Adult Attachments in Kinetic Relationship Drawings

Indianapolis, IN

Prior research indicates that children's attachment styles predict the ways in which they depict family members in Kinetic Family Drawings. In this study our goal is to extend this research to examine whether adult attachment styles --specifically secure, avoidant, and resistant-ambivalent—predict the ways in which emerging adults depict family member, friends, and/ or romantic partners in their drawings. We examined this by having participants draw two pictures, a Kinetic Family Drawing and a Kinetic Relationship Drawing. Then, participants took Hazan and Shaver's (1987) adult relationship attachment questionnaire, followed by a demographics survey. For example, we expect that emerging adults with avoidant attachment will draw pictures without distinctive features and resistant-ambivalent attachment will draw pictures with wider distances between figures when being compared to the drawings of emerging adults with secure attachment.