Attachment in the time of COVID-19: Insecure attachment orientations are associated with defiance of authorities' guidelines during the pandemic.

Previous research has linked people's relational attachment orientations to emotional reactions and coping during crises, and to social trust and trust in societal institutions. The COVID-19 pandemic is a global crisis for which collective efforts, such as social distancing, are necessary to stop the spread of the virus. During previous pandemics, people high in trust have typically adhered to such efforts. In the present study, we investigated whether attachment orientations were related to people's adherence to authorities' guidelines to stop the spread of COVID-19. We also tested whether previous mediational findings-linking attachment-related avoidance to welfare state trust via social trust-would replicate. We used a web-based survey of 620 participants. Our findings showed that attachment-related anxiety was linked to low adherence to social distancing regulations. This finding was especially noteworthy because high attachment-anxious participants also experienced more negative emotions, yet negative emotions were generally linked to high adherence. Thus, people higher in attachment anxiety seem to have more difficulties in avoiding social situations despite heightened risk of catching and spreading the virus. In addition, attachment-related avoidance was negatively related to adherence and to welfare state trust, and its effects on welfare state trust were statistically mediated by low social trust.

Structure of Dark Triad Dirty Dozen Across Eight World Regions.

The Dark Triad (i.e., narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism) has garnered intense attention over the past 15 years. We examined the structure of these traits' measure-the Dark Triad Dirty Dozen (DTDD)-in a sample of 11,488 participants from three W.E.I.R.D. (i.e., North America, Oceania, Western Europe) and five non-W.E.I.R.D. (i.e., Asia, Middle East, non-Western Europe, South America, sub-Saharan Africa) world regions. The results confirmed the measurement invariance of the DTDD across participants' sex in all world regions, with men scoring higher than women on all traits (except for psychopathy in Asia, where the difference was not significant). We found evidence for metric (and partial scalar) measurement invariance within and between W.E.I.R.D. and non-W.E.I.R.D. world regions. The results generally support the structure of the DTDD.