The cost of distrust: Trust, anxious attachment, jealousy, and partner abuse.

Trust is critical in the development of healthy, secure, and satisfying relationships. However, anxiously attached individuals may be more prone to trust issues as well as experiencing jealousy within their romantic relationship. Further, feelings of lower trust and higher jealousy may have potential downstream effects on physical and psychological abuse. Participants (N=261) completed self-report measures of attachment, trust, jealousy and IPV perpetration. Mediated moderation results from participants in committed relationships supported our hypotheses: Attachment anxiety moderated the association between trust and jealousy; anxious individuals experienced higher levels of cognitive and behavioral jealousy when reporting lower trust. Moreover, among anxiously attached individuals, behavioral jealousy mediated the association between trust and both types of abuse. Findings illustrate the importance of trust in relationships and suggest that lacking trust has cascading effects, particularly for anxiously attached individuals