Anxious Attachment Styles Alter Our Memories — A New Study

How Attachment Style Impacts Our Memory

It’s commonplace in personal development to recognize that our beliefs skew our perception. That not all of us are experiencing the same reality and that such realities can appear very different depending on our mental state and our histories.

This can bring particular problems in relationships because words and behaviors can be misinterpreted based on our individual perceptions.

Take an anxiously attached individual and a secure individual, for example. Each is told by their partner that they’d like to spend the day alone to rest up and recuperate after a busy week (having spent all of the day previously with them).

Whilst a secure individual is likely to see reason in this, and allow their partner the time and space they need for themselves, an anxious partner may find it troubling. “Why do they not want to spend time with me?” they’ll wonder as they begin to worry about the potential demise of the relationship. Both realities are identical but experienced differently through the lens of each individual.

But perception may not be the only thing skewed by our attachment styles, our memories may be too.

Attachment Styles Lead To Memory Changes

Whilst it may seem obvious that our beliefs skew our perception, I’ve rarely thought of how our perception impacts memory — until now.

A recent study published last year in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology uncovered an uncomfortable truth when studying the impact of anxious attachment styles on memory.

Taking a group of anxiously preoccupied individuals (those with excessive worry about rejection or abandonment) and a group of unworried controlled subjects, the participants were asked to watch a 20-minute video of a person speaking of their recent breakup as well as a 20-minute non-romantic video. Both groups were then asked to take a memory test and recall the details of each video.

Interestingly those who identified as anxiously attached were at higher risk of relaying back misinformation compared to their non-anxious counterparts.

Why, as Nathan Hudson, author of the paper says, “We believe that highly attachment-anxious individuals are likely intensively analyzing what is being said in the videos we showed them”, he continues, “Their own thoughts and feelings about the video may have gotten mixed up with the actual video contents in their minds. Thus, they experienced false memories when we gave them a test regarding the video’s contents.”

Not only then can our perception lead to miscommunication, but our recollection of such events may be skewed, too. This brings forward an important outcome of the study and a piece of awareness for you to keep in mind if you are anxiously inclined.

Memory Can’t Always Be Trusted

If you are anxiously attached or anxiously inclined the pain of your experience can linger for longer than necessary. Suffering from low self-worth; fears of abandonment and rejection may lead you to ruminate excessively over past hurt. Using such experiences as a means to then validate your existing feelings.

From personal experience, we can become fixated on these negatives to the point where they take on a world of their own. From there a cycle can form of feeling down and using your memories as a means to keep you down or push you further down.

But it’s imperative we make accurate assumptions of our pasts. The human condition is to focus on the negatives rather than the positives but matters are made worse when we may actually be recalling information inaccurately. If this is the case, we’re feeling negative emotions such as regret, sadness, frustration, and anger, to memories that may not be rooted in truth.

Moving Forward With This Information

So what does this information mean to you?

Firstly it means being aware of your tendency to potentially recall memories wrong. As Hudson notes about memory recall, “… our brain stores snippets of information about our experiences. When we attempt to recall a memory, it combines stored bits of related information and makes its best guess about what happened”.

If you’re prone to ruminating and are making assumptions based on past experiences, take a notepad and write out the memory in detail. Was it all that you remember? Are there snippets of information missing?

We’re all subject to confirmation bias, and we’ll conveniently recall memories that confirm our existing beliefs. It takes extra effort to recall a whole memory and be faced with the fact that things may not be how you actually remembered. This is called cognitive dissonance, a state of mind I recently wrote of and will link below.

Challenging existing beliefs before we make quick assumptions allows us to come to more accurate conclusions. In doing this we begin to break a cycle of feeding into limiting beliefs through false-memory recalls and start reconfiguring our beliefs to healthier, new ones.

Thanks for reading this article. If you enjoyed it, I’d be very happy if you could leave a few *claps*. In the meantime, feel free to check out similar articles below.