Attachment Styles As Predicator of Marital Satisfaction and Mixed Anxiety/Depressive Symptoms in Married Individuals

Abstract

The present study was aimed at studying three different attachment styles namely secure, anxious and avoidant as determinants of marital satisfaction and mixed anxiety/depressive symptoms in married individuals. After detailed review, following hypotheses were formed for the present study: (1) Attachment styles will be the determinant of marital satisfaction, and mixed anxiety/depressive symptoms (2) There would be gender differences in the scores of marital satisfaction and mixed anxiety/depressive symptoms in individuals with different attachment styles. For the purpose of analysis 250 married individuals were taken, comprising of 125 males and 125 females. Data collection was completed using a consent form, demographic information and measures including Adult Attachment Scale ,AAS (Collins & Read, 1990), Marital Satisfaction Scale MSS (Ayub, 2005) and Aga Khan Universitry Mixed Anxiety/Depressive symptoms Scale by Badar, Ali, Imtiaz Jehan, Hashim Reza and Murad Khan (1998) were used to tap attachment style, marital satisfaction and mixed anxiety/depressive symptoms. Statistical procedures were applied on the results obtained to find out the relationship between the variables. Data was selected through convenient sampling technique. The ages of the participants ranged from 25 till 40 years with the mean age of 33 years. The sample belonged to all the three classes, that is, lower, middle and upper, however the main frequency was of individuals belonging to middle socioeconomic status. Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) was applied to determine the differences for three groups of attachment styles, secure, anxious and avoidant for marital satisfaction as well as for mixed anxiety/depressive symptoms. Multiple comparison test was applied to see the mean differences at 0.05 level of significance. The results showed significant differences in the three groups of attachment styles for marital satisfaction (since p= 0.001, p < 0.05) but it was not found to have statistically significant effect on mixed anxiety/depressive symptoms (since p = 0.054, p > 0.05). Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) was also applied to find out the comparison of different attachment styles with gender for mixed anxiety/depressive symptoms as well as for marital satisfaction. The results showed significant differences in the three groups of attachment styles in combination with gender for marital satisfaction (p= 0.000, p < 0.05) whereas the differences in the three groups of attachment styles in combination with gender were not found to be statistically significant for mixed anxiety/depressive symptoms (p= 0.750, p> 0.05).