Adult attachment and the defensive regulation of attention and memory: Examining the role of preemptive and postemptive defensive processes

Previous research has found that avoidant adults have more difficulty recal ling emotional experiences than do less avoidant adults. It is unclear, how ever, whether such findings reflect differences in the degree to which avoi dant adults (a) attend to and encode emotional information, ro) elaborate e motional information they have encoded, or (c) do both. Two studies were co nducted to distinguish between the effects of these processes. Participants listened to an interview about attachment-related issues and were asked to recall derails from the interview either immediately or at variable delays . An analysis of forgetting curves revealed that avoidant adults initially encoded less information about the interview than did nonavoidant adults, a lthough avoidant and nonavoidant adults forgot the information they did enc ode at the same rare. The implications of these findings for current views on the nature and efficacy of defenses are discussed.