Attachment
Does anxious attachment make trainee teachers more stressed?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
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.
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
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Key findings
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.
Methodology
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.
Limitations
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.
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