Search

Recent studies suggest that one's personality relates to their music preferences. Separately, research from an attachment theory perspective has demonstrated that attachment security and insecurity are important relationship‐related individual differences. We combined these two lines of inquiry here by investigating whether the lyrics of individuals' favorite songs about relationships reflect their attachment styles and related Big Five personality traits (Study 1; NParticipants = 469, NSongs = 4853). Individuals higher in attachment avoidance preferred relationship songs with lyrics expressing an avoidant attachment style, whereas individuals higher in neuroticism preferred relationship songs with lyrics expressing more attachment anxiety. We extended these results in a second study, finding that the lyrics of Western culture's 823 most popular songs from 1946 to 2015 mirrored societal trends of increasing social disengagement (i.e., were increasingly higher in attachment avoidance themes), suggesting that song lyrics impart psychological meaning at the sociocultural level as well. Our data therefore suggests that higher levels of attachment avoidance are reflected in preferred lyrics in relationship songs at both an individual and societal level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: People gather important social information from subtle nonverbal cues. Given that one's attachment style can meaningfully affect the quality of one's relationships, we investigated whether people could perceive men's and women's attachment styles from photos of their neutral faces.Method: In two studies, we measured targets' attachment styles then asked participants (total N = 893) to judge the male and female targets' attachment anxiety and avoidance from photos of their neutral faces (total N = 331) and to report their own attachment anxiety and avoidance.Results: Participants detected men's attachment style from face photos significantly better than chance in an initial exploratory study and in a preregistered replication but did not consistently detect women's attachment style from their face photos. Moreover, participants' own attachment style biased these first impressions: Individuals with greater attachment anxiety viewed others as more anxiously attached.Conclusions: People can detect some hints of unacquainted others' attachment styles from their faces but their own anxious attachment can bias these judgments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]