Exploring a Psycholinguistic Method of Assessing Attachment Orientation in Couple Therapy

Research conducted with the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) has provided a wealth of information regarding how adults behave in and respond to relationships. Unfortunately, despite the AAI's usefulness in assessing attachment orientation, administering the AAI requires intensive training, cost, and time. Because of this, a limited number of researchers are able to use the AAI despite the measure's demonstrated psychometric properties and utility for research related to attachment theory. The present study aimed to utilize the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software to assess attachment orientation in the context of an attachment-based couple therapy, with the broad goal of potentially expanding our ability to measure attachment orientation in research. The results indicate that attachment orientation is a meaningful metric for analyzing individuals' speech regarding their relationships in an attachment-based couple therapy.