Breaking up is hard to do, especially for strongly "preoccupied" lovers

Is a relationship breakup harder on certain people? To address this questio n, the present study investigated the relationship of individuals' attachme nt styles to various reported aspects of a relationship's dissolution: init iation of the breakup, emotional reactions to the breakup, reasons for the breakup, and experiences and perceptions following the breakup. One hundred nineteen undergraduates completed an extensive questionnaire concerning a past romantic relationship that had broken up. Feeney, Noller, and Hanrahan 's (1994) Attachment Style Questionnaire (ASQ) provided continuous measures for five attachment styles or "attitudes": confidence, discomfort with clo seness, need for approval, preoccupation with relationships, and relationsh ips as secondary. Principal-components analyses served to derive criterion indexes from the breakup questionnaire measures, which were individually re gressed on the five ASQ scales. As predicted from attachment theory, respon dents scoring high on pre-occupation with relationships (reflecting anxious /ambivalent attachment) showed distinctive responses to the relationship br eakup, in contrast to those scoring high on other attachment styles. Specif ically, those strongly preoccupied with relationships reported (a) that the ir partner was unhappy in the relationship and had initiated the breakup, ( b) having experienced difficulty adjusting to the breakup and feeling it ha d been a mistake, end (c) more negative emotion and less positive emotion f ollowing the breakup. Implications of these findings are discussed.