ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the extant literature on romantic attachment variability across gender, geography, and cultural forms. This review focuses on six specific questions:
Do the theoretical internal working models of attachment—models of “self” and models of “other”—underlie romantic attachment styles in the same way across all cultures (Bartholomew, 1990)?
Is the secure romantic attachment style normative across all cultures (i.e., is it the most common) (see van IJzendoorn and Sagi, 1999)?
Are East Asians particularly prone to preoccupied styles of insecure romantic attachment (Soon and Malley-Morrison, 2000), and if so, why?
Do cross-cultural patterns of attachment relate to local ecologies in ways that support or refute evolutionary theories of human sexuality (Belsky, Steinberg, and Draper, 1991; Chisholm, 1999)?
Are there universal gender differences in romantic attachment, particularly in the dismissing form of romantic attachment (Kirkpatrick, 1998)?
Does cross-cultural variation in the magnitude of gender differences in romantic attachment support or refute various evolutionary and social role theories of human mating (Belsky, Steinberg, and Draper, 1991; Eagly and Wood, 1999)?
