The Attentional Bias And Its Formation Stage Of Individual In Different Adult Attachment Styles

Attachment theory assumes that the attachment is the theme of the whole human life, and the adults who are in the romantic relationship also has a similar relationship as the maternal attachment, namely adult attachment. Previous studies discussed cognitive bias of adult attachment orientation on the base of attention and memory. In the attention studies, most researchers divided participants by two attachment dimensions, used attachment-related words as experimental, and found that insecure attachment individuals are prone to make avoided activities, only two studies found the attention alert in the attachment anxiety type of individuals. Adult attachment argue that only attachment figure or elicits the mental representation of the attachment figure as a means to obtain a sense of psychological proximity, so the attachment system is specifically oriented toward the attachment figured and once activated; once more, each style is associated with a distinct way of coping with stress, securely attached individuals adopt secure strategies that flexible distracting; anxiously attached individuals adopt hyperactivating strategies that alerting attention; avoidantly attached individuals adopt deactivating strategies that avoiding attention.So the existing research results not only failed to reach an agreement, but also undiscussed the formation phases of individual's attention bias:directional or transfer? In order to provide more direct evidence for adult attachment theory, the present study designed the two studies discuss different adult attachment styles individual attention of attachment object bias after analyzing those methods and results in previous studies. All participants of adult attachment styles were selected by ECR (Experiences in Close Relationship).Study 1 discuss how different adults attachment styles influence the attention bias on two conditions. Participants completed a modified dot probe task in the experiment 1, and the SOA was set to 550ms, in order to study the differences of the attention bias among four adult attachment styles. The results indicated that participants were associated with attention alert toward the attachment name on the whole, only secure and anxious attachment styles individual were associated with attention alert toward the attachment name.In order to reduce the role of defense mechanisms, especially the pre-defense strategy in fear attachment individual, experiment 2 used the same paradigm as experiment 1, and the SOA was set to 250ms. The results indicated that participants were associated with attention alert toward the attachment name on the whole, only the fearful attachment styles individual was associated with attention alert toward the attachment name. No attention bias was found toward the attachment name in attachment avoid individual. Study 1 found that different adult attachment styles tend to pay attention to the attachment name, but failed to explain these attention bias occurred in any stage.Study 2 used the cuing paradigm and the SOA was set to 300ms, discussed the mechanisms of different adult attachment styles. Experimental verification is not only to a certain the results of the study 1, but distinguish between the different adult attachment styles tend to place attention to the specific stage:attachment anxiety genotype attention bias in attention concentration and transfer stages, attachment fearful individuals occurred in the attention shift stage; secure and avoidant attachment did not find significant attentional bias.In conclusion, we found the following results:(1) When attachment system is activated, people will show a positive attention bias to the attachment name on the whole; but different attachment styles individuals have different attention bias.(2) Attachment secure individuals have a moderate attention degree, and with no apparent awareness or avoid.(3) Attachment anxiety individuals have the highest degree of attention bias, and this bias may occur in the orientation and the transfer stage.(4) Attachment fearful individuals showed the time-course features:from alert to avoid.(5) Attachment avoid individuals have no significant attention bias in the different SOA conditions.