Adult attachment and motivated attention to social images: Attachment-based differences in event-related brain potentials to emotional images

Differences in adult attachment may concord with differences in social perception. The present study aimed to measure neural activity associated with the presentation of visual social stimuli. In an affective oddball paradigm, event-related brain potentials were recorded while participants viewed negative, positive, and neutral images of people and categorized them according to valence. Brain response amplitudes were examined across valence categories and across attachment groups. Results revealed differences between anxious and avoidant groups in “emotion bias”. The avoidant group displayed a bias towards more neural activation in response to negative compared to positive images. The anxious group trended in the opposite direction. Results are discussed in terms of possible attachment-based differences in motivated attention to social stimuli.

► Event-related brain potentials were recorded in response emotional images.
► Attachment style of adult participants was characterized with the ECR scale.
► Avoidantly attached individuals showed a negativity bias in brain responses.
► Anxiously attached individuals did not exhibit a bias, negative or positive.