Keely Dugan

• University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Objective Personality traits such as conscientiousness and emotional stability are consistently linked with better metabolic health, but there is limited evidence on the etiology of these associations and their robustness across the life‐span. Methods Therefore, we estimated phenotypic, genetic, and unique environmental associations of traits inde...

Existing work on the contribution of life events and person characteristics to changes in attachment has mostly overlooked interactions between events and characteristics. Using 15 common events and ten personality characteristics in a multi-wave longitudinal study of 6,566 people, we examined whether person characteristics moderate the impact of l...

Adolescence is a period of rapid social changes that may have important implications for the ways adolescents think, feel, and behave in their close relationships. According to family systems theory, adolescents’ attachment-related changes have the potential to spread throughout their family system, leading to coordinated changes in parents’ and ad...

Attachment theory, as originally outlined by Bowlby (1973, 1980, 1969/1982), suggests that the ways people think, feel, and behave in close relationships are shaped by the dynamic interplay between their genes and their social environment. Research on adult attachment, however, has largely focused on the latter, providing only a partial picture of...

According to the canalization hypothesis of attachment theory (Bowlby, 1973), people’s trajectories of attachment security should become increasingly stable and buffered against external pressures as their relationships progress. The present study aimed to examine this hypothesis within the context of romantic relationships. We analyzed longitudina...

Objective: Personality changes across the life span. Life events, such as marriage, becoming a parent, and retirement, have been proposed as facilitating personality growth via the adoption of novel social roles. However, empirical evidence linking life events with personality development is sparse. Most studies have relied on few assessments sepa...

Attachment theorists suggest that people construct a number of distinct working models throughout life. People develop global working models, which reflect their expectations and beliefs concerning relationships in general, as well as relationship-specific working models of close others—their mothers, fathers, romantic partners, and friends. The pr...

The present research examined whether a dismissing attachment style (i.e., being high in attachment avoidance and low in attachment anxiety) is a risk factor for low subjective well-being (SWB). Specifically, we examined the associations between dismissing attachment and two indicators of SWB: global life satisfaction and daily affect. Self-reports...

Attachment theory suggests that romantic relationship dynamics are not only shaped by how people relate to their partners but also by the bonds they share with other important people in their lives. The present study investigated how parental and partner attachment representations work together to predict romantic relationship functioning. In addit...