The relationship between individuals with fearful-avoidant adult attachment orientation and early neural responses to emotional content: An event-related potentials (ERPs) study.

Summary & key facts

Researchers recorded tiny, early brain waves from about 120 college students while they looked at neutral and emotional pictures. They split the students into four groups: fearful-avoidant, secure, anxious-preoccupied, and dismissive-avoidant, with about 30 people in each group. The fearful-avoidant group showed early brain responses that looked more like the dismissive-avoidant group than the anxious group. That means, in the first fraction of a second after seeing an emotional picture, people who call themselves fearful-avoidant seem to react by pulling away or avoiding, not by showing an anxious alarm. The study focused on the brain’s first reactions in the first 0.11 to 0.28 seconds after a picture, and the sample was mostly young women, so the findings may not apply to everyone.

Key facts:

• The study tested about 120 undergraduate students, average age about 23, split into four attachment groups with around 30 people in each group.
• Researchers showed emotional and neutral pictures and measured tiny brain waves called event-related potentials, which capture the brain’s reaction in the first 0.11 to 0.28 seconds after a picture.
• People who identified as fearful-avoidant had early brain responses (at the earliest measured moments) that were significantly different from anxious-preoccupied people.
• The early brain responses of fearful-avoidant people were similar to those of dismissive-avoidant people, suggesting an avoidance-type reaction dominates their first response to emotional cues.
• The study focused on three very early brain signals often labeled P1, N1, and P2, which occur roughly between 110 and 280 milliseconds after a picture appears.
• Because the participants were mostly young college students and mostly women, the results may not apply to older people or to the general population. The study shows a pattern, not a proven cause-and-effect rule.

Abstract

Our results suggest that the initial response to emotional stimuli of individuals with fearful-avoidant attachment is dominated by avoidance, rather than anxiety. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Topics

Anxiety, Depression, Psychometrics, Treatment, Cognitive Processes Attachment and Relationship Dynamics Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

Categories

Psychology Social Psychology Social Sciences

Tags

Anxiety Attachment theory Cognition Developmental psychology Event-related potential Geometry Law Mathematics MEDLINE Orientation (vector space) Political science Psychiatry Psychology PsycINFO

Conditions & symptoms

Anxiety Anxiety or worry Feeling disconnected from others