Attachment between friend and romantic partner - Case Study Example

The study has covered 50 respondents (students) of Bournemouth University age ranges from 18 to 25 with their academic qualifications of bachelor degree for survey. The selected respondents' versions in terms of their relationship status with their friends and romantic partners (now and then) are the findings of the study. The research survey was carried out in the month of '', 2009. On one hand, the study has explored the relationship status in terms of attachment level of students at their different ages with their friends and romantic partners considering their dependency level and competitiveness attitude towards them and on other hand, it has tried to analyse why the attachment style of students will differ as per their age variations with their friends and romantic partners.

Through these two explorations, a substantial contribution to identify the behavior of students at different ages with their different relationship (Friends/Partners) status can be supposed to say. According to Bowlby (1973, 1980), experiences with attachment figures generate representational or "working models" that guide behaviour, affect, and perceptions in later relationships. The earliest working models are formed during infancy and early childhood, partly in response to interactions with parents and other significant caregivers (Van IJzendoorn, 1995).

During social development, models of different attachment figures coalesce into more generalised, higher-order models of the self and significant others, even though models of central attachment relationships remain intact (Main, Kaplan, & Cassidy, 1985). Throughout childhood and adolescence, working models of new people and new relationships begin to develop based on these earlier models. New models, therefore, are not entirely independent of earlier ones given that earlier models guide how information about new persons and relationships is encoded, processed, interpreted, stored in memory, and eventually acted on (Bowlby, 1973; Collins, Guichard, Ford, & Feeney, 2004; Crittenden, 1985).

Effective modulation of negative emotional experiences is fundamentally important to both mental and physical health. This process is associated with an individual's experiences of security within attachment relationships, and that this association is mediated by parasympathetic nervous system functioning. These findings open up a host of provocative questions regarding the basic biopsychology of the attachment system and the multiple ways in which interpersonal experiences with attachment figures become integrated, over time, into psychological, behavioral, and biological patterns of emotion regulation.

Future research on these issues is important for integrating the increasingly sophisticated bodies of knowledge on social relationships and physiological functioning that have developed within the social-psychological, developmental, and behavioral medicine traditions. Such integration is critical for elucidating how and why humans' most intimate and important relationships shape both mental and p