People who are very afraid of rejection in close relationships may react more sharply to a partner's refusal to apologize after a quarrel. This is the conclusion of the authors of a new study published in The Journal of Social Psychology. They conducted three surveys and one experiment to understand how anxious attachment is linked to resentment, avoidance and an inability to forgive.
Attachment is a psychological style of expectations and fears in close relationships. Anxious attachment means a strong need for closeness and a fear of being rejected. People with this style often doubt their own worth and closely monitor whether a partner is emotionally available.
The first study involved 242 people (121 couples), average age 36, with relationships lasting an average of 12.6 years. Each recalled an unresolved conflict in which the partner had acted wrongly, rated how much the partner behaved in a "non-apologizing" way (shifted blame, denied the offense), and how much they themselves harbored a grudge, avoided the partner or failed to forgive. After adjusting for avoidant attachment, there was no direct link between anxious attachment and destructive reactions. But the link appeared with a high non-apologizing response from the partner: the higher the anxiety, the stronger the destructive reactions.
The second study involved 538 people in exclusive relationships (average age 25, average duration 5.5 years). Here a longer attachment questionnaire was used. The result: with a low non-apologizing response from the partner there was no link, while with a high one, anxious participants showed stronger destructive reactions. Moreover, among those who were more afraid of rejection, the link between perceiving non-apology and a destructive reaction was more than twice as strong as among the less anxious.
The third study was experimental: 334 students (average age 22, relationships averaging 2.5 years) recalled a conflict and then imagined one of three scenarios: the partner sends an apologizing message, a non-apologizing one (with accusations), or does not reply at all (control condition - a notification from the university). Comparing the apology with the two other conditions produced no significant effect. But when imagining the non-apologizing message and when there was no reply, participants with high anxious attachment reacted more destructively than those with low anxious attachment, but in the case of non-apology the difference between the groups was not significant. In the condition of the partner's silence, however, anxious participants more often reported destructive reactions.
The authors suggest: silence may be perceived as complete withdrawal and uncertainty, which anxious people tend to interpret pessimistically. They emphasize that this is correlational and experimental data with limitations: reactions overall were weak (on average 1.79 and 2.05 out of 7), the conflicts were of moderate severity, and participants recalled the situation themselves. In addition, in the experiment the control condition (no reply) may itself have been stressful, and additional comparisons increased the risk of a chance finding. The conclusions do not prove causation, but only point to a link.