An Experimental Study On The Gender Differences In Attachment Traits To Emotional Information

Attachment is a kind of strong emotional connection,which develops between individual and special others in long-term relationships.The strong emotional connection between the individual and friends,family member,lover and the partner is called adult attachment.Parenting experience in the early help individual gradually form “internal working models ”,these are mental representations of the attachment figure and of the self.The internal working models are stable,that will subconsciously affect the selection and processing of emotional information.When facing emotional information,there are differences in coping strategies between difference types of attachment style.Attachment avoid individuals are characterized by a deactivating strategy in order to suppress the influence of emotional information.However,anxious attached individuals adopt a hyperactivating style to alert emotion information.In other word,adult attachment can affect attentional bias of emotional information.Research Objective: This study aims to investigate the attentional bias to different facial emotional information of different adult attachment style between male and female.This study aims to investigate from two aspects.The first one,the emotional faces are target stimulus,the other,they are distractions.On this basis,we further study whether the attentional bias to emotional information is affected by facial gender.Research Methods:This study consists of three experiments.They use emotional faces as experimental materials and participants are selected by Experiences in Close Relationship(ECR).Experiment 1: A 2(gender: male,female)×2(adult attachment: anxious,avoidance)×2(facial emotion: happy,angry)mixed-design Experiment was conducted.The emotional faces with no obvious gender characteristics were used as experimental materials.A dot-probe paradigm was conducted to investigate the attentional bias conducted to investigate the attentional bias to different facial emotion.The result indicate : Avoidant male subjects had attentional bias to angry facial emotion,the mechanism of these subjects attentional bias related to disengaging.Anxious female subjects had attentional bias to happy facial emotion.Experiment 2: A 2(gender: male,female)×2(adult attachment: anxious,avoidance)×2(facial emotion: happy,angry)×2(facial gender:male,female)mixed-design Experiment was conducted.The emotional faces with obvious gender characteristicswere used as experimental materials.To explore whether the attentional bias to emotional information is different that caused by facial gender.The experimental paradigm is a dot-probe paradigm.The result indicate: Avoidant female subjects had attentional bias to all happy facial emotion,the mechanism of these subjects attentional bias related to orientating.The same as anxious female subjects.As for female face,avoidant subjects had more attention bias than anxious subjects.Experiment 3: A 2(gender: male,female)×2(adult attachment: anxious,avoidance)×2(facial emotion: happy,angry)×2(Experimental treatment: experimental conditions,control conditions)mixed-design was conducted.The experimental material is the same as experiment one.The negative priming paradigm was used to investigate the attentional inhibition on emotional information that as a distraction.The result indicate: Avoidant male subjects was associated with a stronger inhibition of happy faces.Avoidant female subjects was associated with impaired inhibitory processing of happy faces.The same as anxious female subjects.Research Conclusion:(1)Avoidant male subjects had attentional bias to angry facial emotion,the mechanism of these subjects attentional bias related to disengaging,and there was a tendency to avoid happy faces.(2)As for avoidant female subjects,there was a tendency to avoid angry faces.They also had attentional bias to all happy faces,the mechanism of these subjects attentional bias related to orientating.(3)Anxious male subjects had no attentional bias or avoidance to emotional faces.(4)As for anxious female subjects,there was a tendency to avoid angry faces.They also had attentional bias to all happy faces,the mechanism of these subjects attentional bias related to orientating.(5)Avoidant subjects paid more attention to female faces than anxious subjects.