We also acknowledge the possibility that individuals who experience the low early care/high adult romantic quality configuration may be psychologically defensive individuals who provide overly favorable views of their romantic relationships and their psychological health. This alternative interpretation seems less plausible because our interview-based measures of romantic quality emphasized participants’ ability to provide concrete examples to back up claims about the best features of their relationships, making these measures less prone to self-presentation biases than standard self-report assessments. The fact that we did not observe this moderation effect in the work competence discriminant analysis (given that the work competence measures should also have been prone to self-presentation biases) reduces the likelihood of this alternative explanation even further.
