Abstract

The primary purpose of this study was to investigate Korean college students' distributional pattern of attachment style. The typical distributional pattern of American adults and college students appeared in order of secure>avoidant>ambivalent in many studies. In spite of this consistent distributional pattern, the differences in many psychological characteristics between attachment types are unstable. We are to understand this disparity in cultural perspective. Particularly, we conjectured that the higher ratio of avoidant in comparison with ambivalent is a reflection of American culture emphasizes individuality and independence of self. Korea is classified into collectivistic and relational oriented culture. Therefore we anticipated that there are more ambivalent than avoidant in Korean culture. As anticipated, the ratio of ambivalent was higher than that of avoidant in Korean college students. And the characteristics between attachment types were different in two cultures. We discussed it with cultural view.