Deceptive Behavior Of The Anxiously Attached Individuals Under Threat Stimulus:the Role Of Secure Attachment

Deception is not only a social behavior closely related to daily life,but also an advanced and complex cognitive activity requiring the participation of cognitive resources.The factors that influence individual cheating behavior are very extensive.According to previous studies,attachment anxiety is one of the factors that influence individual deceptive behavior from the perspective of relationship.According to attachment theory,which provides a framework for understanding the relationship between attachment and deception,children and adults who experience supportive attachments are significantly less defensive,more sensitive to others’ feelings,and more sincere and sympathetic.On the contrary,attachment with lack of support and distrust will increase attachment insecurity,which will lead to individuals’ self-protection defense and distorted cognition,interfere with empathy and openness,and increase deceptive behaviors.Individuals with attachment anxiety,because of their negative self-model and positive others model,show a strong need for intimate relationship,fear of rejection,and often use hyperactivation strategy to exaggerate threats in interpersonal communication.Previous studies have mostly described individuals with attachment anxiety from a behavioral level who often use deception to maintain a relationship or create a pleasing image for others.However,previous studies have found that external threat sources and the inability to bond to an attachment object exacerbate pain and trigger the highest levels of attachment level activation.While attachment anxiety can make individuals face more threats and perceive more threats,which may make individuals morally vulnerable.Specifically,when perceiving potential or actual threats,the attachment system is activated,and such threats may lead to individual deception.Therefore,the research on attachment anxiety and deceptive behavior ignores the influence of threat stimulation on rt behavior of individuals with attachment anxiety and lacks electrophysiological evidence.To sum up,this study is based on the social information processing theory of attachment and the information processing characteristics of individuals with attachment anxiety in threatening stimuli.This experiment introduced threat stimulation combined with event potential correlation(ERP)to explore the influence on the deceptive behavior of individuals with attachment anxiety.In addition,the negative information related to attachment is regarded as an attachment threat stimulus,and the processing of attachment threat stimulus will cause the individuals with attachment anxiety to adopt hyperactivation strategy and thus show the characteristics of being difficult to disengage.At the same time,the attachment study,wake up by the individual state attachment safety can temporarily activate its attachment representation,a number of positive effects,such as raising the positive emotions,positive self-evaluation,etc.,so the results of the experiment results,based on the specific stimulation and general threats to distinguish the attachment stimulating influence on attachment anxiety individuals deceptive behavior,and through the attachment security priming to start the activation state sexual attachment safety inspection of the deception.In conclusion,two experiments combined with S1-S2 paradigm and ERP technology were conducted in this study to explore the influence of threat stimulation and attachment secure priming on the deceptive behavior of individuals with attachment anxiety.Experiment 1discussed the influence of threat stimulus on the deceptive behavior of individuals with attachment anxiety.Based on the results of experiment 1,experiment 2 still used S1-S2 paradigm combined with ERP technology to distinguish different threat stimuli and to explore the influence on deceptive behavior by awakening the attachment security of individuals with attachment anxiety and temporarily activating their attachment representation.Two experimental results showed that:(1)For the anxiously attached group,deception RT of the threat stimulus was significantly higher than that of the neutral stimulus.(2)Threat stimulus elicited greater LPP amplitudes than that of neutral stimulus in the anxiously attached individuals,but there was no significant difference in securely attached group.(3)In neutral priming condition,the deception RT in general threat stimuli was significantly higher than that in attachment threat stimuli of the anxiously attached individuals.The deception RT in attachment threat of the attachment secure priming group was significantly lower than that of the neutral priming group.(4)For attachment threat stimuli,the attachment security priming condition elicited smaller EPN amplitude than the neutral priming condition.The LPP amplitude of attachment threat stimulus was larger than that of general threat stimulus in neutral priming group.The experimental results show that the threat stimulus will affect the anxiously attached individuals tend to invest too much cognitive resources in the deceptive behavior.There are situational differences between attachment threat stimuli and general threat stimuli on the deceptive behavior of attachment anxious individuals.Specifically,attachment related negative information(attachment threat)processing puts more cognitive resources into the deceptive behavior of attachment anxious individuals than non-attachment negative information(general threat)processing.Individuals with attachment anxiety after secure priming reduced their perception of attachment related threats and had more cognitive resources to reasonably allocate to cheat tasks.In this study,two experiments were conducted to improve the influencing factors and characteristics of the deceptive behavior of individuals with attachment anxiety,and the positive effect of attachment secure priming was extended to the field of cheating.Moreover,this effect revealed the influencing mechanism of secure attachment priming on the deceptive behavior of individuals with attachment anxiety at the electrophysiological level.To further understand the cognitive processing characteristics of deception behavior of individuals with attachment anxiety and to expand the "broaden and build" cycle effect.