Episode Type, Attachment Orientation, and Frame Salience: Evidence for a Theory of Relational Framing

Relational framing theory asserts that dominance-submission and affiliation-disaffiliation tend to displace each other as frames for processing social interaction; involvement is argued to be a content-free intensifier variable that contributes to judgments of dominance or affiliation as a function of the salient relational frame. The present study seeks to replicate and extend previous tests of these claims by evaluating three hypotheses: (a) The differential salience of dominance-submission and affiliation-disaffiliation frames as a function of the type of social episode is robust across same-sex and cross-sex friendship dyads; (b) the magnitude of the association between involvement and dominance and affiliation varies as a function of frame salience instantiated by the type of episode; and (c) attachment anxiety is positively correlated with the perceived relevance of both dominance-submission and affiliation-disaffiliation to social episodes. Results are consistent with all three of the hypotheses, but relational framing is unrelated to subscales operationalizing the comfort with closeness dimension of attachment orientation.