#1257 Jeffry Simpson: Attachment Styles and Interpersonal Relationships

00:00 Ricardo Lopes: Hello everyone. Welcome to a new episode of The Dissenter. I'm your host, as always, Ricardo Lops, and today I'm joined by Dr. Jeffrey Simpson. He's distinguished university teaching professor and chair of the Department of Psychology at the University of Minnesota, where he also directs the Doctoral minor in interpersonal relationships, and today we're going to talk about interpersonal relationships but focusing mostly on attachment theory, attachment styles, and how they manifest in interpersonal relationships. So Dr. Simpson, welcome to the show. It's a pleasure to everyone.

00:39 Jeffry Simpson: It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you.

00:42 Ricardo Lopes: So before we get into attachment theory itself, uh, let me just ask you, because of course we're going to apply it to interpersonal relationships, what are the most basic aspects of interpersonal relationships? Where exactly do their foundations start getting built in life?

01:07 Jeffry Simpson: I think the most important aspects are in the way that relationships kind of allow people to live their lives and navigate their social worlds in a way that feels as comfortable and flexible to them as possible. And so, I mean, relationships are We've learned in the last 30 or so, 40 years that relationships are very important, um, in that, um, when they, when they go well, your life tends to be better, you tend to be a better parent, you tend to be happier, uh, have higher well-being. You tend to actually, you know, do better at work and enjoy your work more. And when they don't go well, um, they can be really damaging and debilitating. And they can affect your physical health, um, in, in some cases, even as much as engaging in vices like smoking and, and being overweight or eating poorly, a poor diet, etc. Uh, AND so, uh, for many years, it was assumed basically that relationships, sure, they were important, but they really didn't have really positive or really negative effects on people in multiple domains of life. Mental health, physical health, well-being, but we know now, know that they're very powerful.

02:26 Ricardo Lopes: So they basically can influence, I mean, most or even every single aspect of our lives in in positive or negative ways,

02:39 Jeffry Simpson: in positive or negative ways, yes, yes. Mm.

02:43 Ricardo Lopes: And what is the importance of attachment theory when it comes to understanding interpersonal relationships? I mean, how much of a role does attachment theory and attachment styles play, and how much do they allow for us to have a better grasp on interpersonal relationships?

03:03 Jeffry Simpson: Very good question. Very good question. So attachment theory, what makes it unique compared to other major theories of relationships is it's a lifespan theory. It's a lifespan theory of, of social and personality development from the beginning of life across life. And so what it argues is that Um, what's happening in your current relationships is partly a vestige of what happened to you with other important people in your life, your parents, your earlier friends, your earlier romantic partners, your earlier attachment figures, uh, in life. Um, AND although the past doesn't dictate or determine. What you're like in a current relationship, there's probably, and we've got some evidence of this actually more recently, there's vestiges of your past that still are there, even if you're in better relationships, uh, or worse relationships as an adult.

04:03 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. And what different styles of attachment are there? And could you just briefly characterize each of them?

04:13 Jeffry Simpson: Yeah. Um, WELL, it depends a little bit on whether or not you're focusing on attachment in children versus attachment in adults, but there is a lot of overlap. The, the terminology differs a little bit, but what they kind of assess in terms of the way people regulate their emotions in relationships are very, very similar. So, in the adult area, there are basically 4 types of uh what we call normative or within normal range attachment styles, and then there's a disorganized style, which is pretty maladaptive. So, You have securely attached people. That's the majority actually of people in many cultures, and these people have both a positive view of themselves as partners in relationships and a positive view of their close others. Uh, AND, uh, and so they tend to be very well adjusted. They tend to Adopt what are known as problem-focused emotion regulation strategies. So when they're upset, what secure people do is they, they, they use their partner as a resource to help them manage their emotions, solve their problems, and return to normal everyday life. Um. Then you have, uh, anxious people. Anxious people, it's a small percentage of, of most populations. It's usually 10 or 15% of people who really are in this category. Um, ANXIOUS people have a, uh, a negative view of themselves as partners, but, uh, a, a guarded positive view of others. So they're hoping their partners are going to be there for them, but they aren't quite sure. Uh, AND it makes them hypervigilant. It makes them, um, wanting to receive reassurance. Uh, THEY, they feel like they're going to be abandoned or left, and so they become very clingy, and they're difficult to be with because of these, of these features, but they've, they've learned in the past that they have to do this because they can't count on people staying with them. Um, AND then you've got two kinds of avoidant people. You've got dismissive avoidant people, and then you've got fearful avoidant people. So, dismissive avoidant people have a negative view of partners, but a positive yet brutal view of themselves. Um, SO they think that, you know, they're kind of above attachment needs. They feel like they don't need people to kind of, you know, be stable and fulfill their lives, um, and they, they have a negative. Negative view of, of other people. Uh, AND so there's kind of like they're kind of condescending, they're aloof, um, they're independent, they're autonomous, um, but at, at some level, they really do need contact with people, just that they want it on their own terms. Um, THE other type of avoidant person is a fearful person. And they have both a negative view of themselves as partners and also a negative view of other people as partners. And so these people basically are kind of a combination of avoidant and anxious tendencies, uh, and they kind of go back and forth between the two depending on, on the situation. So you can think of these four styles as in a two-dimensional space where one dimension is, is whether or not or the degree to which you have a positive view of who you are. Uh, uh, YOUR self-esteem in relationships, um, positive or negative, and the other dimension is your view of your partner. Is it positive or is it negative? And then another dimension which is kind of more, more in the clinical realm is called a disorganized attachment style, and this actually reflects a lack of a coherent strategy to kind of regulate your emotions when you're upset and to negotiate and deal with people. So people who are disorganized have oftentimes been really treated extremely badly earlier in life. They've been abused. They've been maltreated. Um, AND they basically again have no coherent strategy for dealing with negative situations and negative feelings when they're upset.

08:28 Ricardo Lopes: But let me just ask you, uh, because I mean there's secure attachment, secure attachment style, and then is it that the avoidant, the fearful, and the anxious are all insecure kinds of attachment style, and, and if so, I'm Are they always psychologically considered negative, or can they be adaptive depending on the situation, on the context, on the kind of interpersonal relationship, and so on?

09:01 Jeffry Simpson: Excellent question. Excellent question. Yes, they all, all of those different styles, um, anxious, dismissive avoidant, fearful avoidant, and disorganized are insecure styles and this is something that a lot of people in the public don't understand. They Disorganization is not adaptive because there's no strategy there. You're kind of like bandied about by what's happening to you and you don't know how to deal with it. But the other types of insecurity that are more in the normal or normative range, anxious, fearful, avoidant, and dismissive avoidant, they are adaptive at some level because what people have, what these people have learned in their history is that they, they, they can't assume their partners are going to necessarily be there for them in the way that they need. And so they have to find a way of regulating their emotions that will allow them to get what they need from their partners. And so what anxious people do, they've learned that they can't really count on people from their past experiences. What they do is they kind of clamor for attention and they clamor for reassurance and they cling. But that's an adaptive thing to do if you've had a history of partners who are kind of fickled and you know, you can't predict what they're going to do. You want to get their attention and you want to keep their attention. So that's an adaptive actual, actually strategy given that it's based upon what's happened to you in prior close relationships. And the same is true of avoidance. I mean, the idea behind avoidance, at least early on in life, is that um An avoidance strategy allows you to make sure that you don't drive away, uh, an attachment figure, let's say a mother or a father or even a close friend, um, who may not be highly motivated to stay with you. Uh, SO, you kind of like, you don't push them too hard. You, you, you become independent, you become autonomous, you give them space, um, and that allows you to maintain that relationship. But without driving them away. And so, in, in that sense, avoidance is also an adaptive strategy. Uh, AVOIDANT people usually have a history of being, uh, rejected at least mildly, not necessarily kind of totally pushed away, but kind of rebuffed and kind of like, um, not given sufficient attention and so they've learned to become self-reliant. Um, AND that's a very, a very adaptive thing to do. If you have a history of partners who forced you to become independent. Right,

11:35 Ricardo Lopes: so I want to ask you about how these attachment styles develop, and I want to go through each of the potential factors that might play a role here. So are there or do we know of any genetic predispositions to developing any particular kind of attachment style?

11:57 Jeffry Simpson: That's another really good question. So, uh, the, the early twin studies that were done showed very low heritability levels. In other words, there didn't appear to be much of a genetic basis to these styles. This is unlike personality traits. So, if you look at the big five, for example, um, uh, openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion. Uh, AGREEABLENESS and neuroticism, those are the big five. All of those tend to have heritabilities that are around 40 or 50%, with the other 50 or 60% being due to environmental factors or to error in measurement, things like that. The early studies on attachment were the heritability percentages were a lot lower, but there's been, there's been some more recent work with bigger samples to show that there is, there's probably were underestimates of the heritability. It still isn't, as far as I know, at the level of, of personality trait like extroversion, which might be 40, 50% heritable. Um, BUT there might be a little bit of heritability, but the idea behind attachment theory, going back to John Bowlby, who developed the theory, is that these styles largely reflect the way you were treated in prior relationships with attachment figures, people who you depended on. Uh, FOR protection, for advice, for support, for care, and so the idea is that they probably are largely environmentally determined, and we've actually started to, these ideas have been out there for a long time. There's been a lot of work looking at attachment. Um, ACROSS the lifespan, but we're just now beginning to understand what are the environmental factors that affect adult attachment styles toward your parents when you're an adult, toward your friends when you're an adult, and toward your romantic partner or partners when you're an adult.

13:58 Ricardo Lopes: So when it comes to environmental factors apart from your early experiences with interpersonal relationships, are there any other aspects of the environment, any other environmental factors that might play a role in the development of attachment?

14:17 Jeffry Simpson: Yeah, they're what we've learned, we've recently did a published a study, in fact, it was published only a couple of months ago. In the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology where we had data on 700 people from very early in life, pretty much the time they were born. Into uh late, late adolescence, early adulthood, late twenties, basically. Um, AND we had really good measures of what happened to them at various points in development with their mother, with their father, with their friends in the context of their school, um, and also with the romantic partners. And what we found in terms of the relationship, uh, variables is that, um, individuals who had more sensitive, uh, parents, parents who actually, this is based upon videotaped ratings actually of Young the participants when they were young as children interacting with their mother and father in stressful situations, that that people who had got more sensitive parenting, especially from their mothers, who felt closer to their mothers, who had less conflict, who experienced lower levels of hostility, those people became more secure or were more secure in all kinds of different relationships in adulthood. Um, AND we also found with regard to friends. Friends are also very, very important that if you, uh, had high-quality friendships earlier in life and you are more competent, socially competent as a peer in the context of friendships, you are more likely to have secure. RO man tic relationships later in life. And so those are the primary variables that we've studied that makes sense theoretically as well that predict adult attachment styles, be they with regard to your attachment to your mother or your father or your friend or your romantic partner. But there are some other things. I mean, for example, we've done some work that's shown that simply having a stressful life. Being experiencing a lot of daily stress due to lack of money, due to interpersonal conflicts, due to, you know, the things that life throws at you, that can make people also more insecure in general. Um, AND so, that's another factor. It's important though to, to realize that attachment theory is a theory that suggests that people can change uh as your environment changes, as the quality of your interpersonal relationships as you go across life changes, you can change your attachment styles and that's why, that's why therapy, we have therapy and why therapy works. And why it's important to find a partner or find a close friend who can help kind of correct the way you think about things if you come in those relationships as an insecure person. Right. There is a, there, there are, the, the, again, the theory says that, you know, your, your, your experience across life is not necessarily going to be consistently bad or consistently good. It's gonna vary depending on who you meet and what kinds of things you are doing at, at different stages of life and so, people do change.

17:43 Ricardo Lopes: Mm. I think that you've already addressed this question, at least partially, but what is the role that unique life experiences might play in attachment styles?

17:57 Jeffry Simpson: Yeah, yeah, I know you have a lot of them, and this is, um, there is a concept in attachment theory called earned security, and what it suggests is that some people start out in life being insecure for some of the reasons I just indicated. But they uh have experiences that allow them to become more secure without being in therapy, just life experiences. So one example is, um, mentors or teachers, important teachers in your life that allow you to correct the way you think about the degree to which you can trust other people and the degree to which you're you're valuable as a person. Uh, SO teachers can be, uh, transformative figures that can change your, um, your relationship. Mentors, um, and mentors can sometimes be good, but sometimes they can be bad if they betray trust, right? Uh, SO mentors, uh, your involvement in, you know, organizations as athletic organizations, scouting. Um, YOU know, other kinds of things that kids, uh, and adolescents get involved in, those, those, uh, people sometimes can be at least surrogate attachment figures, um, as you develop and your experiences with them can also kind of shift your trajectory based upon your earlier experiences with, let's say, family members or other, other people in your life.

19:23 Ricardo Lopes: So I think you've already talked about this, but then at the attachment styles, I mean whatever kind of attachment style we develop applies to all kinds of different interpersonal relationships. I mean, being with family members, friends, romantic partners, and so on.

19:47 Jeffry Simpson: Mhm, YEAH, definitely. Definitely. And I, I should mention one more thing regarding change. Going back to the study that I talked about where we had, we studied about 700 people across time. What we also found in that study, and this is one of the novel parts of it, is that because we had measures of sensitivity and closeness and conflict and hostility at multiple points in time, we could look at trajectories of change. So, for example, some people start out with an insensitive mother and or father. They have a bad relationship early in life. There's a lot of hostility, but it gets better. It gets better as they move into, let's say the elementary school. It gets even better as they move into high school and beyond. We also found that if you are experiencing an upward trajectory, things are getting better. You tend to be more secure. Independent of what happened to you earlier in life. So that it's not just, it's not just where you start, it's the trajectory that you're on that also independently predicts the degree to which you're secure or insecure later in life. And again, it just shows that, you know, things change and as things change, people kind of recalibrate the way they think about themselves in relationships. They recalibrate the way they think about other people. Uh, THEY make adjustments and they then change the way they interact, how they think, feel, and behave with regard to their, their current partners.

21:20 Ricardo Lopes: But I mean, I think this question is important. Do people have even if their attachment style can change, we've already talked about that, but do people have one single attachment style to everyone and every kind of relationship, or can they have different or men. Manifest different attachment styles to different people. So let's say, could I have, for example, a secure attachment style with a particular friend, and at the same time I have an avoidant attachment style with my father and an anxious attachment style with another friend depending on The way that our relationship develops.

22:08 Jeffry Simpson: Yeah, you're accurate. Most people, the vast majority, there are some cases where there's probably consistency across those types of relationships. I'll talk about in a moment, but, but typically what you find is that people differ depending on not only the type of relationship, at least a little bit. But also the person that you're with because your, your attachment is also a function of who you're with at that point in time and what they're like. So, for example, if you're with, uh, if you have a history of avoidance, but you get involved with a romantic partner who's rock solid secure, and you will, and they, and they know how to provide you with tailored support so that you feel like you have sufficient independence, but you can also turn to them for help. And, and, you know, and support and comfort. Then you actually become less avoidant just because of that specific relationship with that specific person. And so there is an element of person specificity in the context of these different types of relationships, friends, romantic partners, family members could be sibs as well, right? A sib could be an attachment figure for you depending on the nature of that relationship. So yes, uh, most people typically will have slightly different styles with different, not only different types of relationships, but different people. But there are a few, there, there probably is one major exception, and that is individuals who've been severely maltreated early in life. If you think about, you know, for example, The Romanian orphanages that existed 20 years ago where they, the children basically were given institutional care. There was little contact comfort, little physical or even psychological or, or emotional uh caring because they had so many kids that a small number of people in these orphanages were, the staff was overwhelmed basically. In those really extreme cases where there's been neglect or abuse, those people might be basically insecure with everybody at some level for the vast majority of their life, but those cases are fairly atypical. For most people, you're going to have variability in attachment, security or insecurity across relationships and across different people within those relationships.

24:38 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, for someone to be insecure in every kind of relationship with everyone and probably for the rest of their life, I mean they have to really go through extreme kinds of early life experiences, yeah,

24:55 Jeffry Simpson: and there could be some balancing going on. So for example, it could be the case, let's say that you are You're insecure with regard to your romantic partners, but people need contact. And so what they might do is they might try really hard to develop secure relationships with their close friends to kind of balance. They need someone they can go to and talk to, confide in, uh, and if they feel they can't do it in the context of romantic relationships given a bad history of being betrayed, being rejected, being treated badly. What they may do to compensate is they may really work to develop a secure best friend. Um, AND that may be a kind of a way that we don't necessarily have a lot of evidence with regard to that, but if you think anecdotally, that does make a lot of sense because people do, everyone within reason needs to have a connection, and they need to have someone they can not only confide in, but can find comfort in. Um, AND, uh, even insecure people, um, they also need that. They just oftentimes Either want it on their own terms, like like what an avoidant person would typically do, or they want it so badly that they tend to drive people away, and that's sometimes what happens with anxiously attached people,

26:17 Ricardo Lopes: right? And with the same person. Can our attachment style, the kind of attachment we have with them, change over time? So for example, if I am anxious, anxiously attached to someone and that person, because I mean I'm just honest with them or Because he or she notices it and she is secure and manifests back that security to me, is it possible that over time I might develop a secure attachment style with them?

26:58 Jeffry Simpson: Yes, yes, exactly. In fact, we did some of the, we did some of the early work looking on our lab on attachment change in the context of the transition to parenthood. So, we chose the transition to parenthood because it tends to be both a happy time but also a stressful time as you're making a life adjustment, especially when it's your first child, right? You're becoming a new parent. And what we did in that study is we measured each partner's, in this case they were biological parents, mother's and father's attachment. Um, TO each other before their baby was born, their first baby. And then we make, we followed them up and measured their attachment and also what was happening in their relationship. After the baby had been there for 6 months, 12 months, etc. And what we found basically is that avoidant, people who start out as avoidant with their partner become less avoidant if their partner over time continues to provide them with support. And so it doesn't happen right away. It takes a lot of time, and this is kind of important because during the transition to parenthood, there are new norms that have to be developed, new rules, new routines. There's just a lot more to do. And so avoidant people are in a position during that period of time where they can't just kind of push the support away because they need the support given all of the changes. And if they gradually begin to learn that their partner is genuinely there for them and they get support, they become less avoidant across time, but it takes a long time. It doesn't happen overnight. Uh, SO that's one example of, uh, you know, a partner's supportiveness when you're upset and distressed, sleep deprived, etc. um, KIND of allowing you to realize that, yeah, maybe I can count on my partner because even though they're distressed, they're still giving me a lot of support and it's actually benefiting me. Maybe I should kind of like view them a bit differently and maybe turn to them more for help.

29:06 Ricardo Lopes: Does attachment relate to jealousy in any way?

29:11 Jeffry Simpson: It does actually. And um there's been a reasonable amount of work on this, and one of the things that we've done in our lab is we've tried to look at, we've tried to put people in situations, not real life situations, but simulated situations where they have to think about their partner, um, engaging in behavior with another potentially attractive person. Um, AND to indicate how they would feel and think and what they might do as the apparent relationship, if you want to call it that, between their partner and this other attractive person as they're watching a situation unfolds. And what we've found is that Um, and this is consistent with other work in the field is that anxious people start out, even if there's minimal interaction between their partner and someone else who might be a viable rival, they start out being more jealous and avoidant more secure people. And as, as the partner and this other person kind of interact more and, and they, they get a little bit closer. They maintain that high level of distress and they're more likely to try to intervene and stop the situation even before a lot of people would say it's not really a problem yet, right? And so, and avoiding people basically, they, they suppress the jealousy. They say, oh, my partner is just being my partner. There's nothing going on here. I really don't care. So you've got the anxious people being hypervigilant, kind of being ready to see a problem before there really is a problem, and you've got the avoidant people down here saying, I'm going to dismiss it. I'm going to ignore it. I'm going to deny something is going on here until it's a real clear situation, and at that point then they intervene and they get upset. Secure people are kind of right in the middle. They're kind of like viewing it as the way most people would view it, you know. It starts out, uh, probably OK, then it gets a bit more intimate. Uh, I'm, I'm not going to pay attention to this. Then it gets more intimate and they think, oh, maybe I should do something, and then at some point they actually do something. Mhm

31:28 Ricardo Lopes: How about personality traits? Does attachment relate to personality traits in any way? Uh, I mean, and when I say personality traits, it could be, I don't know, the big five, the exo, or some other inventory. So

31:45 Jeffry Simpson: that's another really good question and um uh. Several people have done work on this. Chris Fraley at Illinois, for example, has, I believe, and there are others. We've done a little bit of work on this, um, and one of the things that we found is that there is a link actually between the degree of security, um, secure versus insecure, and three of the five big five traits. So, for example, people who have a history of being secure, starting early in life actually tend to become adults that are more agreeable, are more conscientious. And are less neurotic. Those three traits are the big five. AND that, those three traits form a higher level dimension that personality psychologists calls call stability. So, stability is you agree with people, you cooperate with them, you take their perspective, you are conscientious, you pay attention to what's going on, you try to do the right thing, and you're not neurotic. You're not focusing. AND ruminating on, on the negative things that are happening or could happen in the context of your relationships. And so, so security is or the degree of security. Going from secure to insecure is correlated with the stability dimension in the big five, and there's some other personality traits that are correlated with some of the big five measures that also correlate with attachment, but the important, an important point to make is that these correlations are not huge. So for example, in the study that we did, we're looking at a person's history of security measured in different ways. And they're standing on the big five traits of stability, the correlations were in the order of about 0.30, approximately. So you're accounting for about approximately about 10% of the variation that exists between attachment and these traits. So they're not the same thing, but they, they do, they do intersect. Mhm.

33:53 Ricardo Lopes: So I have one last question then. Do the kinds of attachment people develop influence their parenting practices in any way?

34:05 Jeffry Simpson: Yes, indeed. And in fact, the early, the early work in developmental psychology was focused on that directly. So the early work in developmental psychology in measuring attachment in adults was to use what's called the adult attachment interview. Um, AND the adult attachment interview is about a 45 minute interview that asks people questions about their, their memories of their parents, the people who took care of them, also their memories of others who took care of them as they were growing up. So, they would ask questions about, you know, what, what, what words describe your parents, and they would then they would give examples of, you know, my parents were loving. Here's an example from my memory. Uh, AND then they, uh, it also asked questions about what happened when you were upset, when you were hurt, etc. AND it's coded, um, and you can, you can, uh, place people into categories or put them on dimensions of security versus insecurity, um, and that, that, uh, the AI then was used to look at how those parents who were secure or insecure, uh, parented their own children in a strange situation. Uh, WHICH is a threatening situation that you put parents and kids in, um, at about 1.5 or 2 years of age. Um, AND what, so that work found that people who had a secure representation of how they were raised by their parents tended to have babies, children in this strange situation who, uh, when they were upset, would turn to them for comfort and would comfort quickly, whereas the insecure. People, people who had memories of their childhood that involved elements of either anxiety or avoidance. Um, WHEN they were videotaped in a strange situation with their children, their children either Did not come to them but remained distressed or came to them and never came calmed down. In other words, they couldn't comfort their children. And so there is a link there. There also is, there's been a little bit of work looking at the self-report adult attachment styles, which is a very different way of measuring things than the adult attachment interview, and that shows basically that you get somewhat similar results. In fact, we actually did some work on this about 30 years ago. It was the first work that was done. Looking at self-reported attachment to your romantic partner, predicting the way you parent your kid in a stressful situation. And what we found basically is results that kind of paralleled what was being found with the AAI. Now what's interesting about this is, at least in my opinion, is that the AAI does not correlate really highly. With the self-report romantic attachment measures that makes some sense because the AI measures your attachment based on memories when you were a child with your parents in one type of relationship. And the self-report romantic measures measure your more conscious representations of attachment in a different relationship, romantic, with a different person. Um, BUT when you look at the two together, they both kind of predict the same parenting styles. So secure parents, parents who are secure with their romantic partner, um, tend to be more sensitive, more caring, more empathic. Um, Parents who are insecure with their partner tend to either be hovering. Like anxious people kind of hovering over the kid, child and not letting them kind of do the task on their own, wanting to do it for them, or they tend to be more avoidant where they kind of like when the child fails at something, they kind of like rebuff them, dismiss them, you know, kind of view them as like, you know, come on, you could do better than that. And so it's interesting, we, this is one of the reasons why I think attachment theory is powerful because You can measure security with different people in different ways and you still see the same basic kinds of outcomes even though they're not necessarily always highly correlated.

38:23 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, no, that's really fascinating. So Dr. Simpson, just before we go, would you like to tell people where they can find your work on the internet?

38:34 Jeffry Simpson: Uh, YEAH, if you go to the Department of Psychology at the University of Minnesota, um, there is a tab of faculty, and you can click on my link, and I've got a, uh, uh, a web page there that describes the most recent work that we've done. Um, I'm also on uh Orchid, uh, which lists all the things that I've done over the years, um, and, um, that probably is the best way to To, you know, find out what I'm doing, but there's a lot of good information out there on the internet on attachment. Attachment theory has become, and it's a grand theory basically of relationships. It's one of the 3 or 4 biggest theories, and it's become, you know, one of the more popular, um, Popular theories, not only in academia, but also out there in the public. There's a lot of stuff on the, on the internet that allows you to kind of, uh, you know, take, take tests that measure your attachment, uh, your attachment styles and things like that. And I would also encourage, uh, folks to take a look at some of, of that information because there's a lot of it out there and a lot of it's actually pretty good. Mhm.

39:47 Ricardo Lopes: OK, great. So thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. It's been a real pleasure to talk with you.

39:54 Jeffry Simpson: I've enjoyed it, Ricardo. Thank you very much.

39:58 Ricardo Lopes: Hi guys, thank you for watching this interview until the end. If you liked it, please share it, leave a like and hit the subscription button. The show is brought to you by Enlights Learning and Development done differently. Check their website at enlights.com and also please consider supporting the show on Patreon or PayPal. I would also like to give a huge thank you to my main patrons and PayPal supporters, Perergo Larsson, Jerry Mulleran, Frederick Sundo, Bernard Seyaz Olaf, Alex, Adam Cassel, Matthew Whittingbird, Arnaud Wolff, Tim Hollis, Eric Elena, John Connors, Philip Forst Connolly. Then Dmitri Robert Windegerru Inai Zu Mark Nevs, Colin Holbrookfield, Governor, Michel Stormir, Samuel Andrea, Francis Forti Agnun, Svergoo, and Hal Herzognun, Machael Jonathan Labran, John Yardston, and Samuel Curric Hines, Mark Smith, John Ware, Tom Hammel, Sardusran, David Sloan Wilson, Yasilla Dezaraujo Romain Roach, Diego Londono Correa. Yannik Punteran Ruzmani, Charlotte Blis Nicole Barbaro, Adam Hunt, Pavlostazevski, Alekbaka Madison, Gary G. Alman, Semov Zal Adrian Yei Poltontin, John Barboza, Julian Price, Edward Hall, Edin Bronner, Douglas Fry, Franco Bartolotti, Gabriel Pancortez or Suliliski, Scott Zachary Fish, Tim Duffy, Sony Smith, John Wiseman. Daniel Friedman, William Buckner, Paul Georg Jarno, Luke Lovai, Georgios Theophannus, Chris Williamson, Peter Wolozin, David Williams, Dio Costa, Anton Ericsson, Charles Murray, Alex Shaw, Marie Martinez, Coralli Chevalier, Bangalore atheists, Larry D. Lee Junior. Old Eringbon. Esterri, Michael Bailey, then Spurber, Robert Grassy, Zigoren, Jeff McMahon, Jake Zul, Barnabas Raddix, Mark Kempel, Thomas Dovner, Luke Neeson, Chris Story, Kimberly Johnson, Benjamin Galbert, Jessica Nowicki, Linda Brendan, Nicholas Carlson, Ismael Bensleyman. George Ekoriati, Valentine Steinmann, Per Crawley, Kate Van Goler, Alexander Obert, Liam Dunaway, BR, Massoud Ali Mohammadi, Perpendicular, Jane Hetner, Ursula Guinov, Gregory Hastings, David Pinsov, Sean Nelson, Mike Levin, and Jos Necht. A special thanks to my producers Iar Webb, Jim Frank Lucas Stink, Tom Vanneden, Bernardine Curtis Dixon, Benedict Mueller, Thomas Trumbull, Catherine and Patrick Tobin, John Carlo Montenegro, Al Nick Cortiz, and Nick Golden, and to my executive producers, Matthew Lavender, Sergio Quadrian, Bogdan Kanis, and Rosie. Thank you for all.