Attention Bias For Emotional Faces In Middle Childhood With Different Attachment Styles

Attachment is an internal representation that individuals develop of the world and of significant people within it,including the self.This representation is believed to be reflected in the automated cognitive bias of attachment-related information.This means that cognitive bias may play an important role in the processing of attachment information,and attention is considered to be the core regulation mechanism of individual attachment system.Therefore,in recent years,the study of the relationship between attachment and attention bias has been widely concerned by scholars.However,there are relatively few studies on attachment in middle childhood.Guy Bosmans and colleagues discovered that insecure attached children will pay more attention to their mothers' faces.However,it is not clear that how insecure attached children pay attention to non-maternal faces.Therefore,in this study,we investigated the attachment-related information processing bias characteristics of different attachment types children to adult female face.Firstly,Revised the children Experiences in Close Relationships Scale compiled by Brenning(2011),so as to form an good tool for measuring the attachment quality of children in middle childhood.Base on this,Establish a discriminant function of attachment type by discriminant analysis method.According to the two indexes of attachment avoidance and attachment anxiety of ECR-RC scale,children were divided into four types: Secure attachment,Dismissing attachment,Preoccupied attachment and Fearful attachment.Secondly,a dot detection paradigm was used to explore the characteristics of attention bias of different attachment types children to adult women emotional faces: happy,neutral,sad,anger and disgust.The results are as follows:(1)The revised ECR-RC scale consists of two dimensions: attachment avoidance and attachment anxiety,with 36 items,with good reliability index: 0.92 for avoidance and 0.94 for anxiety,which basically meet the requirements of psychometrics.(2)The correct judgment rate of the discriminant function of attachment type for Secure,Preoccupied and Fearful attachment types is more than 50%,and the total correct discrimination rate is 47%,While the correct judgment rate of the Dismissing attachment is less than 25% of the prior probability.(3)In the time of 500 ms,there was a significant attention bias towards disgust faces in the preoccupied attachment children,which was characterized by attention avoidance.In 1250 ms,the post-processing stage,there is no significant attention bias to disgust faces.At the same time,preoccupied attachment children have no attention bias to sad,anger,and happy faces.(4)There was no significant attention bias to emotional faces in children of Secure,Dismissing and Fearful attachment type.Conclusion: the preoccupied attachment children have attention avoidance towards disgust faces,while other attachment types children have no attention bias towards any other emotional faces.It is suggested that mothers with preoccupied children should pay more attention to the psychological needs of children and provide more sense of security,encouragement and affirmation to children.