Anxiously attached individuals feel more depressed when their partners phub them

A daily diary study found that anxiously attached individuals tend to feel more depressed and to experience lower self-esteem on days when they perceive that their partner is phubbing them more. Relationship satisfaction was not affected. Instead, phubbed anxiously attached participants tended to feel more resentment and curiosity, and were more likely to retaliate. The paper was published in the Journal of Personality.

Phubbing is the act of ignoring or paying less attention to someone you are physically with because you are focused on your phone. The word combines “phone” and “snubbing.” It can happen during conversations, meals, meetings, dates, family time, or any situation where one person keeps checking messages, social media, notifications, or other phone content.

Phubbing tends to make the other person feel unimportant, rejected, or less emotionally connected. In romantic relationships, frequent phubbing can reduce relationship satisfaction and increase conflict. In friendships and family relationships, it can make communication feel shallow or interrupted. Sometimes, people may phub others intentionally, but most often they do it without thinking because phones are designed to capture attention.

Study author Katherine B. Carnelley and her colleagues note that perceptions of partner phubbing are associated with lower relationship functioning. Phubbing behaviors tend to trigger negative emotions that may lead partners to retaliate against perceived phubbing by engaging with one’s own smartphone in the presence of a partner. They conducted a study investigating how one’s adult attachment style moderates the relationship between perceived phubbing, on one side, and relationship satisfaction, anger/frustration, personal well-being, and desire to retaliate, on the other.

Adult attachment refers to the emotional bond people form with important others, especially close partners, involving needs for closeness, security, support, and comfort. Attachment avoidance is a tendency to keep emotional distance and rely on independence, while attachment anxiety is a tendency to worry a lot about rejection, abandonment, or not being loved enough.

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These authors conducted a daily diary study. A daily diary study is a type of research design in which participants repeatedly report their experiences, feelings, behaviors, or events each day over a period of time, allowing researchers to study short-term psychological changes and developments in participants’ environments.

Participants in this daily diary study were 196 individuals recruited via online forums, social media, and word of mouth for a study on “mobile phone use in romantic relationships.” They were required to be adults living with their current partner and to have been in a romantic relationship for at least six months. Participants’ average age was 36 years. 144 of them were women, and 168 identified as straight/heterosexual. 54% of participants were employed full time, while 11% were students.

Participants were asked to complete 10 short diaries in the form of daily Qualtrics surveys over a period of 10 days, including a baseline survey. Participants completed an average of 7.91 daily diaries. For this, they either received 6 GBP as payment or were entered into a prize draw to win one of two 50 GBP Amazon vouchers.

The daily diary asked about daily perceived phubbing (four items adapted from the Phubbing Scale), relationship satisfaction (the satisfaction subscale of the Perceived Relationship Quality Component Inventory), self-esteem (“I have high self-esteem”), depressed/anxious mood (the 4-item Patient Health Questionnaire), anger (e.g., “Today, I felt angry”), responses to being phubbed (six questions about how they responded), and whether they retaliated (“I picked up my own phone and used it”) and why (with options being “To get back at my partner,” “I was bored,” “To seek support from others,” “To seek approval from others”). Participants also completed a baseline assessment of adult attachment anxiety and avoidance (the ECR-12 scale).

Results showed that, on average across all participants, days with higher perceived partner phubbing were associated with lower relationship satisfaction, higher anxious mood, and higher anger. However, when looking specifically at attachment styles, a different pattern emerged.

On days when they perceived that their partner was phubbing them more, participants with more pronounced attachment anxiety tended to report higher depressed mood and lower self-esteem. However, their daily relationship satisfaction was not significantly affected by the phubbing.

In such situations, participants with more pronounced attachment anxiety also tended to report more resentment, curiosity, and retaliation in response to phubbing. The frequency of reported reasons for retaliation tended to depend on one’s attachment pattern. People with more pronounced attachment anxiety tended to retaliate in order to seek support and approval from others, whereas those higher in attachment avoidance tended to do so solely to gain approval from others. Interestingly, individuals with higher attachment avoidance actually reported lower levels of conflict in response to phubbing compared to those with low attachment avoidance.

These results contribute to the scientific understanding of how adult attachment patterns influence couple interactions in the modern world. However, it should be noted that the sample was largely female and heterosexual, meaning the results might not fully generalize to more diverse populations. Furthermore, all data came from self-reports, leaving room for reporting bias to have affected the results.

The paper, “Attachment, Perceived Partner Phubbing, and Retaliation: A Daily Diary Study,” was authored by Katherine B. Carnelley, Claire M. Hart, Laura M. Vowels, and Tessa Thejas Thomas.