MARIO MIKULINCER Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya PHILLIP R. SHAVER University of California, Davis* Adult Attachment Orientations and Relationship Processes In the present article we provide an overview of attachment theory as it has been adapted and tested in our research program. We then review attachment research by many investigators on a variety of topics likely to be of interest to family researchers: patterns of communication, management of conflict, provision of care and support to relationship partners and family members, family dynamics, and the emergence of attachment patterns within families We were generously invited to provide an overview of adult attachment research that might be useful for family researchers, and we do so here with pleasure. Our work (summarized in Mikulincer & Shaver, 2007a, and updated here) relies on concepts and methods from contem- porary personality and social psychology and is based primarily on studies of adolescents and adults. Because we were trained as personal- ity and social psychologists, we generally use self-report measures of individual differences in attachment orientation and a variety of labo- ratory tasks and experimental interventions to probe underlying processes. There is another School of Psychology, Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, PO Box 167, Herzliya 46150, Israel (mario@idc.ac.il). *Department of Psychology, University of California, Davis, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616-8686 (prshaver@ucdavis.edu). Key Words: adult attachment, caregiver-child, social psychology of relationships. important approach to measuring and study- ing adult attachment (reviewed, e.g., by Main, Hesse, & Goldwyn, 2009), which we do not have space to review extensively here. Both of these approaches, using self-report measures or the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI; Main et al., 2008), are explained in the Handbook of Attach- ment, coedited by Cassidy and Shaver (2008); some of the similarities and differences between the approaches were outlined recently by Rois- man (2009). We refer in this article to AAI stud- ies only when they support a theoretical predic- tion not fully studied using our kinds of methods. In the present article we provide an overview of attachment theory as it has been adapted and tested in our research program; we then review attachment research by many investigators on a variety of topics likely to be of interest to family researchers: patterns of communication, management of conflict, provision of care and support to relationship partners and family members, family dynamics, and the emergence of attachment patterns within families. OVERVIEW OF ADULT ATTACHMENT THEORY As a psychoanalyst, the originator of attachment theory, John Bowlby (1982), assumed that the explanation of adult behavior lay somewhere in early parent-child interactions, but he was dissatisfied with the psychoanalytic theories of his time. They conceptualized human motivation in terms of drives, and they explained a child’s emotional ties to parents in terms of benefits Journal of Family Theory & Review 4 (December 2012): 259–274 259 DOI:10.1111/j.1756-2589.2012.00142.x