Androgyny and Attachment Security: Two Related Models of Optimal Personality

Three studies explored similarities between attachment style typologies and sex role typologies. Both are defined by pairs of dimensions: self model and other model (attachment styles); masculinity, or agency, and femininity, or communion (sex role orientations). Results indicate that although there are conceptual and empirical similarities between self model and masculinity (two operationalizations of "agency") and between other model and femininity (two operationalizations of "communion '9, the sex role renditions of agency and communion are more closely related to gender than are the attachment style renditions. The authors argue that attachment style dimensions and the personality ideal they help to define-attachment security-are closer than masculinity and femininity to what sex role researchers may have had in mind when they proposed the concept of psychological androgyny. Attachment security is, roughly speaking, androgyny minus the elements of power; aggression, and emotional vulnerability that are inadvertently retained when agency and communion are defined in terms of gender-linked traits.