More on childhood and romantic relationships...

Here is a further presentation relating to research on the connection between childhood experiences and adult relationships.

A key issue in this topic is that different approaches can explain the findings of studies such as the Love Quiz - in particular there is a Nature vs Nurture debate angle, as the temperament (genes) hypothesis and continuity (early experience) hypothesis both explain why securely attached babies grow into securely attached adults etc.

There is a good opportunity for a methodological discussion too. Questionnaires like the Love Quiz allow a lot of data to be collected, but samples generally end up being quite biased anyway (readers of the same paper, and a volunteer bias - what type of person responds to this kind of thing?). Structured interviews allow more valid judgements of childhood attachment type to be made, because it's harder for participants motivated by social desirability bias to 'cheat'. The Adult Attachment Interview uses body language and the consistency of answers to different questions to judge how truthful participants are being.

The results of such studies support the original findings - but it could still all be temperament, or social learning for that matter. An even bigger problem for psychologists in this field is that properly scientific testing of these hypotheses isn't possible. Why not? What would be necessary??