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This longitudinal study examined the course and bidirectional relation between posttraumatic distress and posttraumatic growth (PTG). A sample of Israeli ex-prisoners of war and matched controls were followed over 17 years. Participants' posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and anxiety symptoms were measured at three time-points. PTG was assessed twice. Applying an autoregressive cross-lagged modeling strategy, initial PTSD predicted subsequent PTG above and beyond PTG stability, but not vice versa. Cross-lagged relations of PTG to depression and anxiety were not significant. Moreover, analysis of PTG trajectory revealed that individuals with PTSD reported higher PTG levels across times than those without PTSD. Thus, growth is facilitated and maintained by endorsement rather than absence of PTSD. The findings are discussed in the context of the illusionary versus adaptive notion of PTG.

Attachment theorists have emphasized that attachment-anxious individuals are ambivalent in their relational tendencies, wishing to be close to their relationship partners but also fearing rejection. Here we report 6 studies examining the contribution of attachment anxiety and experimentally induced relational contexts (both positive and negative) to explicit and implicit manifestations of (a) attitudinal ambivalence toward a romantic partner and (b) motivational ambivalence with respect to the goals of relational closeness and distance. Attachment-anxious individuals exhibited strong attitudinal ambivalence toward a romantic partner, assessed by both explicit and implicit measures. They also exhibited strong motivational ambivalence regarding closeness (both explicit and implicit), and this motivational conflict was intensified in relational contexts that encouraged either approach or avoidance tendencies. Participants who scored relatively high on avoidant attachment proved to be implicitly ambivalent about distance issues but mainly in negative relational contexts. Several alternative interpretations of the results were considered and ruled out.

Romantic couples (N ϭ 127) engaged in a relationship conflict interaction during which their autonomic physiology, emotional experience, and emotional behavior were recorded. Couples were assigned randomly to one of two interventions, or to a control condition: In the affective suppression condition, one partner was instructed to refrain from expressing emotions. In the positive mindset condition, one partner was instructed to think about the positive aspects of the relationship. Results revealed that emotion regulation interventions influenced the physiology, emotional behavior, and emotional experience of both the manipulated person and his or her partner, who was oblivious to regulation manipulations. Specifically, suppression increased, and positive mindset decreased cardiovascular arousal and negative affect. These effects were generally exacerbated among those high on attachment anxiety and attenuated among those high on attachment avoidance. The results of this research corroborate and extend the Temporal Interpersonal Emotion Systems model (Butler, 2011) in the context of relationship conflict interactions.

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In 6 studies we examined procedural, scriptlike knowledge associated with 2 different kinds of attachment insecurity: anxiety and avoidance. The studies examined associations between attachment insecurities, the cognitive accessibility of sentinel and rapid fight-flight schemas, and the extent to which these schemas guide the processing of threat-related information and actual behavior during an experimentally induced threatening event. Anxious attachment was associated with (a) greater accessibility of the sentinel schema in narratives of threatening events; (b) faster, deeper, and more schema-biased processing of information about components of the sentinel schema; and (c) quicker detection of a threat. Avoidant attachment was associated with greater accessibility of the rapid fight-flight schema in narratives of threatening events and faster, deeper, and more schema-biased processing of information about components of the schema. We discuss implications of the findings for understanding the cognitive aspects of insecure people's coping strategies in threatening situations, as well as the potential benefits of these strategies to the people who enact them and to the groups to which they belong.

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