Gender-related romantic attachment and serum oxytocin level difference in adult patients with obsessive compulsive disorder

Background Given the scarcity of data on gender-related romantic attachment changes and the potential role of oxytocin (OT) in the pathophysiology of obsessive-compulsive illness (OCD), the current study aimed to assess gender-related differences in romantic attachment characteristics and their relationship to serum oxytocin in a set of forty OCD cases compared with a similar group of healthy controls .Simultaneously examining the gender differences in serum oxytocin levels in OCD patients, the diagnosis of OCD patients was determined using DSM-5 criteria, and the severity of OCD was determined using the Y-BOCS rating scale. All of the patients were drug-free and not depressed. The romantic attachment was assessed using the “Experiences in Close Relationship” Questionnaire. Standard ELISA kits were used to assess plasma OT levels. Results Regarding romantic attachments, patients with obsessive compulsive disorder scored higher on the anxiety and avoidance domains than controls with no significant gender difference. Serum oxytocin was higher in patients with OCD than in healthy controls, indicating a possible underlying pathophysiology of the illness. Also, there was a significant gender difference, with female patients having higher serum oxytocin and symptoms severity being negatively associated. Conclusions Taken together, these findings propose that OT may play a role in OCD pathophysiology with gender specificity. Also, OCD associated with insecure romantic attachment.

No effect of attachment avoidance on visual disengagement from a romantic partner’s face

Attachment avoidance (discomfort with closeness and intimacy) has been inconsistently linked to visual disengagement from emotional faces, with some studies finding disengagement toward specific emotional faces and others finding no effects. Although most studies use stranger faces as stimuli, it is likely that attachment effects would be most pronounced in the context of attachment relationships. The present study ( N = 92) combined ecologically valid stimuli (i.e., pictures of romantic partner’s face) with eye-tracking methods to more precisely test whether highly avoidant individuals are faster at disengaging from emotional faces. Unexpectedly, attachment avoidance had no effect on saccadic reaction time, regardless of face type or emotion. Instead, all participants took longer to disengage from romantic partner faces than from strangers’ faces, although this effect should be replicated in the future. Our results suggest that romantic attachments capture visual attention on an oculomotor level, regardless of one’s personal attachment orientations.

The Nature of Attachment Systems

Attachment theory is an enduring and generative framework for understanding infant and romantic relationships. As a lifespan phenomenon, attachment research has focused largely on developmental processes and how to link the infant attachments with later close relationships, but there has been comparably less scholarly attention targeted at the evolutionary origins and functionality of romantic attachments, in particular. Here, I advance a two-system approach to attachment, proposing that infant attachments and romantic attachments constitute etiologically distinct systems that evolved in response to different selection pressures, serve different evolutionary functions, and are fundamentally different in nature with regard to operation and necessity toward their respective evolutionary goals. This two-system approach has downstream implications for future attachment research, most notably with regard to how the romantic attachment system develops over the lifespan, and the extent to which romantic attachments guide the formation of relationships in adulthood.

Generational Trauma and the Crisis of Après-Coup In Alison Bechdel’s Graphic Memoirs

This essay suggests that Bechdel’s two autographic memoirs are indicative of the potential that exists in graphic narrative to provoke new dialogues with regard to how we approach, how we interpret, and how we interact with generational and familial trauma that stems from dysfunctional relationships with parental figures. Specifically, it examines how Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? builds upon the juxtapositions of the father-daughter bond in Fun Home by shifting the focus towards Bechdel’s traumatic relationship with her mother. This chapter argues that by explicitly weaving the narrative around a backdrop of psychology and psychoanalysis (D. W. Winnicott, Freud, Jung, and Lacan), Bechdel intentionally situates the “reader in the position of the analyst” (as quoted in The Paris Review). Drawing on Bechdel’s theory-rich content, this essay examines the figure of the mother as a shifting entity that mutates and molds itself onto substitute transitional objects and experiences, including Bechdel’s therapists and romantic attachments. Alternating among transcribed audio dialogues, diary entries, counseling sessions, dreams, letters, photographs, and memories, Are You My Mother? is an illustration of the Freudian concept of “afterwardness,” or, as Lacan coined it, après-coup—a retroactive understanding and re-visitation of earlier trauma.

Perceptions of infidelity: A comparison of sexual, emotional, cyber-, and parasocial behaviors

Previous research indicates that extradyadic sexual behaviors and other behaviors including emotional infidelity, pornography use, and online infidelity are considered to be acts of betrayal. However, perceptions of infidelity occurring through social media and of romantic parasocial relationships (one-sided romantic attachments formed with media figures) have not been well researched. In two exploratory studies, I examined a) the extent to which participants rated parasocial, sexual, emotional, and social media behaviors as infidelity, and b) how hurtful these behaviors would be if a partner were to enact them. I also examined how often participants reported having been negatively affected by their partner’s parasocial romances. Results indicate that activities such as sexting and sexy Snapchatting are perceived similarly to both cybersex and physical sexual infidelity, and that parasocial infidelity is seen similarly to pornography use. These similarities apply to whether the acts are seen as infidelity, and in terms of the emotional pain the acts may cause. These results indicate that extradyadic social media and parasocial behaviors can be negatively perceived, and may be likely to negatively affect real-life romantic relationships.

I’m Sweet on You

This chapter probes the narrators’ deep and enduring emotional and romantic attachments to other women, primarily by focusing on stories of dating and marriage. Johnson’s interlocutors recall: stories of how they met their partners, memories of particular dates, their family’s responses to their relationships, and, for some of them, how and when they decided to pursue marriage. Importantly, Johnson notes that all of these interviews took place before the Supreme Court case that legalized same-sex marriage across the nation in 2015. Despite the legal limits of partnership in Southern states, several of these women chose to remain in the region. Their choices reflect the need to think expansively about the possibilities for queer life for Black women in the South.

Sources of Consensus and Variegation in Cultural Affective Meanings

Societal cultures are grounded in characteristic and broadly shared meanings for particular identity labels, which encode social knowledge about the esteem, respect, and treatment that various types of people deserve. Although our cultural sentiments are predominantly shared with others, they also reflect our unique individual experiences. The present research examines the proposition that variegation in cultural affective meanings can be explained, in part, by sociodemographic characteristics, social position, and formative experiences in family and romantic relationships. Respondents from two universities of distinct racial and socioeconomic composition were found to have substantial consensus in their sentiments for social groups but to differ in these sentiments to a degree commonly found in cross-cultural comparisons. Where identity meanings diverge, race is an important predictor of differences in cultural sentiments, along with parents’ education and marital status, and disruption versus stability in parental and romantic attachments.

The Sheltered Life

“The Sheltered Life” looks at Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Ellen Glasgow’s attempts to sustain romantic attachments while maintaining their success as writers. Rawlings spent much of her time in Richmond interrogating friends and relations about Glasgow’s romantic relationships, especially her confirmed engagement to Henry Anderson. Rawlings herself was married to Norton Baskin after her initial marriage to Charles Rawlings fell apart over their volatile tempers and professional jealousies. Glasgow never married and found it difficult to sustain her romantic affairs for any length of time. Both women prioritized their professional lives as writers over romantic attachments and were regularly frustrated by their partners’ inability to understand their lives as writers.

Figures of Love in Later Romantic Antisemitism

This chapter draws on psychoanalytically inflected theories of ideology to offer a new explanation of the apparent inconsistencies of Arnim's antisemitism. Slavoj Žižek's concept of the “social fantasy” and Homi Bhabha's notion of “colonial mimicry” both stipulate that ideologies can incorporate a great deal of inconsistency and ambivalence without losing their effectiveness. These post-Freudian theories shed new light on Arnim precisely because ambiguity and ambivalence proliferate in his writings around the motif of interreligious love. It is shown that romantic attachments are the means by which Arnim figures the possibilities and the limits of Christian-Jewish rapprochement. It is also argued that interfaith love stories fulfill a distinct function in Arnim's political thought, which combines German nationalism with a critique of rising industrial capitalism. Arnim wrote several texts that either stage the emergence of a German community that excludes Jews or depict the corrosion of such a community through French occupation and rising industrial capitalism. These texts include the openly antisemitic speech “On the Distinguishing Signs of Jewishness,” the unpublished prose fragment “Reconciliation in the Summer Holiday,” and the complex novella Gentry by Entailment (Die Majorats-Herren). In each of these texts, the dramatization of failing Christian-Jewish love affairs serves to gloss over the tensions that trouble Arnim's visions of social harmony and political unity.

Why was this Music Desirable? On A Critical Explanation of the Avant-Garde

In the introduction to his Oxford History of Western Music (2005), Richard Taruskin writes that his account of music history is based in the work of individual people, their statements, and their actions, as opposed to the power of ideas, teleologies, and romantic attachments to style criticism. He also claims that a “true history” of music can overcome the survey genre by offering causal explanations of historical events. In his discussion of the Cold War avant-garde, however, Taruskin points the way toward a slightly different kind of historiography by employing what I call a critical explanation. It is based in a causal question—Why was this desirable?—but the ensuing explanation resembles the hermeneutics of suspicion typically associated with thinkers such as Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, all of whom were skeptical of the view that individuals are agents of their actions. I argue that Taruskin’s approach to the era has a methodological upshot, enabling readers to evaluate how the Cold War avant-garde might be linked with social and intellectual history in new ways. To demonstrate this, the article begins with a theoretical discussion of causality and its complex relationship to empiricism, proceeds through a survey of Taruskin’s use of existentialism as a critical explanation of the Cold War avant-garde, and ends with an account of some historical details concerning the era’s intellectual actors that expands on a few of the issues his critical explanation presents.