The Characteristics Of Emotional Conflict Processing In Individuals With Different Attachment Style

Emotional conflict refers to the irrelevant emotion information impede function of emotional target tasks,Effective control of disturbance stimulation is necessary to maintain normal cognitive function.Attention must be focused on effective emotional information,while suppressing the impact of irrelevant emotional information can lead to a more productive life.Existing researches have shown that disruptive information may impede the processing speed of individual,to a certain extent,which can identify accurately and make reasonable response that there is a contradiction in the past studies.To explain above in better way,researchers pointed out that respondse to different emotional conflict may depend in part on the difference of individual in maintaining social relationships,namely,individual differences in attachment styles.Attachment style is a vital personality traits,which is formed in the interaction between individuals and caregivers.Different attachment styles may affect the cognition and behavioral tendency of individual to the external information.Anxious attached individuals have a strong need for intamicy,as a result,which lead to them tend to exaggerate external threat information.At the early stage,the emotional information may be more alert,but the excessive involvement of the emotions leads to the less inhibition of the conflict resolution for them.Conversly,avoid attached individuals tend to deny the need for intimacy in order to avoid the pain caused by the rejection of attachment figure.This defensive mechanism allows avoid attached individuals showing a smaller emotional response to emotional conflict.Secure attached individuals have a open cogntive attidude,as a result,they can restore cognitive and emotional balance in the face of emotion conflict.Positive and negative emotion have different processing process.And different attachment styles have differenct processing with positive and negativeemotion.Studies have shown that anxious individuals have a tendency to process positive emotions,while avoidant individuals have a processing bias towards negative emotions.Previous studies have shown that the negative emotion of the non-secure attachment is the characteristic of cognitive control processing failure.In conclusion,we can infer that the processing characteristics of emotional conflict of different attachment styles may also be different.The identification of conflict,namely conflict monitoring,does not reach the corresponding research conclusions.Moreover,there is a lack of research on the difference in the processing stage of emotional conflict between anxious and avoidant individuals.Anxious individual tend to positive emotions,avoidant individuals tend to negative emotions,but there is absence of difference of emotional conflict processing for insecure attached individuals under the background of different emotions.Consequently,by introducing the variable of target stimulus emotional valence,this paper further explores the characteristics of emotional conflict processing in the context of different emotional distractors.Current study employed high temporal resolution event related potential(ERP)technology,from the perspective of the relationship between emotional conflict and attachment model,focus on the early viligance,conflict monitoring,and conflict resolution of secure,insecure(anxious and avoidant)individuals during the process of emotional conflict,and in the context of positive and negative emotional distractors,three types of attachment styles during emotional conflict processing are characterized.The basic assumption as follows,in the first experiment is that,compared with secure attached individuals,avoidant and anxious attached individuals showed larger N170 amplitude at the early stage of vigilance.At the stage of conflict monitoring,avodiant and anxious individuals have larger N170 or N450 amplitude.Whereas at the late stage of attentional inhibit,avoidant individuals showed smaller P3 amplitude,anxious individuals show the greatest P3 amplitude.However in experiment 2,compared with secure attachment individual,avoidant and anxious individuals showed a larger N1 amplitude at the early viligance stage of negative target stimuli.At the stage of conflict monitoring,avoidant individuals under the background of the early stages of negative target stimulus,showed a larger conflict monitoring N170 or N450 amplitude,while anxious individual under the background of positive target stimulus showed in obvious conflict monitoring N170 or N450 amplitude.At the late stage,under the condition of negative target stimulus,avoidant individuals showed more obvious inhibitory control,namely showed larger SP amplitude,and anxious individual,is under the condition ofnegative target stimulus,show that the smaller SP amplitude,which explained anxious individual showed weaker inhibition.The resutls showed that:(1)Different attachment styles all have characterization of emotional conflict processing with three phases under the face-word emotion Stroop paradigm,specific phases of the processing characteristics maybe moderated by activated attachment system and emotion of target stimuli.When attachment system were not activated,P1 amplitude was generated during the early stage of perception,and the N170 amplitude and the late attention inhibition phase produced the P3 amplitude.While attachment system were activated,the early perception processing N1 component was produced,and the conflict monitoring N450 component and conflict resolution SP component.(2)When attachment system were not activated,compared with secure individual,avoidant individuals showed inhibition,produce smaller P3 amplitude,not good to solve the conflict processing.Anxious individuals adopt hyperactive strategies to resolve conflicts.(3)Different individuals of attachment styles have various cognitive conflict processing capacity in different time are dynamic change process,early perceptual processing,avoidant and anxious individual in attachment system activation condition have contrary processing bias,then the conflict monitoring stage performance is also affected by emotion.For avoidant individuals,the conflict effect under the condition of negative target stimulation shows a strong N450 amplitude with conflict conditions,and negative emotion promotes its conflict processing.For anxious individuals,they showed a preference for positive emotions,and showed a strong N450 amplitude under consistent conditions,and positive emotions promoted their conflict processing.(4)When attachment system were activated,avoidant attached individual showed larger SP amplitude at late stage of conflict resolution,which manifested it likely to have ability of inhibition.The results of this study not only verified the processing characteristics and electrophysiological differences of the emotional conflict between secure,avoidant and anxious individuals,it also extends previous research on the relationship between attachment style and emotional conflict.That is,from the perspective of time process,the early and late characteristics of the emotional conflict processing of non-secure attachment individuals are explored.From the perspective of individual differences,this paper provides a new perspective for the study of emotion and cognitive controlprocessing.At the same time,it provides new theoretical evidence for the study of emotional conflict,and explains the processing characteristics of emotional conflict between different attachment individuals.