Relationship between Parental Attachment Styles, Emotional Regulation and Relationship Satisfaction in Adult Romantic Relationship

Abstract

Parental attachment styles are the manner in which parents engage with their children and shape their emotional development, this is something which an individual experiences since their childhood and it plays a major role in our life. The current research aimed to study the link between parental attachment types, emotional regulation, and relationship satisfaction among adult romantic relationships. A sample of 300 young adults who are presently dating or in a romantic relationship were selected through the purposive sampling method for this study. The study was done through the stepwise linear regression to see the impact of subcategories of parental attachment styles on the emotional regulation and relationship satisfaction in adult romantic relationships. Data was collected using the standardised scales; Adult Scale of Parental Attachment (Short Form), Difficulties in Emotional Regulation Scale (DERS-16) and Relationship Assessment Scale (RAS). The findings of the study showed that there is a significant impact of safe and dependent attachment on relationship satisfaction. Safe and dependent attachment accounted around (3%) of the positive and negative variance in relationship satisfaction and the other subcategories of parental attachment i.e., Parentified, fearful and distant were not significant to the relationship satisfaction. For Emotional Regulation, the result showed that there is a significant impact of dependent attachment on emotional regulation accounted around (10%) of the variance in emotional regulation and the other subcategories of parental attachment i.e., Safe, parentified, fearful and distant were not significant to the emotional regulation.