Participants Eighty undergraduate students from a subject pool at a large urban university on the West Coast participated in the study for partial course credit. Fifty-four per cent of the participants were female and 46 per cent were male with a mean age of 22.2years old. Six per cent of the participants were African American,31percentAsianAmerican,33percentCaucasian, 20 per cent Latino, and 10 per cent others.
Design and procedure The study was a 2 (gift giver’s attachment anxiety: high and low)×2 (gift giver’s attachment avoidance: high and low)×2 (recipient’s attachment anxiety: high vs. low) mixed design with giver’s attachment anxiety and avoidance as measured variables within subjects and recipient’s attachment anxiety as a between-subject factor. Data were collected during lab sessions. Participants came to the sessions in groups of no more than 10 students and were told they were taking part in a two-part survey on romantic relationships. In the first part of the survey, partic- ipantsfilledouttheExperiencesinCloseRelationshipsscale (Brennan et al., 1998). In the second part of the survey, participants were asked to imagine being in a romantic relationship with a partner whose attachment orientation was described in a paragraph. We created descriptions of the partner (gift recipient) as varying along the anxiety attachment dimension. In the high-anxiety condition, the partner was described using typical attributes possessed by