Discuss the affect of early attachment on adult relationships.

continuity into adulthood, establishing attachment type of the adult and how they experience love.In support of this, Haven and Shaver submitted a love quiz into a local newspaper asking questions of adult relationship experience and adjectives describing parental relationships. They found similarities between childhood and adult relationship experience, with those who are securely attached as a child lasting twice as long there adult relationships. Secure adults reportedly were trusting and had greatest intimacy with their partners; however insecure adults lacked trust and were fearful of intimacy, even doubting the existence of love. However there are many weaknesses of self report research, with demand characteristics, memory issues, cultural bias and how generalisable the results are. Self report methods aren't a scientific method for drawing conclusions on cause and affect, with demand characteristics being an issue for the validity of results. The participants may have given socially desirable responses or even have guessed the aim of the experiment. Also, memory can be affected through retrieval, meaning it can become distorted to how participants now feel about their parents and not their childhood experiences, reducing accuracy of results. The research cannot be generalised due to the local sample being used, only collecting the data from those who read the local newspaper and filled in the quiz. Furthermore, the idea of attachment type is ethnocentric and therefore there is cultural bias, with the results being restricted to that culture and therefore the theory can't be universal.Feeney and Noller however found research to suggest this theory is flawed, finding that there is a variation of relationships an individual experiences in adulthood, with some relationships being different in terms of secure and insecure attachment and lasting different lengths. This challenges the idea that attachment type of relationships is consistent within every relationship the individual experiences. In relation to this Hamilton found that a child can be change from being secure to insecure in attachment type after a major life event, for example if a loved one dies. From this it can be suggested that a comparison with early life is harder because of life events and other variables which affect attachment type, such as peer relations. The early attachment theory has also been criticised for being deterministic, suggesting that first attachment determines all future attachments and relationship types, however Hamilton challenges this idea by suggesting people's life experiences and later relationships also play a role in romantic love. Therefore it can be suggested that the diathesis stress model can be used in explaining this, with both early and later relationships and experiences being relevant to romantic relationships.