Adult attachment and attention to positive and negative emotional face expressions

The present study investigated the relation between adult attachment styles and attention for happy, angry, and neutral emotional face expressions. Using a modified version of the exogenous cueing paradigm, we found that the combination of high attachment anxiety and high attachment avoidance was associated with reduced attention for angry faces. We also observed that anxious people tended to orient attention away from happy faces, especially in combination with high scores on attachment avoidance. These findings replicate and extend the results of a previous study and provide additional information on the role of attention in adult attachment.