Attachment state of mind and perceptual processing of emotional stimuli

Abstract

This study aimed to investigate the relationship between attachment state of mind and perceptual processing of social and non-social, affective, and neutral material. A total of 57 young adults completed the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) plus an experimental task in which their perceptual thresholds to different types of pictures were assessed. Significant correlations were found between the AAI dimensions and perceptual thresholds for social stimuli such as social interactions or human faces displaying emotional expressions. As expected, no relationships were found between the AAI and perception of neutral stimuli. The pattern of correlations was especially clear for the dismissing dimension. The results suggest that higher vigilance to social stimuli is related to dismissing attachment tendencies and, to a milder degree, to preoccupied tendencies.

Keywords:

• Attachment state of mind
• perception
• perceptual vigilance
• perceptual defense

Notes

In an exploratory analysis, we correlated the two attachment dimensions with the thresholds for the 17 filler stimuli. This was done on an exploratory basis only, because no specific hypotheses could be derived concerning that material. The filler stimuli were subdivided into three groups of pictures. The first category was ‘Emotional Children’ (pictures no. 2, 17, 29), the second category pertained to smooth interactions between adults and children (‘Parental Interactions’, pictures no. 7, 15, 18, 31, 37), and the third category contained the remaining pictures (no. 6, 8, 21, 25, 28, 30, 32, 35, 36). Only one significant correlation was found, that between the mean threshold score for ‘Emotional Children’ and the Dismissing dimension (r =  − .34, p = .01, n = 57). All other correlation coefficients were between r =  − .17 and r = .15, n.s. These results are coherent with the main findings of the study, and indicate that individuals with higher dismissing tendencies are more vigilant toward children displaying emotion. This may appear inconsistent with other studies that have found dismissing individuals to be less sensitive to emotional expressions of children or infants. We propose that this pattern of results suggests that dismissing individuals are unable (or unwilling) to use the perceived emotional information adequately, despite vigilantly attending to it. Thus, their low levels of sensitivity would not be due to a failure to perceive emotional expressions, but rather to their subsequent misuse of the perceived stimuli. One might argue that dismissing individuals must perceive threatening stimuli very quickly in order to avoid it (Main, 1999; see also Calvo & Eysenck, 2000).

As the dismissing and the preoccupied dimensions were significantly correlated in this sample, it could be speculated that the vigilance effects found for both dimensions were due to a specific combination of the scales, e.g., caused by individuals who scored high on both scales. To examine whether the correlations found are independent of the score on the other insecure dimension, we re-analysed the data with regression analyses in which we entered the main effects of the two insecure dimensions and their interactive term (multiplicative product). The interactive term was found significant with one dependent variable only, i.e., mean threshold for natural scenes. This indicates that, overall, the correlation pattern was not caused by the combination of the two insecure scales. Moreover, nearly all effects found with correlational analyses remained significant with the regression analyses. This indicates that the correlations found for each attachment dimension were independent of the effects of the other dimension.