Valeological Potential of Home Attachment in Adults

The article focuses on the role of subject-environment interactions, namely, human relationship with home environment, in maintaining mental health of a person. As a key construct that reflects personal preferences and love toward home it is proposed to consider the phenomenon of home attachment. Until now, the relationship between home attachment and psychological health and, moreover, the analysis of these relationships in the context of life course has been the subject of theoretical constructions, that prove the benefit of their empirical research. Home attachment was measured with the author’s same name questionnaire (Reznichenko et al., 2016). There were also measured mental health and its components: psychological well-being (using the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale of R. Tennant and colleagues), a sense of connectedness (Sense of Coherence scale developed by A. Antonovsky) and authenticity (the Authenticity Scale by A. Wood, et al.). Adult respondents (N=203; age range 18-60 years; Mage=33.7; SDage=7.2) were participated in the study; the sample was divided into three age groups: youth age, early adulthood and middle adulthood. The obtained results allowed concluding that home attachment is a resource of mental health, especially in maintaining a sense of coherence and psychological well-being. It was found that the relationship between home attachment and psychological health is age-specific: the strongest correlations are observed in youth, they become insignificant in early adulthood, and in middle adulthood they become significant again. The results are discussed in the context of life and age-related problems of personality development.

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