| Similar to the basic needs for food and water in our evolutionary history,the need to belong is deeply rooted in individual psychology.Given that social rejection could thwart the basic need for social acceptance,one might expect that people will experience negative emotions during social rejection and this may increase their impulse to aggress.People tend to respond to unprovoked punishment with high levels of provoked aggression.However,differences in responses to unprovoked punishment may depend in part on individual differences in how people maintain social bonds,namely their attachment patterns.Attachment pattern as an important personality trait are developed and formed in infant-caregiver interaction.Differences in attachment patterns may predict a selective bias in attention toward certain types of emotional information in the external environment: anxiously attached individuals are in favor of exaggerated mechanisms,incline to exaggerate the threatening information,pay more attention to the threatening information and thus seek closeness to attachment figures actively;avoidantly attached individuals prefer defensive mechanisms and tend to shy away from the attachment information;securely attached individuals lead to greater openness in the perception of positive and negative information,which can help coping and restore emotional balance.For anxiously attached individuals who chronically yearn for closer ties with others and fear failure to achieve proximity to an attachment figure,experiencing unfair social encounters may represent especially painful events.In contrast,people who are generally uncomfortable in getting close to others may shieldthemselves from negative events such as rejection and attack,resulting in less intense responses.Attachment security can help coping and restore emotional balance,so that individuals can face social rejection calmly.Based on the rejection-aggression link,present research focuses on the modulation of attachment patterns in provoked aggression and why this may occur.The general aggression model(GAM)emphasizes the modulation role of self-control processes in regulating people's aggressive urges.To explain how aggression occurs,the model suggested that different levels of self-control will affect the needed resources to engage in appraisal and decision-making processes,leading them to engage in impulsive,aggressive actions or non-aggressive ones.Therefore,present research would from the perspective of executive functioning to explore the reason why distinct reactive aggression within three attachment groups.Present research designed three experiments to explore the above issues,the results showed that:(1)In the context of social rejection,reactive aggression was higher in the anxiously attached participants than in the securely and avoidantly attached groups anxiously attached participants.(2)Anxiously attached participants had higher executive functioning depletion after receiving an unprovoked punishment than securely and avoidantly attached individuals and they thus favored impulsive aggressive actions.(3)The difference of executive functioning between attachment patterns has occurred following social rejection as anxiously attached participants experienced higher executive functioning depletion than avoidantly attached participants,while unprovoked punishment further aggravated the depletion of executive functioning in anxiously attached participants.The present findings provided some initial evidence that attachment patterns can buffer or enhance the effects of provoked aggression following unprovoked punishment in the context of social rejection,and this most probably depends on the amount of preserved executive functioning.Moreover,by investigating dynamic change of executive functioning within three attachment patterns in different experimental stage,current research can help us to come to a better understanding about how executive functioning depletion impacts individuals' aggressive behavior with different attachment styles.Therefore,current research not only extends the field that attachment patterns impact cognitive and behavioral tendency,but also adds support to the General Aggression Model.Based on our results,a feasible method to alleviate the phenomenonof school violence may be to form secure and high-quality attachment relationships.To achieve this goal,parents should look provide more communication to children,understanding their living needs and psychological changes.The innovation of this study were through created real situation where aggressive behavior occurred,we examined the influence role of attachment style on individual's proactive aggression.Moreover,we further to systematically explore the mechanism that lead to distinct proactive aggression among different attachment styles from the perspective of executive functioning. |
PDF Full Text Request