Assessing the Correlations between Attachment, Prosocial and Antisocial Behavior, and Primal World Beliefs

Presenter: Lucas Reardon

Faculty Sponsor: Kirby Deater-Deckard

School: UMass Amherst

Research Area: Psychology and Behavioral Sciences

Session: Poster Session 5, 3:15 PM - 4:00 PM, Auditorium, A15

ABSTRACT

This presentation involves a wide range of data from the collaborative Parenting Across Cultures study involving 9 different countries: China, Italy, Kenya, the Philippines, Thailand, Sweden, the USA, Colombia, and Jordan. Using this data, this presentation aims to highlight correlations between the development of particular primal world beliefs (“primals”) and different parental attachment styles in late adolescence and early adulthood, while additionally studying the correlations between the development of particular primal world beliefs and a person’s apparent prosocial or antisocial behavior. Scales regarding an adapted adult attachment scale to measure whether a person had secure or anxious attachment with both parents individually, regarding a person’s tendency to externalize problems (antisocial) and their prosocial behaviors, and lastly measures for the expressed primal world beliefs themselves. A majority of the findings show statistically insignificant connections, however a decent handful of results display that particular attachment styles to respective parents, and especially a person’s antisocial or prosocial behavior correlate with at least 4 primals. Particularly, the progressing/declining and safe/dangerous primals have significant positive correlations with dependent attachments, while the enticing/dull primal has a significant negative correlation with anxious attachments. More strikingly, all primal scales were discovered to have significant correlations with a person’s antisocial behavior. This study doesn’t definitively prove how or why these correlations exist, and further testing with the isolation of particular variables is encouraged to discover more about relationships regarding primal world beliefs.