Differences Of Recognizing And Processing Facial Expressions In Individuals With Different Adult Attachment

Recognizing facial expressions is an important skill to adapt to modern society.Facial expressions convey a rich source of emotional information,with up to two-thirds of human communication taking place through non-verbal means,so understanding others’ expressions is also crucial to successful interpersonal communication.The ability to correctly recognize others’ facial expressions is affected by attachment style.Individuals with different attachment styles have different internal working patterns and emotion regulation strategies,which affect the cognitive process of attention,perception and understanding of facial expressions,thus regulating their corresponding behavior.For example,insecure individuals tend to overpay attention or ignore negative emotional cues to avoid frustration and painful experience.Therefore,individuals with insecure attachment may have defects in understanding facial expressions,resulting in interpersonal communication and social adjustment difficulties.At present,there is a lack of studies on the influence of attachment style on facial expression recognition and consistent results.It may be due to the reason that facial expressions selected in the experiment were mostly based on the emotion dimension theory,which just simply divided emotions into positive and negative dimensions.In addition,previous studies mainly focused on behavioral performance to apply single indicators,lacking investigation and explanation of the cognitive mechanism behind the recognition performance.However,basic emotion theory has found that emotion is composed of several main basic emotions,which have unique facial muscle expressions and neurophysiological mechanisms.Therefore,will different basic emotional expressions affect the recognition among individuals with three attachment styles? What are the cognitive neural mechanisms behind it?Based on the attachment theory and basic emotion theory,two experiments were conducted to investigate the differences in the recognition and processing of basic emotional expressions among individuals with different attachment types.In Experiment 1,we employed eye-tracking technology in a passive viewing task to explore the differences of visual fixation between secure,avoidant,and anxious individuals in recognizing different basic emotional faces.Then in Experiment 2,we used ERP technology in a dual-choice Oddball task to further explore the electrophysiological mechanism of individuals with the three attachment styles in the processing and recognition of sadness,anger,fear,and disgust with poor performance.The main conclusions of this study are as follows:（1）The accuracy of avoidant individuals in identifying sadness,fear,and calm expressions were significantly lower than that of secure individuals,but there was no differences between avoidant and secure individuals in identifying disgust,anger,and pleasure expressions.Anxious individuals were less accurate than secure individuals in recognizing disgust expression,but the identification accuracy of the sadness was lower than that of the secure type.The results showed that the basic emotional types of faces affect the recognition differences of individuals with different attachment styles,which is related to the different social significance conveyed by expressions and the different emotional strategies used by individuals.（2）Compared with secure and anxious individuals,avoidant individuals significantly increased the fixation time and counts of eyes.In the visual coding of faces,it is difficult for avoidant individuals to extract the information of eyes,which may lead to their recognition obstacles.On the contrary,there was no significant difference in visual coding ability between anxious individuals and secure individuals.（3）Compared with secure individuals,avoidant and anxious individuals induce larger N2c waveform on sad and angry faces than disgusting faces.Avoidant individuals induce larger P3b than anxious individuals,and there is no significant difference between these two attachment types and secure individuals.It shows that compared with secure individuals,avoidant and anxiety individuals are more difficult to distinguish sad and angry expressions than disgusting expressions,and need more selective attention.In addition,avoidant individuals may have inhibition efforts or integration difficulties in late emotional processing,so they need to pay more cognitive efforts.Anxious individuals only invest less psychological resources in the absence of threat to reduce internal loss and maintain the timely activation of attachment system.