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Personality, Attachment, and Well-Being in Adolescents: The Independent Effect of Attachment After Controlling for Personality

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Abstract

Although there is evidence that parental attachment and personality interact during development and exert mutual influences on one another, studies describing how parental attachment and personality dimensions interact in predicting well-being are scarce. Studies that help clarify the shared and unique variance on well-being explained by these two constructs are required, and as such, the objective of the present study was to describe the relationships between personality, attachment, and well-being. A total of 336 adolescents participated in this study (M age = 15 years; SD = 1.73). Participants completed self-report measures of personality, attachment, and well-being. The present study expands current knowledge in three ways. First, attachment dimensions of communication, trust, and involvement were significant predictors of well-being, even after controlling for age, gender, and personality dimensions. Second, age and gender moderate the associations between parental attachment and cognitive (but not affective) well-being, reflecting the representations systems, which are culturally and socially construed underlying cognitive well-being. Third, adolescents low in self-directedness and low in persistence are more dependent on their parental attachment to have better well-being. In sum, our results support the idea that parental attachment is one of the most crucial mechanisms for the promotion of well-being  as it acts as a promoter of the development of adolescent socio-cognitive processes (such as self-directedness, which development depends strongly on the parental factors) as well as a coping mechanism for those with less adaptive personality characteristics.

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Funding

This work was supported by grants from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) (PTDC/MHC-CED/2224/2014; and CIPD-BI-UID/PSI/04375/2016); and by the Minerva Foundation – Ensino, Cultura e Investigação Científica (the founding organization of the Lusíada Universities).

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  1. Instituto de Psicologia e de Ciências da Educação, Centro de Investigação em Psicologia para o Desenvolvimento (CIPD), Universidade Lusíada-Norte (Porto), Rua Dr. Lopo de Carvalho, 4369-006, Porto, Portugal

    Paulo Moreira, Susana Pedras, Márcia Silva, Maria Moreira & Joana Oliveira

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  1. Paulo Moreira
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  2. Susana Pedras
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  3. Márcia Silva
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  4. Maria Moreira
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PM: Conceptualization, Methodology, Supervision, Project administration, Funding acquisition, Writing—Review and Editing. SP: Formal analysis, Writing—Original draft. Writing—Review and Editing, Visualization. MS: Data curation; Investigation, Methodology. MM—Data curation; Investigation, Methodology. JO—Supervision, Project administration.

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Correspondence to Paulo Moreira.

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Moreira, P., Pedras, S., Silva, M. et al. Personality, Attachment, and Well-Being in Adolescents: The Independent Effect of Attachment After Controlling for Personality. J Happiness Stud 22, 1855–1888 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-020-00299-5

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