Does anxious attachment make trainee teachers more stressed?
Trainee teachers who worried more about closeness in relationships reported more stress, partly because they were less sure how to read their own and other people's minds.
Source
Mentalizing partially mediates the association between attachment insecurity and global stress in preservice teachers
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cross-sectional — One-off online survey analysed with structural equation modelling (latent variables, bootstrapped indirect effects) testing mentalizing as a mediator between attachment insecurity and stress.
- N
- N=202 · 202 German preservice student teachers (171 female, 31 male) surveyed online between October 2021 and February 2022.
- Population
- Preservice (university) student teachers in Germany, mean age 25.61 years
- Outcome
- Global chronic stress (Trier Inventory of Chronic Stress screening scale), with self-reported attachment anxiety and avoidance (ECR-R short form) and mentalizing uncertainty (Reflective Functioning Questionnaire) as predictors and mediator
Structured fields used in claim comparison tables when every cited study has a complete layer.
What they did
The researchers surveyed 202 student teachers online during the Covid pandemic. Each person completed short questionnaires on attachment anxiety (fear of rejection) and attachment avoidance (discomfort with closeness), on mentalizing problems (uncertainty about using thoughts and feelings to explain behaviour), and on how much stress they had felt over the previous three months. A structural equation model tested whether mentalizing problems carried, or mediated, the link from insecure attachment to stress.
What they found
Attachment anxiety was linked to higher stress (beta = 0.39) and to more mentalizing problems (beta = 0.35), and mentalizing problems were in turn linked to higher stress (beta = 0.43). Part of the anxiety-stress link ran through mentalizing, an indirect effect of beta = 0.15, so the mediation was partial. Attachment avoidance was not significantly related to either mentalizing or stress, and the model explained 39.8 percent of the variance in stress.
The limits
What it doesn't show
Because everything was measured at one time point, the study cannot show that attachment causes mentalizing problems or that these cause stress; the arrows in the model are theoretical assumptions. All measures were brief self-reports, so shared method variance could inflate the links, and mentalizing was measured only as uncertainty about mental states. The sample was mostly female student teachers from one German university context, so it cannot speak for practising teachers, and the null result for avoidance may reflect avoidant people under-reporting distress.
Key terms
- Attachment anxiety
- A form of insecure adult attachment marked by worry about rejection and abandonment in close relationships.
- Attachment avoidance
- A form of insecure adult attachment marked by discomfort with closeness and a tendency to suppress attachment needs.
- Mentalizing
- The ability to understand one's own and others' behaviour in terms of mental states such as feelings, beliefs and intentions.
- Mediation
- A statistical pattern in which part of the association between a predictor and an outcome runs through a third, intervening variable.
- Transactional stress model
- The view that stress arises when a person judges that demands exceed their resources, rather than from the demands alone.
- Structural equation modelling (SEM)
- A statistical method that tests a whole network of hypothesised relationships among latent (underlying) variables at once.
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Quiz yourself
Which variable was tested as the mediator in this study?
Common questions
Does this show that improving mentalizing would reduce teachers' stress?
No. It is a single-time-point correlational study, so it is consistent with that idea but cannot test it; an intervention or longitudinal study would be needed.
Why study trainee teachers rather than working teachers?
The authors argue that personal characteristics matter more than school conditions for teacher stress, so university training is a window to spot and address risk factors before people enter the job.
Why might avoidant attachment show no link to stress?
Avoidant people tend to suppress or downplay distress, so on self-report questionnaires they may simply report less stress; alternatively they may genuinely distance themselves emotionally from stressors.
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