Self-construal and Insecure Attachment Variation and Co-variation During a Period of Economic Crisis

Abstract

Changes in socioeconomic conditions can affect how people understand themselves. The present analyses tested hypotheses on individuals’ self-construal and insecure attachment variation and co-variation during a period of severe and prolonged economic downturn in Greece, a typically more collectivist culture. Adult attachment and self-construal were surveyed in 15 independent samples of young adults collected consecutively between 2004 and 2016. Significantly lower independence, but not higher interdependence, was observed in recent crisis-stricken years of higher unemployment compared to earlier (pre-crisis) years. Participants also reported higher insecure attachment, particularly higher anxious attachment in recent years. However, it were temporal changes in avoidance that were associated with a greater decline in independent self-construal during the time period studied. Avoidance also preceded temporal variability in independent self-construal during this period. The results highlight links between socioeconomic conditions and individual-level variation in cultural understandings of the self and insecure attachment, and point to socio-cognitive processes that may explain interrelationships between two constructs that partly lie at different levels of understanding the self.