Seeking Security in the New Age: On Attachment and Emotional Compensation

Abstract

The purpose of the present cross-sectional questionnaire study was to construct a comprehensive and reliable scale to assess new age orientation as a continuous individual difference variable. Given large increases in new age orientation in Sweden in recent years, an additional purpose was to test our emotional compensation hypothesis by studying connections of retrospective parental and adult romantic attachment in relation to new age orientation, emotionally-based religiosity, and socialization-based religiosity, as well as to study links between attachment and several aspects of spiritual change. The study group included 193 participants from upper secondary school classes, Christian youth organizations, and new age establishments in Stockholm, Sweden. The new age orientation scale was shown to be unidimensional according to an exploratory factor analysis, and to possess adequate reliability and construct validity. In line with the emotional compensation predictions, new age orientation was directly linked to attachment insecurity and emotionally-based religiosity and inversely related to socialization-based religiosity. Attachment insecurity was also linked to the experience of spiritual changes, whereas most findings pertaining to characteristics of spiritual change did not support predictions. In general, unlike perceived attachment to parents, adult romantic attachment did not display the predicted pattern of results. It was concluded that attachment theory may make an important contribution by highlighting predisposing factors for new age orientation, as representing one aspect of the emotional compensation profile, but that several methodological improvements are necessary in future studies.The purpose of the present study was to establish a comprehensive, yet easily administered and reliable, scale that taps new age orientation as an individual difference variable, and to test whether our emotional compensation hypothesis, as derived from attachment theory, is applicable to new age orientation and spiritual changes. OUTLINE OF ATTACHMENT THEORYAttachment theory, as formulated by Bowlby (1969Bowlby ( , 1973Bowlby ( , 1980 and extended by Ainsworth (Ainsworth, Waters, Blehar, and Wall 1978) and others has been the topic of several good introductory chapters and books (see, e.g., Bretherton 1985Bretherton , 1987Bretherton , 1991Colin 1996;Weinfield, Sroufe, Egeland, and Carlson 1999). The theory is an empirically well-corroborated framework for the study of child-parent relations and their socioemotional correlates in subsequent development. It is not an overstatement to claim that attachment theory is the one leading relationship-oriented paradigm within research-oriented developmental psychology, one that has also been given increased attention among personality and social psychologists during the last decade.Attachment theory can be thought of as a "middle-level" evolutionary theory (see Buss 1995), originally devoted to considerations of the functional significance of the affectional bond within mammal...

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