Defenseless against art? Impact of reading fiction on emotion in avoidantly attached individuals Maja Djikic a, * , Keith Oatley a , Sara Zoeterman b , Jordan B. Peterson a a University of Toronto, Desautels Center for Integrative Thinking, Joseph L. Rotman School of Management, 105 St. George Street, Toronto, Ont., Canada M5S 3E6 b Teachers College, Columbia University, Box 302, 525 West 120th Street, New York, NY 10027-6696 article info Article history: Available online 17 October 2008 Keywords: Art Avoidant attachment Emotion Literature abstract An experiment tested the hypothesis that literature can subvert habitual emotional disengagement of avoidantly attached individuals. After completing the Attachment Style Questionnaire and an Emotion Checklist, 166 participants were randomly assigned to either an Art or a Control condition. Those in the Art condition read the short story The Lady with the Toy Dog by [Chekhov, A. (1899/1990). The lady with a toy dog. In S. Applebaum (Ed.), Five great short stories. Dover Thrift Editions: Springer]. Those in the Control condition read a comparison text that was documentary in format, and had the same content, length, reading difficulty, and interest. Following this, all participants completed the Emotion Checklist again. As hypothesized, an interaction between Attachment Style and Condition was found: Individuals who scored above the median on avoidant attachment experienced significantly greater Emotion Change in the Art condition than in the Control condition. Ó 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Can art pierce or circumvent psychological defenses? Psycho- logical defense is a process that involves avoiding or reducing pain- ful emotions (Paulhus, Fridhandler, & Hayes, 1997). Researchers have shown that avoiding occasions for certain kinds of emotion can begin in infancy (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978) and persist into adulthood (Hazan & Shaver, 1994). Infants who are not able to elicit responses from, or who are rejected by, their caregivers, tend to avoid attachment and thereby preclude the anx- iety and distress associated with seeking comfort from an unre- sponsive attachment figure (Kobak & Sceery, 1988). This behavior often continues into adulthood, and avoidantly attached individu- als are less likely to seek support from their partners in times of distress (Collins & Feeney, 2000; Simpson, Rholes, & Nelligan, 1992), and less likely to provide support to their partners in times of need (Feeney & Collins, 2001). Despite the possibility that emotional and cognitive detach- ment exhibited by avoidantly attached people point to both dimin- ished negative emotionality and need for attachment, physiological research has shown the issue to be more compli- cated. Zilber, Goldstein, and Mikulincer (2007) found that those high in avoidant attachment showed amplified Late Positive Poten- tial to negative emotional pictures, a response similar to that of those who were low in avoidant attachment. Furthermore, the re- duced subjective or self-reported negative emotionality commonly reported by avoidantly attached individuals (Feeney, 1999; Mikul- incer, 1998) was accompanied by an increased sympathetic ner- vous system reactivity (Diamond, Hicks, & Otter-Henderson, 2006), which is associated with detrimental long-term health out- comes (Repetti, Tayor, & Seeman, 2002; Ryff, Singer, Wing, & Love, 2001). Given that about 25% of adults identify themselves as avoi- dantly attached (Mickelson, Kessler, & Shaver, 1997), discovering ways to reduce avoidance of emotion is important. One way may be art. The link between art and emotion is deep and variegated (Cupc- hik, 2006; Silvia, 2005). Artists betray unconscious preoccupation with emotions when speaking about their work (Djikic, Oatley, & Peterson, 2006). On their side, readers experience emotions in empathy with characters they read about (Oatley, 1999; Oatley, 2006), in the course of simulating the plans and events of a piece of fiction. The emotions prompted by art are not inferior to emo- tions experienced in other contexts. Although the more intense emotions of human tragedy and joy in real life are not matched by those of reading short stories, and although the emotions people report during reading of fiction are usually of shorter duration, they are not dissimilar in kind or intensity from those people typ- ically record in diary studies of emotions in everyday life (Oatley, 1994). Given the close links between art and emotion, one may ask: could art penetrate defenses that have been carefully built by avoi- dantly attached individuals? We propose that although art prompts emotions, it seems to do this in a non-threatening way. 0092-6566/$ - see front matter Ó 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jrp.2008.09.003 * Corresponding author. E-mail address: maja.djikic@rotman.utoronto.ca (M. Djikic). Journal of Research in Personality 43 (2009) 14–17 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Research in Personality journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jrp