Under The Threshold, The Mental Representation Of The Object Of Fear To Start With The Adult Attachment Accessibility Of The Relationship

Since Hazan and Shaver spred the attachment theory into adult romantic relationship research, there have been great development in adult attachment. But it seemed more complicated and obscure of adults' attachment behavior than chidren's. So labrotory studies will be more effective in adult psycho-mechanism studies.In this research, we examined one of the basic assumption of attachment theory that physical or psychological threats (e.g., the appearance of a predator, the departure of an attachment figure) automatically activate the attachment system through a social cognitive research.. Through a lexical decision task which took 40 minor students(male: 10, female: 30) of capital normal university as subjects, we tested how subconscious threat influenced the accessbility of adults' the activation of representations of attachment figures, and how attachment style influenced the accessbility. The result demmonstrated that:(1) Threat primes led to increased accessibility of representations of attachment figures. This effect was specific to attachment figures.(2) The stabilities and validities of the Chinese version of ECR-R seemed better than ECR and AAS. Attachment anxiety heightened accessibility of representations of attachment figures even in neutral contexts, whereas attachment avoidance had no effect on the react time of the lexical task.(3) Although trait anxiety had close relation with attachment anxiety and had middle relation with attachment avoidence, it had no effect on the react time of the lexical decision task, which further testified the unique function of attchment system.