Buffering and spillover of adult attachment insecurity in couple and family relationships

Close relationships are crucial to health and well-being. However, anxious expectations of rejection (attachment anxiety) and avoidant beliefs that romantic partners cannot be trusted (attachment avoidance) undermine long-term relationship functioning and well-being. In this Review, we outline how romantic attachment anxiety and avoidance create harmful cognitive, affective and behavioural responses in stressful couple contexts, and summarize partner buffering processes that can mitigate these harmful effects. Next, we expand the focus on within-couple processes by describing how romantic attachment insecurities and associated responses within stressful couple interactions spill over to shape functioning in non-stressful couple contexts as well as family contexts, such as parent–child and co-parenting interactions. We also consider how partners might contain spillover processes to mitigate the risk that romantic attachment insecurities create maladaptive outcomes for couples and their children. Finally, we propose new research directions that require expanding current methods and collaborations to identify and address the diverse ways in which romantic attachment impacts couple, family and child well-being. Romantic attachment insecurity undermines long-term relationship functioning and well-being. In this Review, Overall and colleagues describe processes that buffer the effects of attachment insecurity within couple interactions, associated spillover effects that shape functioning across couple and family contexts, and ways to contain spillover to improve well-being.