Investigation of the relationship between attachment styles, personality characteristics and psychological problems with adults

It is a well known fact that personality characteristics, attachment styles and psychological problems all related with each other. There are also many studies which show that psychopathology is affected by personality characteristics and attachment styles. However, the studies, which show how different symptoms of psychopathology are affected by both attachment and various dimensions of personality are limited. On the other hand, it is a well known fact that psychopathology is affected by education and sex . In this study, the aim was to examine the relationship between the attachment styles, personality characters and the psychopathology all together in adults. The study sample was composed of 100 adult volunteers living in İstanbul. A socio-demographic questionnaire, Experiences in Close Relationships-II, Five Factor Personality and Brief Symptom Inventory were applied to obtain data from all participants. All data were analyzed through SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Sciences) for Windows 22.0. To determine the correlation between the scales used with demographic variants t-test an done way ANOVA has been applied. The pearson correlation and hierarchical regression analysis were used in order to examine the relationship between the variables and the inventories. As a result of our findings, it has been clear that anxious attachment predicted psychopathology alone. However, when anxious attachment was controlled, it was confirmed that anxiety predicts 2% of neurotism, 11% of depression, extroversion, neurotism and responsibility, and that hostility predicts 8% of neurotism and adaptability, However, it has been clear that although anxious attachment predicted neurotism, it did not contribute in percentage and that somatization did not predict any other personality characteristics other than anxious attachment. Besides, it was clear that neither sex nor education had an effect at all on psychopathology levels. We believe the study should be carried out with more heterogeneous samples; yet it can still contribute much with its method where different variables were studied all together. Keywords: Attachment Styles, Personality Characteristics, Mental/Psychological Problems.