TTie founding principle of attachment theory (Bov\/lby 1973} is that a secure attachment to a caregiver is one of the first and most basic needs in an infant's life. Through the decades attachment theory has expanded its scope to include central adult relationships, especially between romantic partners, and has provided a useful framework for exploring relationships with triends and family members. We seek to further extend the applicatbn of the standard model of adult attachment to another interaction that people value: relationships with pets. We compa-ed partlcipaits' reports of their relationships with pets and relationships with rom^tic partners in a web-based survey of 192 pet owners. Our adaptations of measures originally designed to measure insecurity in human relationships-^the Relationship Questionnaire (RQ; Bartholomew and Horowitz 1991) and the Avoidance and Anxiety scales from the Experiences in Close Relatbnships-Revised questionnaire (ECR-R; Fraley, Waller and Brennan 2000)-produced reliable measures of relationships with pets. The structure of dimensions of insecurity was simitar for pet and partner relationships, but ratings of pet relationships correlated little or not at all with ratings of partner relationships. Surprisingly, relationships with pets were more secure on every measure. Our results provide initial evidence that attachment measures are indeed useful tools for investigating people's relationships with their pets. It appears that pets are a consisttjnt source of attachment security; future research with attachment measures may be useful for understanding how the relationship with a pet affects other aspects of the owner's life, pertiaps by buffering the experience of negative human social interactions.
Three studies demonstrated substantial individual differences in prototypicality judgments about trait categories. In Study 1, subjects twice rated instances of four personality trait categories, four concrete object categories, and one definitional category. For all nine categories, agreement between individuals was substantially lower (median r = .43) than the retest reliability of individual ratings (median r = .86). In Studies 2 and 3, subjects twice rated the prototypicality of characters from the film Twelve Angry Men as instances of seven trait dimensions. Agreement between individuals was again found to be substantially lower (median r = .56) than the retest reliability of individual ratings (median r = .81). These results may help to explain the unreliability of trait ratings based on examples of behavior (e.g., evaluation of employees or patients) and suggest that individual differences in the perception of prototypicality should be taken into account when comparing cross-situational with temporal consistency of behavior. Most generally, the results suggest a reconsideration of the nature of implicit personality theory.Do people agree about the meanings of common categories? Rosch (1975) has demonstrated that groups of subjects are well agreed in rating the prototypicality of instances of common object categories, categories such as vegetable and bird. Buss and Craik (1983) extended Rosen's paradigm to behaviors as instances of trait categories and found, as Rosch did, that group mean ratings are highly reliable. Buss and Craik noted, however, that the agreement of individual raters was far lower than the agreement of group means. Following up this observation, we show here that there are consistent individual differences in prototypicality ratings of instances of both concrete object and trait categories. These results may be important for both practical and theoretical issues in personality assessment.
Study 1According to prototypicality theory, categories are based on an ideal member (real or imaginary) to which all other instances are compared. No instances need to be excluded from a category, but the worst instances will exist on the outer periphery of the category, far from the central prototype (Rosch, 1973(Rosch, ,1975Rosch & Mervis, 1975). Rosch has used both reaction time measures and paper-and-pencil ratings to show that subjects tend to agree about the prototypicality of instances within a category. Most people seem to agree that a jeep is a clearer example of the vehicle category than a tricycle is. Indeed, mean prototypicality ratings of instances within a category are not
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