Date of Award

2026

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Psychology (PsyD)

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

Dr. Or Dagan

Second Advisor

Dr. Marc Diener

Third Advisor

Dr. Michael Katz

Abstract

Adult insecure and disorganized attachment representations have been shown to be consistently associated with internalizing and externalizing symptoms in adulthood. A recently validated coding system (Groh & Haydon, 2024) was developed to assess insecure (i.e., deactivating and hyperactivating) and disorganized (i.e., anomalous) scripted attachment representations via the Attachment Script Assessment (ASA; Waters & Waters, 2006) – a word prompt task traditionally designed to assess secure base script knowledge. Deactivating scripts reflect minimized or ignored attachment-relevant problems; hyperactivating scripts entail exacerbated attachment-relevant issues; and scripts with anomalous content contain disorganized or contradictory attachment-relevant concerns that shape how caregiving interactions are expected to unfold. This study is the first to assess the degree to which deactivating, hyperactivating, and anomalous attachment scripts predicted self-reported internalizing and externalizing symptoms in adulthood, as well as specific depressive, anxiety, somatic, avoidant personality, attention-deficit/hyperactive, and antisocial personality symptom clusters. We hypothesized that all insecure and anomalous content attachment scripts would be positively associated with internalizing and externalizing symptoms, except for deactivation scripts, which would be negatively associated with internalizing symptoms. Additionally, we hypothesized that all three novel attachment scripts would be significantly associated with psychopathology symptoms above and beyond traditional secure base script knowledge coding and covariates of interest. Results indicated that anomalous content was significantly associated with greater externalizing and anxiety symptoms, even after accounting for secure base script knowledge and covariates. Deactivating and hyperactivating attachment scripts were not significantly associated with psychopathology. In line with literature that uses the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI; George et al., 1985) to assess disorganized attachment, these findings suggest that anomalous content may reflect a particularly meaningful dimension linked to adult psychopathology. Future research should replicate these findings in more diverse samples and explore links between Groh and Haydon’s (2024) ASA coding system and psychopathology. Keywords: Attachment, anomalous content, deactivating, hyperactivating, psychopathology, script

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