Neuroscience of human social interactions and adult attachment style

Summary & key facts

This paper reviews brain studies about adult attachment, which is how people form close relationships based on their early history and tendencies. The authors summarize brain imaging and thinking tests that show different attachment styles change how people automatically read social safety or threat and how they control thoughts and feelings about others. Avoidant people tend to show weaker emotional reactions to social cues, while anxious people often show stronger emotional reactions and possibly stronger mental focus on other people's thoughts. The review says these brain differences help explain social behavior and might be important for mental health problems that involve trouble with c

Key facts:

• Attachment style is built from a person’s relationship history and natural tendencies. It shapes how someone sees other people as safe or threatening in social situations.
• The review combines studies that used tests of thinking and brain imaging to study how attachment relates to emotion and social thinking.
• A set of deeper brain areas, including the amygdala, hippocampus, and striatum, and limbic cortex areas like the insula and cingulate, are involved in quickly judging social emotional signals.
• A different brain network, including the medial prefrontal cortex, the superior temporal sulcus, and the temporo-parietal junction, supports deliberate thinking about other people’s minds and controlling emotions.
• Studies suggest people with avoidant attachment show reduced automatic emotional responses to social cues, meaning they may react less strongly at first to social threat or closeness.
• Studies suggest people with anxious attachment show increased automatic emotional responses and may pay more mental attention to other people’s thoughts and feelings.
• Emotion regulation strategies, such as rethinking a social situation or hiding emotional reactions, are used differently depending on someone’s attachment style.
• The authors say these brain-based differences help explain normal social behavior and may play a role in mental health conditions where problems with close relationships are important.

Abstract

Since its first description four decades ago, attachment theory (AT) has become one of the principal developmental psychological frameworks for describing the role of individual differences in the establishment and maintenance of social bonds between people. Yet, still little is known about the neurobiological underpinnings of attachment orientations and their well-established impact on a range of social and affective behaviors. In the present review, we summarize data from recent studies using cognitive and imaging approaches to characterize attachment styles and their effect on emotion and social cognition. We propose a functional neuroanatomical framework to integrate the key brain mechanisms involved in the perception and regulation of social emotional information, and their modulation by individual differences in terms of secure versus insecure (more specifically avoidant, anxious, or resolved versus unresolved) attachment traits. This framework describes how each individual's attachment style (built through interactions between personal relationship history and predispositions) may influence the encoding of approach versus aversion tendencies (safety versus threat) in social encounters, implicating the activation of a network of subcortical (amygdala, hippocampus, striatum) and cortical (insula, cingulate) limbic areas. These basic and automatic affective evaluation mechanisms are in turn modulated by more elaborate and voluntary cognitive control processes, subserving mental state attribution and emotion regulation capacities, implicating a distinct network in medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), superior temporal sulcus (STS), and temporo-parietal junction (TPJ), among others. Recent neuroimaging data suggest that affective evaluation is decreased in avoidantly but increased in anxiously attached individuals. In turn, although data on cognitive control is still scarce, it points toward a possible enhancement of mental state representations associated with attachment insecurity and particularly anxiety. Emotion regulation strategies such as reappraisal or suppression of social emotions are also differentially modulated by attachment style. This research does not only help better understand the neural underpinnings of human social behavior, but also provides important insights on psychopathological conditions where attachment dysregulation is likely to play an important (causal) role.

Topics

Attachment and Relationship Dynamics Child and Adolescent Psychosocial and Emotional Development Neuroendocrine regulation and behavior

Categories

Psychology Social Psychology Social Sciences

Tags

Amygdala Attachment theory Cognition Cognitive psychology Developmental psychology Dopamine Emotion perception Insula Mentalization Neuroscience Perception Prefrontal cortex Psychology Social cognition Social neuroscience Striatum Temporoparietal junction Theory of mind Ventral striatum Ventromedial prefrontal cortex

Conditions & symptoms

Anxiety Depression PTSD Anxiety or worry Feeling disconnected from others Sadness or low mood