Edited by: Anna Buchheim, University of Innsbruck, Austria
Reviewed by: Markus Kiefer, University of Ulm, Germany; Orrie Dan, Yakima Valley Community College, Israel
*Correspondence: Gottfried Spangler
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The induction of emotional states has repeatedly been shown to affect cognitive processing capacities. At a neurophysiological level, P3 amplitude responses that are associated with attention allocation have been found to be reduced to task-relevant stimuli during emotional conditions as compared to neutral conditions suggesting a draining impact of emotion on cognitive resources. Attachment theory claims that how individuals regulate their emotions is guided by an internal working model (IWM) of attachment that has formed early in life. While securely attached individuals are capable of freely evaluating their emotions insecurely attached ones tend to either suppress or heighten the emotional experience in a regulatory effort. To explore how attachment quality moderates the impact of emotional contexts on information processing event-related potentials (ERPs) in 41 individuals were assessed. Subjects were instructed to detect neutral target letters within an oddball paradigm. Various images taken from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) served as background pictures and represented negative, positive and neutral task-irrelevant contexts. Attachment representation was assessed using the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) and individuals were assigned to one of three categories (secure, insecure-dismissing, insecure-preoccupied). At a behavioral level, the study revealed that negative emotionally conditions were associated with the detection of less target stimuli in insecure-dismissing subjects. Accordingly, ERPs yielded reduced P3 amplitudes in insecure-dismissing subjects when given a negative emotional context. We interpret these findings in terms of less sufficient emotion regulation strategies in insecure-dismissing subjects at the cost of accurate behavioral performance. The study suggests that attachment representation differentially moderates the relationship between emotional contexts and information processing most evident in insecure-dismissing subjects.
The first central key for the development into a social human being capable to interact properly with others is the attachment formed between a child and his or her primary caregiver (Sroufe,
While during infancy and early childhood individual differences in IWMs of attachment are assessed by standardized observation of attachment behavior towards the caregiver (e.g., in the strange situation; Ainsworth et al.,
Early childhood appears to be a critical period for the development of the IWM of attachment. At the same time, the first 2 years of life are crucial for the human brains’ structural development. In this developmental period neural circuits become organized and adjusted to the child’s environment (Rutter,
Neurophysiological activation underlying social-emotional processes can best be investigated by using event-related potentials (ERPs) because of their high temporal resolution. Currently available ERP studies provide evidence of attachment-related differences in neuronal processing of facial emotions (Zhang et al.,
Taken together, these findings suggest that experimental paradigms targeting the processing of social-emotional stimuli are capable of activating the attachment system as they have repeatedly shown to reveal attachment related differences at both the behavioral as well as the neurophysiological level. From an attachment theory perspective this makes perfect sense, as especially situations triggering negative emotions with a need for emotional regulation are believed to activate the attachment system, hence, shedding light on individual strategies to handle these emotions. However, the studies reported above have solely focused on altered processing of emotional information with regard to attachment rather than looking at how emotional contexts affect individual processing of neutral information. Indeed, such knowledge would be highly relevant for understanding an individual’s functioning in everyday life in the face of emotional stressors. Addressing this void in the literature the main objective of the current study was to investigate whether emotional contexts influence the neuronal processing of neutral (non-emotional) information depending on attachment.
The studies reported above provide evidence on the influence of attachment qualities on the processing of emotional information which can be expected on the base of assumptions guided by attachment theory. Based on these findings it can be assumed that effects of attachment quality on cognitive processing are also evident when challenging subjects’ capacities of emotional regulation by embedding neutral task-relevant information in emotional (especially negative) contexts. In insecure subjects inefficient attempts to regulate negative emotions provoked by a negative emotional context may lead to an enhanced allocation of cognitive resources to the processing of the task-irrelevant emotional information. Consequently, there may be a lack of cognitive capacities needed to effectively process task-relevant information.
Regardless of attachment, Meinhardt and Pekrun (
As differences in the quality of attachment are associated with the ability to efficiently regulate emotions, attachment representation might, consequently, be an important moderator between task-irrelevant emotional contexts and the processing of neutral, task-relevant information. Thus, the current study aimed to test this assumption by investigating the role of attachment on cognitive performance in emotional and neutral contexts as indexed by the ERP- component P3, using an oddball paradigm.
Securely attached individuals are assumed to be more capable to effectively regulate emotional states, expectably enabling them to dedicate more cognitive resources to a given task. By theory, a securely attached individual’s regulatory capability especially comes to light when dealing with negative emotions. Consequently, the impact of negative emotional contexts on task relevant processing of embedded neutral information might be less intense. Thus, we hypothesized that especially negative emotional contexts reduce P3 amplitudes during information processing in insecure-dismissing and presumably insecure-preoccupied attached individuals, compared to securely attached individuals.
The sample consisted of 42 right-handed young adults (22 female, 20 male) ranging from 17 to 22 years (
The current article refers to data collected at the first and third laboratory assessment. At the first laboratory visit attachment representation (AAI; George et al.,
Attachment representation was assessed by the AAI (George et al.,
In the present study, the German translation of the original English AAI protocol was used (Gloger-Tippelt,
Oddball stimuli consisted of one out of two white letters, a frequently shown “M” (80%; standard stimulus) and a rarely shown “W” (20%; target stimulus). To increase perceptibility they were shown against a black square sized 2.7 cm × 2.7 cm. Nine pictures taken from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS; Lang et al.,
During the ERP experiment, participants were seated in a dimly lit, electrical and acoustically shielded cabin in a comfortable chair. The monitor presenting the stimuli was placed in a viewing distance of 115 cm. Prior to the oddball experiment participants were instructed to press a button as fast as possible when detecting the target stimulus (“W”). The task was performed during three emotional context conditions (negative, positive, neutral) that were generated by IAPS stimuli appearing on the screen as background pictures. Emotional context conditions were presented in randomized order and consisted of 390 trials (312 standard/78 target) per condition. Within each emotional context condition there were three blocks (130 trials) each presenting one of three negative, positive, or neutral background pictures, respectively. Each block started with the presentation of three additional standard trials. The order of background pictures within each condition was randomized across subjects. During each block the respective context background picture remained on screen. In every single trial oddball stimuli appeared at the center of the screen against the respective background picture, thus, being embedded in it. This simultaneous presentation of stimuli and background pictures remained on screen for 200 ms followed by an inter-stimulus interval of 1300 ms, during which the oddball stimuli, the white letter, disappeared. After each block participants were asked to push a button to continue the experiment.
The stimulus presentation was controlled by the experimental software Inquisit (Millisecond Software, Seattle, WA, USA). The behavioral responses following standard and target stimuli (button press) were registered in ms after stimulus onset. Correct responses were defined as button press after target presentation.
EEG was recorded according to the international 10–20 system with active electrodes based on high-quality Ag/AgCl sensors 5 mm in diameter from 60 electrode sites
During offline-processing the EEG signal was re-referenced to the average of the mastoids and digitally filtered using a 0.1 Hz high pass and a 30 Hz low pass filter with a 24 dB/oct gradient. The EEG signal then was segmented into epochs ranging from 200 ms pre- to 700 ms after stimulus onset. The pre-stimulus window of 200 ms was used for baseline-correction. To correct for saccadic eye movements or eye blinks the Gratton and Cole Procedure was applied (Gratton et al.,
Finally, standard and target stimuli segments were averaged for each participant and condition. Based on previous literature and a visual inspection of the grand average waveforms, the P3 was scored as the maximum positive peak between 330 and 600 ms after stimulus onset at midline electrodes Fz, Cz, Pz. With brain activity decreasing from parietal to frontal scalp it was found to show typical scalp topography (Johnson,
Number of correct responses and reaction times to targets as well as false alarms were analyzed by a two-way MANOVA with a repeated measure factor for context and an independent factor for attachment representation.
To examine the impact of attachment representation on P3 amplitude responses repeated measure MANOVAs were conducted with repeated measure factors for electrode (midline: Fz, Cz, Pz; parietal: P3, P1, Pz, P2, P4), stimulus type (standard vs. target), context (negative, neutral, positive) and an independent factor for attachment representation (secure, insecure-dismissing, insecure-preoccupied). The main focus of analysis was on effects concerning attachment, hence only significant effects including attachment security are reported in detail. Attachment relevant effects were further analyzed
The scoring of the AAIs resulted in the following distribution of attachment representations: There were 22 persons with a secure attachment representation and 19 with an insecure one, among the latter 14 persons had an insecure-dismissing and 5 persons had an insecure-preoccupied attachment representation.
Preliminary analyses showed that attachment representation was not associated with the subjects’ age and education (
The attachment × emotional context repeated measure MANOVA for correct target responses with gender as a covariate did not show main effects, but resulted in a significant interaction between emotional context and attachment representation (
Emotional context | |||
---|---|---|---|
Positive | Neutral | Negative | |
Secure | 76.7 (1.6) | 76.4 (3.0) | 76.7 (1.7) |
Insecure-dismissing | 76.6 (1.2) | 76.3 (2.3) | 73.7 (4.7) |
Insecure-preoccupied | 77.2 (1.2) | 77.6 (0.5) | 77.8 (0.5) |
Secure | 1.2 (1.7) | 1.7 (2.1) | 1.0 (1.6) |
Insecure-dismissing | 0.9 (1.3) | 1.5 (1.4) | 1.9 (1.9) |
Insecure-preoccupied | 0.2 (0.4) | 0.6 (1.3) | 1.2 (2.7) |
Secure | 507.5 (57.3) | 520.3 (66.3) | 511.3 (58.8) |
Insecure-dismissing | 502.6 (61.2) | 506.7 (58.6) | 519.7 (53.2) |
Insecure-preoccupied | 480.6 (34.1) | 499.8 (26.2) | 495.2 (42.4) |
The grand average waveforms of the P3 responses of the three groups of attachment representations are shown in Figure
The four-way repeated measure MANOVA for P3 amplitude responses with the factors electrodes (midline: Pz, Cz, Fz), context, stimulus type, and attachment and with gender as a covariate resulted in a significant main effect for electrode (
The four-way repeated measure MANOVA for P3 amplitude responses with the factors electrodes (parietal: P3, P1, Pz, P2, P4), context, stimulus type, and attachment and with gender as a covariate resulted in a significant main effect for electrode (
Insecure-dismissing | Secure | Insecure-preoccupied | |||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Positive | Neutral | Negative | Positive | Neutral | Negative | Positive | Neutral | Negative | |
Fc | 5.18 | 4.55 | 3.98 | 4.28 | 5.19 | 4.87 | 4.95 | 4.75 | 3.96 |
Cz | 12.04 | 10.73 | 9.87 | 12.61 | 13.66 | 13.10 | 11.40 | 12.51 | 10.88 |
Pz | 14.86 | 13.90 | 12.24 | 17.68 | 17.75 | 16.47 | 13.83 | 16.88 | 15.63 |
P1 | 13.45 | 12.53 | 10.77 | 15.71 | 15.48 | 14.74 | 13.55 | 16.08 | 15.74 |
P2 | 13.94 | 12.88 | 11.21 | 17.27 | 16.46 | 15.94 | 11.91 | 14.39 | 13.72 |
P3 | 10.69 | 10.16 | 8.61 | 14.64 | 14.09 | 13.36 | 11.13 | 13.01 | 12.15 |
P4 | 11.60 | 10.29 | 9.15 | 13.85 | 13.96 | 12.90 | 9.85 | 11.60 | 11.40 |
After exclusion of the preoccupied group the three-way interaction between emotional context, stimulus type, and attachment failed to reach significance. Instead there was a main effect of attachment (
The current study aimed to link attachment representation to cognitive and emotional information processing on a behavioral and neurophysiological level. At the behavioral level, subjects with insecure-dismissing attachment representation responded less frequently with correct responses to targets in negative contexts than securely or insecure-preoccupied attached subjects, which indicates that they recognized fewer target stimuli. On a neurophysiological level, ERP-data showed that subjects with insecure-dismissing attachment representation had smaller P3 amplitudes to target stimuli when they were embedded within a negative as compared to a neutral and positive context, which was not the case in the secure and insecure-preoccupied attachment groups. These findings support the hypothesis that attachment representation moderates the association between emotion and information processing.
In the present study, negative emotional context reduced hit rates to neutral stimuli in insecure-dismissing compared to securely attached subjects. Similar findings have been reported in several studies showing restrictions in processing negative facial expressions shown by avoidantly attached subjects as assessed by self-report questionnaire. For example, Dan and Raz (
Although the present study did not replicate the findings regarding response times, the fewer correct answers in insecure-dismissing subjects as compared to the other attachment groups depicts a restricted processing ability in the context of negative emotion. Presumably the present stimulus, either “W” or “M” may invite for faster responses with the side-effect of a higher error-rate, while decisions on facial valence are more complex. Consequently, subjects take more time but have lower error-rates.
These findings are in line with theoretical assumptions from attachment theory postulating deficits in emotional regulation abilities in insecure-dismissing individuals in distressing or threatening situations, in which the attachment system is activated. This is explained by the child’s experiences with the caregiver. While sensitive responding to the infant’s emotional expression and emotional needs in mothers facilitates the development of emotional competences and finally contributes to the development of a secure infant-mother attachment, infants of insensitive or rejecting mothers are restricted in the development of emotional regulation strategies, their ability recognize emotions, to express and communicate their needs and to refer to the caregiver as a source of emotional support. For example, a restricted ability in emotion recognition in insecure-dismissing subjects was also found in behavioral studies with children or adolescents (e.g., Spangler and Zimmermann,
First of all, the pattern of the P3 responses along the midline (frontal, central and parietal) demonstrating decreasing P3 amplitude responses from frontal to central to parietal areas as well as the pattern of the P3 amplitude responses along the parietal line (central and lateral) demonstrating higher central and lower lateral amplitudes were as expected from research literature and verify the validity of the assessment.
In the current study, attachment groups differed significantly with regard to the P3 ERP component. Individuals with an insecure-dismissing attachment representation showed significantly smaller P3 amplitudes to target stimuli when embedded within negative as compared to neutral or positive emotional contexts. In addition, the P3 amplitudes of insecure-dismissing subjects during negative contexts were smaller than those of secure subjects. This pattern was found independent of the location of the electrodes included, both for the amplitudes along the midline (Pz, Cz, Fz) and the amplitudes along the parietal line (P3, P1, Pz, P2, P4).
According to Polich (
Transferring the attention allocation theory of Polich (
Similarly, differences between insecure-dismissing and secure individuals in the P3 amplitude in response to faces of different valence were also found by Fraedrich et al. (
The findings of other studies were somewhat different to the findings of this study. Zhang et al. (
A reason for the different findings of Zhang et al. (
In sum, interpreting the current findings of insecure-dismissing subjects’ dampened P3 amplitude responses to target stimuli in negative contexts in terms of reduced attentional processing capacities well fits with the behavioral findings in the current study. More precisely, this study suggests that the insecure-dismissing group may allocate more attention resources to task-irrelevant negative emotional information, presumably in a defensive regulatory effort, which may in turn contribute to poorer task performance at a behavioral level. This interpretation is supported by previous studies cited above reporting restrictions in the ability to recognize and to regulate negative emotions in infants and adolescents with a history of insecure attachment relationships.
While securely attached subjects significantly differed in neural processing from subjects with an insecure-dismissing attachment relationship, we did not find differential processing patterns when comparing secure and insecure-preoccupied subjects. There are several explanations for this non-finding. Firstly, due to the very different modes of emotional regulation associated with the two different insecure attachment patterns and also due to the explanation of their determinants (Cassidy and Berlin,
Secondly, from a methodological perspective the relatively low number of insecure-preoccupied subjects in our study (which could be expected with respect to known normative distribution of attachment patterns) may have resulted in low statistical power, which makes further neurophysiological studies of this attachment subgroup necessary. Moreover, data inspection revealed that the mean scores of the insecure-preoccupied subjects actually lie between the secure and insecure-dismissing ones, with being more similar to the secure subjects.
Due to the small number of preoccupied subjects we, additionally, calculated the analyses of variance after exclusion of the preoccupied group. In most cases, the findings regarding attachment representation remained essentially the same. Only for the ERP analyses along the parietal line, the interaction between emotional context and attachment for the target stimuli disappeared, and a main effect of attachment in response to target stimuli was found indicating that insecure subjects allocated fewer attentional resources not only in a negative emotional context, but in general. This is in line with Fraedrich et al. (
In summary, the present study shows that the attachment representation influences neurophysiological processing of task-relevant stimuli embedded within emotional contexts. This finding provides further empirical evidence for the assumption that the inner working model of attachment influences perception, processing and interpretation of emotional cues (Spangler and Zimmermann,
Furthermore, this study combines a neurophysiological approach with the assessment of attachment on a representational level, in contrast to other studies (Zhang et al.,
The present study investigated neural processing of neutral targets in emotional contexts to study how attachment moderates the link between processing of task-irrelevant stimuli in the environment (here: the emotional context) and task relevant information processing. In contrast, most other studies focus on facial expressions to investigate emotion perception in others (Green et al.,
Some limitations have to be considered in this study. First, the sample size of the study is limited, and second, the sample size of the different attachment groups varies considerably. Specifically, the insecure-preoccupied group is rather small. It should be noted that the distribution found in this study corresponds with the typical distribution found in several studies (for e meta-analysis, see van IJzendoorn,
Our findings support assumptions about moderation of emotional information processing by differences in attachment representation. Specifically it has been shown that negative emotional information restricts cognitive emotional processing in insecure-dismissing subjects. This indicates that it is sufficient to alter context information to influence neural processing in insecure-dismissing subjects in contrast to varying emotional content of stimuli in the focus of attention. However, in the case of insecure-preoccupied subjects it remains vague to which extent neural processing is altered by varying emotional contexts.
The study was conducted in accordance with the Code of Ethics of the German Psychological Association (from 09/28/2004), which is essentially based on the Code of Ethics of the APA (Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct, American Psychologist, 2002, 57, 1060-1073). According to the rules of the German Research Foundation, it was not required to apply for a formal vote for this study; because (1) the participants were healthy (no patient groups); (2) we did not use invasive methods; and (3) there participation did not provide any risk to the subjects. Finally (4), for studies using ERP assessments, a formal vote only is required if the subjects are younger than 14 years and older than 65 years.
The participants were informed about the aims of the study and about the methods used. In addition, they were informed that (1) their participation was voluntary and that they at any point of time had the right to withdraw the participation and (2) that the data were treated according to the data protection law, and that they were saved anonymously. Each participant signed the informed consent form before participation.
RL: concept, design, collection, analysis and interpretation of data, literature research, writing. CH: analysis and interpretation of data, literature research writing, critical review. MTK: collection, analysis and interpretation of data, writing, critical review. GS: concept, design, supervision, writing, critical review.
The study was funded by ressources of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg.
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
1To distinguish between explicitly and implicitly assessed attachment categories, we used the different terminology that commonly applies to both approaches: avoidant (explicit measures) vs. insecure-dismissing (implicit measure).
2During the second laboratory assessment further EEG experiments were conducted to investigate hemispheric asymmetries (see also Kungl et al., under review) and facial emotion processing.
3Johanna Behringer, Institute of Psychology, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany.
4Kathrin Beck, Institute fuer Therapieforschung, Munich, Germany.
5F7, F3, Fz, F4, F8, FC5, FC1, FC2, FC6, T7, C3, Cz, C4, T8, TP9, CP5, CP1, CP2, CP6, TP10, P7, P3, Pz, P4, P8, PO9, O1, Oz, O2, PO10, AF4, AF8, F5, F1, F2, F6, FT9, FT7, FC3, FC4, FT8, FT10, C5, C1, C2, C6, TP7, CP3, CPz, CP4, TP8, P5, P1, P2, P6, PO7, PO3, POz, PO4, PO8.