The Influence Of Attachment Styles Of College Students On The Cognition Of Facial Expressions

This present study investigated the influence of attachment styles of college students on the cognition of facial expressions involving perception and attention processing by using emotional faces as experimental materials.In study1,the study adopted a morph movie paradigm to explore the relation between attachment styles and the perception of offset or onset of facial expressions,aiming at distinguishing whether the perception differences result from emotional change or emotional cues.The results showed :(1)under conditions of no distress,preoccupied individuals saw the offset of happiness earlier than secure individuals and the onset of positive and negative emotions earlier than dismissive individuals;(2)under conditions of separation distress,preoccupied individuals saw the offset of positive and negative emotions earlier than dismissive individuals and the onset of both positive and negative emotions later than dismissive individuals and fearful individuals.In study2,using a spatial cueing task attempted to investigate the attentional bias of different attachment style individuals on the facial expressions,and cue validity effect,engagement effect and disengagement effect were calculated as three attentional indices.The results revealed that in the state of attachment system being activated,secure people enhanced more attention to happy faces;fearful people were associated with attention avoidance to both happiness and anger;preoccupied people showed no attentional bias;dismissive people tended to orient attention away from happy faces.In conclusion,attachment styles had an influence on the cognitive processing of facial expressions.Secure individuals showed attentional vigilance to happy faces in the state of activate attachment system;fearful individuals displayed the perception avoidance under natural condition,perception vigilance and attention avoidance for facial emotions under the condition of distress;preoccupied individuals exhibited perceptional vigilance to emotional change,moreover,the separation distress influenced the cognitive vigilance;under the natural state,the dismissive individuals avoided the perception of changing facial emotions,whereas they revealed perceptional vigilance to facial emotions under conditions of separation distress.