From Romantic Obsession to Risky Behaviors: Investigating the Association between Love Addiction, Attachment Styles, and Impulsive Actions in Intimate Relationships

Abstract

Love dependency with compulsive dependency and vulnerable self-esteem has become a psychiatric condition with potential criminological significance. The article detects how insecure attachment and affective disorder form the longitudinal trajectory from romantic dependency to aggression and crime. The article integrates attachment theory, the addiction model and neurobiological framework-grounded in recent neuro-psychological and a neuro-criminological studies-explain how caregiving deficits in childhood and abuse in childhood cause insecure attachments and impulsivity. These risk factors, in their own capacity, heighten vulnerability to jealousy and rejection, and encourage different maladjustive behaviors, including verbal aggression, coercion control, and intimate partner aggression. The cultural analysis section adopts the Pick-up Artist (“PUA”) phenomenon from China as an example to show how societal surroundings foster affective dependency and manipulation maneuvers. For intervention, scientists advocate dual-track policies of clinical and social efforts. Emotion-centered therapy, mindfulness training, and reconstructed attachment can reduce personal vulnerability, and emotional education in classrooms and family modeling of healthy attachments can foster system-wide prevention. The article's conclusion suggests it is necessary to undertake cross-cultural longitudinal studies in the future and to establish more efficient preventive measures based on various cultural value backgrounds to help reduce love dependence turning to violence and crime risk.