Deactivating attachment strategies associate with early processing of facial emotion and familiarity in middle childhood: an ERP study

ABSTRACT

Neurophysiological evidence suggests associations between attachment and the neural processing of emotion expressions. This study asks whether this relationship is also evident in middle childhood, and how it is affected by facial familiarity. Attachment strategies (deactivation, hyperactivation) were assessed in 51 children (9 - 11 years)  using a story stem completion task. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded during children's passive viewing of mother and stranger emotional faces (angry/happy). At the stage of facial information encoding (N250), attachment deactivation was associated with a pattern pointing to increased vigilance towards angry faces. Further, the attention-driven LPP was increased to happy mother faces as highly salient stimuli overall, but not in children scoring high on deactivation. These children did not discriminate between mothers’ facial emotions and showed a general attentional withdrawal from facial stimuli. While our results on attachment deactivation support a two-stage processing model, no effect of hyperactivation was found.

KEYWORDS:

• ERP
• face processing
• attachment
• middle childhood
• deactivation
• facial emotion

Acknowledgements

We thank our research students Anusche Macht, Julian Kahler, and Verena Kellerer for their help with the acquisition of ERP data. Further, we want to acknowledge the work of Vera Zalan and Christina Strobl for collecting and coding children’s story stems as well as Ina Bovenschen for sharing her expertise about the method. Finally, we thank all participating families and especially all the children who were so patient and cooperative during the assessments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

At the time the research was undertaken participants did not provide permission for their individual data to be made publicly available, that is an informed consent did not specify this option. So full data is not able to be shared. If readers would like further information, they can contact Melanie Kungl ([email protected]). Upon receipt of a reasonable request and given the researcher’s confidentiality, restricted access may be given to data excluding potentially identifiable information.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/14616734.2022.2132050

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This research was not funded by external sources. Only resources provided by the Department of Developmental Psychology, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg were used.