Attachment to God
One of Dr. Hall’s primary interests is applying attachment theory (and relational theories more broadly) to our understanding of relationship with God. Attachments are gut level expectations (called “internal working models” in attachment theory) of how relationships with attachment figures work. Research in this area has sought to address the question of whether people’s attachment style(s) (which can described as secure, anxious, and distant) with God is similar to their attachment style(s) with human attachments figures (called “correspondence”) or different such that a secure attachment to God is thought to somehow compensate for insecure human attachments (called “compensation”). Dr. Hall and his colleagues have demonstrated that in answering this question, we must distinguish between people’s experience of God (implicit level) and people’s beliefs and behaviors (explicit level). When it comes to experience, the evidence suggests that people’s attachment to God is typically very similar to their human attachments. This has important implications for spiritual formation.
In an early study, Dr. Hall and colleagues looked at the association between emotional/relational maturity (similar to attachment but drawing on object relations theory) and spiritual maturity. They found significant parallels between these two domains. You can download the article at the link below.
A second study, also using self-report measures, showed that people’s attachment styles in human relationships correlated with their experiences of attachment to God and spirituality in general—what we called “implicit spirituality”. We also showed, as predicted, that there was no association between human attachment and religious/spiritual beliefs and behaviors. You can download the article using the link below.
Attachment to God and Implicit Spirituality: Clarifying Correspondence and Compensation Models
In our most recent study, former student, Dr. Annie Fujikawa did an interview study on attachment to God for her dissertation. We conducted the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) and the Spiritual Experiences Interview with about 20 students. We then coded both sets of interviews using the AAI coding system to arrive at an attachment category (secure, preoccupied, dismissing) for attachment to God, and attachment to humans for each participant. We found a 70% correspondence rate across both sets of interview codes, supporting our hypothesis that at the experiential (implicit) level, people’s attachment styles with God tend to be similar to their attachment styles with human attachment figures. This is an important study (in the process of being submitted for publication) because it is the first study we are aware of that uses implicit coding procedures (non self-report) based on interviews for both domains. We will post the article here soon.
Dr. Hall’s research team is currently conducting an interview study to identify themes within secure and insecure attachment styles for college students. You can read more about this on the spiritual exemplars study page.
