The Mediating Effects Of Adult Attachment On The Relationship Between Childhood Family Environment And Long-term Mating Criteria

For eons of time,most species on earth transmit genes and evolve iteratively through sexual reproduction.As the prerequisite of sexual reproduction,mate choice is especially crucial for individuals as they seek to reproduce in a competitive mating market.If you choose the wrong mate,it will not only undermine your interests or even affect your reproductive eventually.As the vital backbone of the youth group,college students are in the critical period of mate selection.Therefore,it is both representative and typical significance to investigate the mate selection behavior and formation mechanism.Most former studies explore the psychological and behavioral mechanisms process of mate selection from a static perspective.As a metatheory of evolutionary psychology,Life History Theory(LHS)organically combines environmental factors with biological factors and provides a more systematic explanation for the individual differences in physiology,psychology,and behavior development from the macroscopic perspective.At present,a certain amount of research results about mate selection have been acquired in the framework of life history theory.However,there are still some new problems demanding prompt solutions.First,the existing studies only examined the pair static relationship among environment,attachment,and mate selection,there is still a lack of studies that coherent investigation of the sequential relationship among the three factors,as well as empirical investigation of the dynamic co-variation mechanism and causal relationship.Second,most previous studies only focused on a single environmental factor,there is still lake of studies that combine the childhood family environment and current environment together to investigate the influence of these environmental factors on mating criteria comprehensively.Finally,most of the existing studies are focused on certain attributes of mating criteria,it remains unclear whether such a childhood environment affected the overall level of mating criteria.Therefore,the present studies conducted three studies to supplement the gap in existing studies,the contents of which are as follows:(1)In Study 1,a cross-sectional method was used to initial explore the static mediating effect of adult attachment on the relationship between childhood family environment and mating criteria.(2)In Study 2,a longitudinal method was used to explore the longitudinal mediating effect of adult attachment on the relationship between childhood family environment and mating criteria by a crosslagged model.(3)In Study 3,experiments were used to explore whether there is a clear causal relationship between environment,attachment,and mating criteria by two sub-studies.In study 3A,death threat priming was used to manipulate the participants’ perceived harshness and unpredictable environment,and further explored the covariant relationship between the current environment,adult attachment,and long-term mating criteria.In study 3B,secure attachment priming was used to explore the covariant relationship between adult attachment and long-term mating criteria.In a nutshell,the main conclusions are as follows:(1)In study 1,attachment avoidance partially mediated the relationship between childhood family environment and long-term mating criteria,but not for attachment anxiety.(2)In study 2,attachment avoidance plays a stable mediating role between childhood family environment and long-term mating standards.That is,an adverse childhood environment can lead individuals to form attachments avoidance,and thus show lower mating standards.(3)In study 3A,death threat priming produced A significant decrease in state secure attachment in females;In addition,death threat priming produced A significant decrease in long-term mating standards.In study3 B,secure attachment priming failed to effectively improve long-term mating standards.In a nutshell,this research systematically explores the dynamic relationship between environment,adult attachment,and long-term mating criteria.It is the first time that adult attachment is used as a mediator to reveal the dynamic mechanism of long-term mating criteria by combining childhood and current environment.This research expands the life history theory on the trade-offs of mate selection and provided reference value to help college students format appropriate standards and improve contemporary long-term commitment in relationships.