Attachment style and Infertility of Unknown Biological Cause: An elusive relationship?

It is known that many infertile couples do no t show any b iological factors capable of explaining their situation. This s uggests that psychological aspects may be operative. However, research has met with enormous difficulties in finding differences between fertile and infertile women, in terms of personality or psychopathology variables. The study preceding this one presented two innovations: a) the use of interpersonal constructs (adult attachment style and quality of parental relationships in childhood); b) the distinction b etween women with and without biological factors able to explain their medical condition. The results of that study showed that women with Infertility o f Unknown Biological Cause (IUBC) presented significantly higher levels of avoidant attachment, particularly of the dismissive avoidant kind, when compared with infertile women with an identified medical cause, and also when compared with a control group of fertile women. The present study replicated, with additional methodological controls, that previous s tudy, namely: a) employing different measures of the interpersonal variables, b) assessing psychological variables before the start of the medical evaluation procedure and, c) using a more thorough approach for obtaining biological accounts for infertility. Participating women (n = 105) were contacted when attending their first appointment at the infertility consultation of a Lisbon hospital. An effect in the predicted direction was found, i.e., the average result of the IUBC group in the dismissive-avoidant scale was higher than that of the medically infertile and medically sub-fertile groups. The e ffect was s ignificant after introducing the other attachment and early relationships variables as co-variables.