On the basis of prior research showing that people respond to
threats to secure interpersonal attachments by seeking alternative,
non-human sources of security (e.g., Birgegard & Granqvist, 2004), as
well as findings that adults derive security from material objects by
virtue of the objects' perceived reliability (e.g., Erkolahti & Nyström,
2009), we hypothesized that object attachment can serve as a compensatory
strategy for coping with the threat to security elicited by the
perceived unreliability of close others