Psychological Attachment Style Determination Using a Word Space Model

Abstract

In this work we experiment with the hypothesis that words a subject uses and their psychological attachment style (as defined by Bartholomew and Horowitz), can be related. In order to verify this hypothesis, we identified characteristic patterns for each style of attachment (secure, fearful, dismissing, preoccupied) by mapping words in to a word space modelon a series of autobiographic texts written by a set of 202 participants. Additionally, a psychological instrument (questionnaire) was applied to these same participants to measure their attachment style. A Support Vector Machine was trained, and we found that attachment stylecould be predicted from text within a range of 64% to 85% for different attachment styles.