Research On ERP Research On Applying Excessive Implicit And Implicit Recognition

Attachment acts as an important regulators of emotion, cognition and behavior in close relationships, it affects individual’s perception and processing of social information. Highly avoidant individuals shaped negative representation of others in childhood due to negative experience including the repeated, sustained low response and less support from caregivers, and formed positive representation of self through the defensive strategy. They denied their attachment needs, were unwilling to establish close relationships with others, and sought emotional independence, with the goal to avoid pain of rejection. When negative memories were needed to be extracted, the internal working models of highly avoidant individuals would provide a defensive strategy, which entails postemptive strategy to suppress the activation and accessibility of encoded painful memories and psychological pain again, resulting in the failure of recollection.Although researchers generally believed that the postemptive strategy of highly avoidant individuals could lead to memory defects on attachment-related information.However, there existed two divergences: First, from the perspective of automaticcontrolled processing, attachment theory proposed that the postemptive strategy of highly avoidant individuals could work under unconscious state; While some studies considered postemptive strategy as a kind of strategy needing conscious cognitive effort.Previous researches attempted to make it certain by explore the implicit and explicit memory retrieval using behavior methods, the results found that highly avoidant individuals both existed implicit and explicit memory defects, which were not affected by monetary rewards, but it is still not clear the difference between the automatic-controlled processing phases. Second, some studies found that the highly avoidant individuals existed memory defects in attachment-related positive information,and some did not. Attachment theory shown that in close relationships, highly avoidant individuals not only worried about rejection, abandonment, or other negative information, but also rejected the intimacy, they sought for the emotionally independence. So the intimacy included in attachment-related information should be suppressed because they would be classified as stressful to them.This study based on Bartholomew’s theory of fragile/positive self presentations.Bartholomew argued that highly avoidant individuals held two sets of contradictivepresentations of self. The fragile self presentation worked in automatic processing stage,they showed a negative bias to attachment-related information; In controlled processing stage, positive self presentations used deactivate strategy to keep the low active of attachment system. Bowlby’s internal working models also put forward the dual-processing theory of memory that implicit level including the implicit recognition or situational script, and explicit levels including the semantic and episodic memory processing. Therefore, in this study, we assumed that the in automatic processing stages or implicit level, fragile self presentation of highly avoidant individuals would prompt them to extract more number of attachment-related information, while on the controlled processing stages or explicit level, positive self presentation of highly avoidant individuals would use postemptive strategy to inhibit attachment-related information into consciousness.The purpose of this study was to explore the effectiveness of postemptive strategy of highly avoidant individuals in automatic-controlled processing phases and stimulus types inhibited during explicit picture recognition using the event related potentials(ERPs) technology; And further verify the effectiveness of postemptive strategy during implicit recognition and the implicit recognition characteristics of attachment-related positive information. After the threatening-Situation priming, we recorded the electroencephalogram during study-test paradigm and continuous recognition paradigm.The results showed that:(1) In the automatic processing stage of explicit recognition, postemptive strategy of highly avoidant individuals were less effective on the defensive familiarity recognition of attachment-related pictures, they showed more widely distributed brain areas on early old/new effects than less-avoidant individuals; And the results of implicit recognition were in accordance with it, showed more significant repetition effects than less-avoidant individuals.(2) In the controlled processing stage of explicit recognition, highly avoidant individuals could effectively use postemptive strategy to suppress the conscious recollection of attachment-related positive and negative pictures, which led to the lower correct recognition rate and lack of late old/new effect.(3) The recognition mechanism of highly avoidant individuals on attachmentrelated positive and negative pictures were similar that they shared the “vigilanceavoidance” dual-process model. In the automatic processing stage or unconscious level,highly avoidant individuals were more vigilant to attachment-related positive andnegative pictures, and matching similarity preferentially after quick identification;While in the controlled processing stage, they adopted postemptive strategy via top-down manner to suppress to conscious recollection of the attachment-related positive and negative pictures.The results not only helped to further clarify the internal processing mechanism and attachment-related stimulus types defensed by the postemptive strategy of highly avoidant individuals, verify the core assumptions of attachment theory about memory processing strategies, but also had great clinical significance on the counseling 、treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder among highly avoidant individuals. The innovation of this study were that we explored the effectiveness of postemptive strategy of highly avoidant individuals from the point of automatic-controlled processing phases after threatening-situation priming; Introduce ERP old/new effects and repetition effects into the field of attachment avoidance and memory research, and made comparison between the mechanism of explicit and implicit memory on brain activity.