringle Self-report JealousyScale, Jealousy Behavior Response Questionnaire and Emotion Regulation MethodQuestionnaire with five different situations for jealousy to activate the subjects’jealousy to finish the questionnaire; the other is only the four questionnaires abovewithout situations designed for jealousy. Consequently, the following results havebeen obtained:1. Secure attachment is the main style for adult attachment. There is nosignificant difference in gender on the two different dimensions of attachment.However, there is significant difference in occupations between on-duty personneland students. Students’ attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance are both higherthan on-duty personnel. Significant difference is also obvious in majors as far asscience and art are concerned, in which the art students show higher attachmentanxiety than science students.2. Jealousy is common. Adults show stronger jealousy in love and social statusbut they mostly adopt the negative wise jealousy strategy like avoidance and silenceinstead of revenge like shouting or beating. However, there is significant difference inavoidance for adults in gender, in particular, female is higher than male, that is,female tends to adopt more avoidance behavior when confronting jealous situation. There is also significant difference in the two following situations for rationalbehavior: first, when provided the situation for jealousy, individuals seldom adoptnegative wise behaviors like silence and positive wise behaviors like acceptance.3. Adults are more likely to adopt rumination like strengthening the relationshipwith stimulating emotions and expressive revealing like crying completely asregulation strategy,which is also called strengthening regulation. There is difference inemotion regulation in gender. Male are more likely to adopt reappraisal (likeremaining indifferent or neutral) and expressive suppression(like keeping calm orovercoming grief) as the regulation strategy, which is also called reducing regulation.Female are more likely to adopt expressive revealing to resolve their emotionalproblem.4. According to the construction model based on the stepwise regression, adultattachment has direct effect on emotion regulation, so does emotion regulation onjealousy and jealousy on jealousy behavior. Adult attachment has indirect effect onjealousy by means of emotion regulation and also has indirect effect on jealousybehavior through emotion regulation and jealousy. Emotion regulation has indirecteffect on jealousy behavior through jealousy.