Attachment and time preference - Relations between early stress and sexualbehavior in a sample of American university women

This paper investigates hypotheses drawn from two sources: (1) Belsky, Stei nberg, and Draper's (1991) attachment theory model of the development of re productive strategies, and (2) recent life history models and comparative d ata suggesting that environmental risk and uncertainty may be potent determ inants of the optimal tradeoff between current and future reproduction. A r etrospective, self-report study of 136 American university women aged 19-25 showed that current recollections of early stress (environmental risk and uncertainty) were related to individual differences in adult time preferenc e and adult sexual behavior, and that individual differences in time prefer ence were related to adult attachment organization and sexual behavior. The se results are consistent with the hypothesis that perceptions of early str ess index environmental risk and uncertainty and mediate the attachment pro cess and the development of reproductive strategies. On this view individua l differences in time preference are considered to be part of the attachmen t theoretical construct of an internal working model, which itself is conce ived as an evolved algorithm for the contingent development of alternative reproductive strategies.