Attachment, affect regulation, and resilience in undergraduate students

Resiliency is the study of factors that lead to successfully overcoming adversity. Attachment has been postulated as being a protective factor for resilience and involves the quality of relationship between child and caregiver. Affect regulation, thought to be an outcome of attachment relationships, involves the management of emotional arousal. There is an absence of research on the relationship among attachment, affect regulation, and resilience in undergraduate students who are transitioning into adulthood. The purpose of the study was to examine secure attachment and healthy affect regulation as protective factors for resilience using Bowlby's attachment theory and affect regulation theory as the theoretical frameworks. The study, a correlational design, included 280 undergraduate students who completed a survey that included the Experiences in Close Relationships Inventory (to measure attachment), the Coping Inventory of Stressful Situations (to measure affect regulation), and the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (to measure resilience). Path analysis was used as the data analysis strategy. The path model, accounting for 43% of the variance, showed that attachment anxiety and avoidance were negatively correlated with resilience and positively correlated with emotion-oriented affect regulation. Attachment avoidance was also negatively correlated with task-oriented affect regulation and resilience was positively correlated with task-oriented affect regulation. Attachment anxiety and avoidance had both direct and indirect effects on resilience. The findings indicated that improving attachment in relationships and coping skills could increase resilience. This suggests that college counselors could design interventions to improve attachment and coping skills that would, in turn, lead to increased resilience and a higher likelihood for college success.