The Impact Of Secure Attachment On The Pursuit Of Unconscious Goals

Nonconscious goal pursuit can be activated by certain environment cues about the goal and affects the subsequent cognition and behavior. Interpersonal relationship (especially significant others) plays the important role of nonconscious goal pursuit. During these interactions with the significant others, individual can attain many schemes. Relationship schemes include self-scheme, other-scheme, script of relationship. In addition, it also contain common goals shared with significant others. Thus, activating relationship schemes can activate the corresponding relationship goal, and subsequently affect the individual to seek these goals unconsciously.As a special emotional bond with others, adult attachment has an important impact on individuals’ close relationships. Recently, researchers have focused their attention on the state attachment which could be activated in experimental environment. Researchers have found the positive effect of attachment security, such as emotional regulation, other-self cognition, interpersonal/group relationship, prosocial behavior and so on. Therefore, this study aims to explore the effect of secure attachment priming on unconscious goal pursuit and further extended the Broaden and Build Cycle of attachment security, thus finds the efficient way to promote goal pursuit.The research adopted three studies to examine the impact of attachment security on the unconscious goal pursuit.Study 1 examined the impact of attachment security priming on the goal accessibility. After completed the Experiences in Close Relationships scales (ECR),106 college students were randomly assigned into three priming groups, respectively for attachment security, acquaintance and control group. Then all of them finished lexical decision tasks. The results showed that the attachment security priming group’s reaction time of success-related word was significantly lower than acquaintance priming group and control group, and there was non-significant difference on neutral words and non-word. The results also found dispositional attachment didn’t moderate the attachment security priming and goal accessibility.Study 2 adopted the puzzle task to examine the impact of attachment security priming on the goal persistent.94 college students completed the ECR, and then they were randomly assigned into three priming groups. Finally, all the participants finished puzzle task. The results showed that in high difficulty condition, the attachment security priming group’s perseverance time was significantly higher than acquaintance priming group and control group, and there was no moderating role of dispositional attachment between attachment security priming and target perseverance.Study 3 examined the impact of attachment security priming on the goal pursuit and the moderating role of regulatory focus between attachment security priming and goal pursuit.94 college students completed the ECR and Regulatory focus questionnaire, and then they were randomly assigned into three priming groups. Finally, all the participants finished space classification task and recognition task. The results showed that the attachment security priming group’s reaction time of academic-related word was significantly lower than acquaintance priming group and control group, significantly higher than control group on the academic distraction words, and there was non-significant differences on the neutral words. Attachment security priming group’s reaction time of digital recognition was significantly lower than acquaintance priming group and control group, and there was non-significant difference on digital recognition accuracy. The results also found dispositional attachment didn’t moderate the attachment security priming and goal accessibility, but defensive focus served as the moderating role between them.All of these results confirmed that attachment security priming has a positive effect on goal pursuit, and defensive focus served as the moderating role.