 30. Attachment Theory and Personality  653
about different significant others. A person 
may consider his spouse to be warm, affec -
tionate, and responsive, while simultane -
ously viewing his mother as cold, rejecting, 
and aloof. The fact that substantial within- 
person variation (i.e., “inconsistency”) ex -
ists in the way people relate to others raises 
a number of questions about how working 
models should be conceptualized in attach -
ment theory.
This problem will be familiar to most 
personality researchers. Over 40 years ago, 
Walter Mischel (1968) published a review of 
the field that is now best remembered for its 
critique of trait models of personality. Ac -
cording to Mischel’s interpretation of the 
evidence, the correlations among measures 
of behavior from one situation to the next 
were lower than expected, leading him to 
question the usefulness of the trait concept 
(see Ahadi & Diener, 1989, for alternative 
interpretations).
Attachment researchers have offered sev -
eral potential solutions to the inconsistency 
issue  in the study of attachment. One popu -
lar proposal has been that people hold dif -
ferent working models of different relation -
ships, and that different models can exist 
at different levels of abstraction or gener -
alization (e.g., Collins, Guichard, Ford, & 
Feeney, 2004; Overall, Fletcher, & Friesen, 
2003; Sibley & Overall, 2008). For example, 
people may hold relatively global representa -
tions of their “parents,” but they also hold 
relationship-  specific representations of their 
mothers and fathers. Thus, it is possible for 
the same person to exhibit varying degrees 
of security in relationships with two parents, 
assuming that there is a different history of 
security and support in the two relation -
ships.
From this point of view, the challenge for 
attachment researchers is not to explain why 
people experience different degrees of secu -
rity in their various relationships, but why 
there is some degree of consistency across 
relationships when each relationship has its 
own unique qualities. One possibility, re -
viewed by Collins and her colleagues (2004), 
is that in addition to forming relationship- 
specific representations, people develop a 
more abstract, global representation that 
captures some kind of “weighted average” 
of their experiences. Indeed, theoretical work on this possibility, using connection -
ist simulations, suggests that mental systems 
easily extract the “gist” or themes that are 
common to many different experiences, and 
that these more abstract representations can 
be used to guide the model’s response to new 
and ambiguous targets (Fraley, 2007). As a 
result, behavior in any one context can be 
driven both by global or abstract represen -
tations, and by ones that are more specific 
to the relationship in question. The global 
representation is part of what creates simi -
larity in a person’s thoughts and feelings 
across relationships (and thus acts as a latent 
factor, in a psychometric sense), whereas 
the relationship-  specific representation cap -
tures knowledge and strategies for manag -
ing specific relationships (and thus explains 
relationship-  specific variance).
Another explanation for the presence 
of some consistency across relationship 
partners is developmental in nature. If a 
relationship-  specific representation is forged 
partly on the basis of those that already 
exist, we would expect a modest degree of 
association in security across different rela -
tionships. For example, if one relationship- 
specific representation (pertaining to one’s 
mother, say) was constructed before another 
(i.e., pertaining to one’s romantic relation -
ship partner), and if the former played a 
role in shaping the latter, then the two sets 
of relational experiences would be similar 
(and, thus, correlated across targets). In this 
scenario, there need not be a global model 
or “trait” (although there is no reason why 
there could not be); the similarities among 
representations of different relationships 
exist because existing models played a causal 
(but incomplete) role in shaping the develop -
ment of new models. Nonetheless, the statis -
tical associations among security measures 
with respect to different relational domains 
will be imperfect, because the different re -
lationships are unique and have their own 
interpersonal histories.
Social-  cognitive research on transference 
suggests that these kinds of dynamics occur 
and can be set in motion relatively easily 
with simple laboratory stimuli (e.g., Ander -
sen & Chen, 2002). For example, when 
asked to rate how secure people feel with po -
tential mates described in personal ads, par -
ticipants were more likely to feel secure with 