Adult attachment orientations and the processing of emotional pictures – ERP correlates

Abstract

Past studies have consistently found that adult attachment orientations contribute to the ways in which people handle emotional events. Attachment-anxious individuals tend to intensify negative emotional states and exaggerate the threatening aspects of an event, whereas attachment-avoidant individuals tend to distance themselves from emotional situations. In the current study, we examined how adult attachment orientations modulate brain responses to emotional stimuli using event-related potentials. Participants viewed unpleasant, pleasant, and neutral pictures, and categorized them according to their valence. Individuals scoring high on attachment anxiety elicited greater late positive potential (LPP) amplitudes to negative pictures than those scoring low on anxiety. Findings are consistent with predictions derived from attachment theory and add to our understanding of emotional regulation.

Introduction

According to attachment theory, human beings are born with an attachment-system that works to maintain proximity to significant others in times of stress (Bowlby, 1982/1969). This system accomplishes basic regulatory functions and is manifested in support-seeking behavior. Early mother–child experiences shape infants’ mental representations of the self and significant others and these remain active over the entire life span (Bowlby, 1973, Bowlby, 1988). In adulthood, most empirical tests of these theoretical ideas have focused on a person’s attachment orientations – the systematic pattern of relational expectations and behavior that results from a particular history of interactions with significant others (Fraley & Shaver, 2000). Initially, research was based on Ainsworth’s typology of secure, anxious, and avoidant styles (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978). However, subsequent studies (Bartholomew and Horowitz, 1991, Brennan et al., 1998) revealed that attachment orientations in adulthood can be organized around two dimensions: anxiety and avoidance. Attachment anxiety is defined by lack of attachment security, a strong need for closeness, worries about relationships, and fear of being rejected. Attachment avoidance is defined by a lack of attachment security, compulsive self-reliance, and preference for emotional distance from others. In this two-dimensional space, the “secure style” is a region where both anxiety and avoidance are low.

Recently, Mikulincer and Shaver (2003) proposed an integrative control-system model to explain the activation and functioning of the attachment-system in adulthood. According to this model, attachment-system functioning consists of three components: (a) the primary strategy associated with attachment-system activation, (b) the strategy related to the attainment of a sense of attachment security, and (c) the strategies triggered by attachment-figure unavailability – hyperactivation or deactivation of attachment-related needs, cognitions, feelings, and behaviors. The first component involves monitoring and appraisal of threatening events and is responsible for activation of the attachment-system. The second component relates to the monitoring and appraisal of attachment-figure availability and is responsible for individual differences in the sense of attachment security. The last component involves monitoring and appraisal of the viability of proximity-seeking as a way of dealing with attachment insecurity. This component is responsible for individual variations in the hyperactivation or deactivation of the attachment-system and accounts for the psychological manifestations of attachment anxiety and avoidance. Whereas attachment-anxious people tend to hyperactivate the attachment-system and over-emphasize needs for proximity and support, attachment-avoidant people tend to inhibit proximity-seeking inclinations and suppress attachment-related thoughts and concerns.

Mikulincer and Shaver’s (2003) model also includes excitatory and inhibitory neural circuits by which attachment anxiety and avoidance affect the appraisal of threatening events and the consequent activation of proximity-seeking inclinations. On the one hand, attachment-anxious people’s hyperactivating strategies, which maintain the attachment-system in a chronically activated state, lead to an exaggeration of threat appraisal and heighten attentional focus to threatening events. Moreover, anxiously attached people tend to generate and intensify negative emotional states as additional means to sustain attachment-system activation (Mikulincer & Orbach, 1995). On the other hand, avoidant people’s deactivating strategies, which maintain the attachment-system in a down-regulated or inactive state, foster the ignoring or dismissal of threatening events and the suppression of any threat-related thought or emotion that might activate the attachment-system (Fraley & Shaver, 1997). Although these deactivating strategies are mainly directed to signs of rejection, disapproval, criticism, and separation, they also tend to be applied to attachment-unrelated distress-eliciting thoughts and emotions because this threatening material can reactivate unwanted needs for proximity and protection (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2003). Indeed, Mikulincer and Sheffi, 2000, Pereg and Mikulincer, 2004 have shown that avoidant people tend to dismiss and draw away from emotional material, even if this material is not directly related to attachment issues or interpersonal relationships.

Although Mikulincer and Shaver’s (2003) model was based on evidence from behavioral and self-report studies, its neural correlates have not been defined. In a first attempt to investigate the neural underpinning of attachment orientations, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to examine the relation between these orientations and brain activation patterns when thinking about emotional events and when attempting to repress those thoughts (Gillath, Bunge, Shaver, Wendelken, & Mikulincer, 2005). Findings revealed that more attachment-anxious participants showed more activation on emotion-related regions (anterior temporal pole, dorsal anterior cingulate) when they thought about negative scenarios. In addition, highly anxious participants showed less activation of brain areas related to emotion regulation (orbitofrontal cortex). It was suggested that anxious people react more strongly to negative thoughts, and are less capable to down-regulate these feelings. Findings also indicated that participants scoring high on attachment avoidance showed a somewhat different pattern of brain activation, reflecting suppression of negative thought. Whereas individuals low on avoidance tended to deactivate the subcallosal cingulate and the left prefrontal cortex while suppressing negative thoughts, these areas were kept active by avoidant participants. Another study (Dawson et al., 2001) used electroencephalographic and autonomic activity recordings of study infants’ and mothers’ reactions to the strange situation paradigm. As compared to securely attached infants, insecure infants exhibited less left frontal brain activity, which may reflect greater propensity to use withdrawal-type emotion regulatory strategies, such as turning away from the external environment. The above studies show that attachment orientations are reflected on long-term emotion regulation strategies.

In the current study, we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine how attachment orientations modulate the processing of emotional information at the individual-stimulus level. ERPs are changes in electrical scalp-recorded potentials time-locked to specific events. The advantage of using ERPs is their high temporal resolution, which enables examination of the actual processing of a stimulus. ERP waveforms consist of positive and negative deflections (components), which are regarded as manifestations of specific cognitive processes. By analyzing these components, it is possible to assess the processing of emotional stimuli and pinpoint particular aspects of information processing that are regulated by the attachment-system. One such component is the late positive potential (LPP), a positive going component with a central–parietal scalp distribution, which has been shown to be sensitive to differences in the emotional content of pictures (e.g., Lang et al., 1997, Schupp et al., 2000). This component is thought to reflect motivational engagement and commitment of attentional resources, and has been found to be stronger when watching emotionally arousing pictures than neutral pictures (e.g., Lang et al., 1997).

We attempted to use the LPP to measure how attachment orientations affect the motivational engagement and attentional resources allocated to the processing of emotionally arousing pictures. According to Mikulincer and Shaver (2003), attachment-anxious people tend to be highly focused on the threatening aspects of incoming information and to intensify the experience of negative emotions, which, in turn, can be manifested in relatively strong LPP amplitudes while processing negative emotional pictures. In contrast, attachment-avoidant people tend to withdraw attentional resources from the processing of emotional information, and, then, they would reveal relatively attenuated LPP amplitudes in response to either positive or negative emotional pictures. On this basis, we hypothesized that higher attachment anxiety scores would be associated with stronger LPP amplitudes to negative emotional pictures, whereas higher attachment avoidance scores would be associated with smaller LPP amplitudes to either positive or negative emotional pictures.