The Effect Of Undergraduates' Attach-ment Types On Attentional Bias For Self-Traits

A central tenet of attachment theory is that the attachment system becomes automatically activated in threatening context. To deal with these distressing feelings, people seek proximity toward the attachment figure to get comfort and protection. Repeated interactions with an available attachment figure usually result in relatively stable beliefs about the self and the attachment figure (internal working models,1WM), which are the basic of attachment individual differences. IWM processes are presumed to affect pathways from childhood to adulthood by shaping cognitive, emotional, and behavioral response patterns that provide guidelines for coping with distress. One particularly important mechanism that may mediate linkages between past and present attachment representations is the process of selective attention. Within the attachment domain, attentional factors have already been studied in relation to the processing of threatening information. However, attention involves more than just the filtering of incoming information, which is just a first step in the activation of the attachment system. That is, attention allocation may also serve important functions for the regulation of the attachment system once it has been activated. The main goal of this research was to examine the selective attention toward self-traits in an attachment-related stress context, to make further exploration of the mechanisms of the IWM.In this research, we used questionnaire and experimental methods, our participants were undergraduates who have Jove experience (at least six months).We asked participants to imagine their attachment figure (lover) of leaving them forever. Then, we administered a dot-probe task to the participants, with target words consisting of negative self-traits and positive self-traits. Moreover, we combined cognitive load technology to investigate whether the cognitive load can change people's attentional bias effect for self-traits. We get the results as below:1,In threatening context, secure people showed the significant attentional vigilance to the positive self-traits. This effect isn't influenced by cognitive load and can reflect secure people have the stable and positive self-representations;2,In threatening context, both preoccupied and fearful people showed a significant attentional bias effect toward the negative self-traits, no matter what the cognitive load is high or low. This result verified these people have the negative self-working model;3,In condition of non-cognitive load (experiment 1), dismissing people showed the significant attentional vigilance toward both negative self-traits and positive self-traits, but only toward positive self-traits under low cognitive load. However, the high cognitive load triggered dismissing people to direct attention towards negative self-traits, the possible reason is their deactivating strategies are disrupted under the insufficiency of cognitive resources, then the negative implicit self-views are exposed. The result reflected that dismissing people's positive self-working model is not so stable as secure people.4,All the results showed above were not appeared in control condition. And all participants didn't show significant attentional bias effect for the self-irrelevant words, so we can conclude that the attentional bias effects toward the negative self-traits and positive self-traits are not triggered by the emotional valence of the words.