654 vI. SELF‑ AND S OCIAL P ROCESSES
the people described in the ads when those 
ads had been constructed, unbeknownst 
to the research subjects, to resemble a for -
mer attachment figure (Brumbaugh, 2017; 
Brumbaugh & Fraley, 2006). This finding 
indicates that existing working models can 
be used to guide the interpretation of new 
experiences, thereby creating a degree of 
consistency across working models.
These ideas bear on the consistency debate 
in personality psychology. In mainstream 
personality psychology, most of the ini -
tial responses to Mischel’s arguments were 
“defensive” in nature—  attempts to explain 
why Mischel was misrepresenting the facts 
rather than attempts to understand how it 
is that people can exhibit coherence in their 
thoughts, feelings, and behavior without 
necessarily behaving in identical ways across 
situations. Some proposals, for example, 
focused on the fact that the expected cor -
relation between two “samples” of behavior 
should be relatively small, as expected from 
the psychometric principles of classical test 
theory, but that such correlations will in -
crease as more and more instances are ag -
gregated (Epstein, 1979, 1980). Other pro -
posals focused on the idiosyncratic meaning 
of trait terms and how some traits might 
be relevant to some people while being ir -
relevant to others (thereby making their be -
havior less consistent across situations; see 
Bem & Allen, 1974; for a discussion, see 
Baumeister & Tice, 1988).
One of the more recent rapprochements 
has come from Mischel himself. Mischel and 
Shoda’s (1995; Ayduk & Mendoza-  Denton, 
Chapter 19, this volume) cognitive–  affective 
processing system (i.e., CAPS) model as -
sumes that an important aspect of personal -
ity is the “if–then” associations people hold. 
A person can behave in a way that appears 
inconsistent if a researcher simply aggre -
gates measures of honesty across situations, 
but the person may in fact be behaving in a 
way that is perfectly consistent with the way 
his or her associations are organized. The 
CAPS framework is similar to ones that have 
been adopted in the study of attachment, 
although the attachment approach incor -
porates traditional trait-like concepts (e.g., 
attachment styles, general working mod -
els) with more contextually specific factors, 
rather than removing trait-like constructs entirely. Indeed, theoretical simulations 
demonstrate that a connectionist cognitive 
system can construct both global representa -
tions and if–then representations in parallel, 
and that both kinds of representations can 
be used to guide behavior in new situations 
(Fraley, 2007). It should therefore be pos -
sible for personality researchers to consider 
models that enable traits and more dynamic 
and situation-  specific aspects of personality 
to exist simultaneously.
Although additional solutions to the 
person–  situation debate have been put for -
ward (e.g., Fleeson’s [2001]), the CAPS 
model is of special interest because it resem -
bles ideas advanced by Bowlby (1969/1982, 
1973, 1980) years before in his discussion 
of how working models are constructed and 
shape human experience. Moreover, some 
attachment researchers have explicitly em -
braced the CAPS framework as a means 
of understanding attachment dynamics in 
adult relationships (e.g., Zayas, Shoda, & 
Ayduk, 2002). Ultimately, the way each 
person thinks, feels, and behaves in the re -
lationship can be understood as lawful, but 
to capture some of this nuance, researchers 
need to attend to not only the variance that 
is common across relationships, but also the 
variance that is specific to each relationship 
that a person has.
Antecedents of  Adult  Attachment: Why  Are 
Some People More Secure Than  Others?
One of the fundamental questions in adult 
attachment research is what makes people 
secure or insecure in the ways they relate to 
significant others. As reviewed previously, 
one of the core assumptions of attachment 
theory is that these individual differences 
reflect variations in the working models 
that people hold about themselves and close 
others—  working models that have been 
constructed over the course of people’s lives.
We have briefly reviewed some of the clas -
sic work on how early caregiving experi -
ences shape the development of attachment 
patterns in early childhood. Correlational, 
experimental, and longitudinal studies all 
suggest that the quality of early caregiving 
experiences plays a role in shaping how se -
cure children become. Our goal in this sec -
tion is to review some of the research on how 