Adult Deactive Strategies and Attention Bias:Evidence From A Dot Probe Task Under Exogenous Cue With Pictures of Facial Expression

Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2013, Vol. 36 ›› Issue (3) : 592-599.

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PDF(739 KB)
Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2013, Vol. 36 ›› Issue (3) : 592-599.

Adult Deactive Strategies and Attention Bias:Evidence From A Dot Probe Task Under Exogenous Cue With Pictures of Facial Expression

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Abstract

As an essential psychological process to activation and regulation of attachment system , attention and its role in attachment orientation has increasing been emphasized. Clear predictions has also been made on the relation between them. Anxious attached individual adopted hypervigilant attentional style and oriented the signal of attachment figure’ unavailibility and rejection, whereas person who was avoidant neglected and avoided signals with threat in order to prevent and inhibit the activation of attachment system. However, to date, it is unclear wherther different attachment strategies guide attention toward or away from attachment signal and threat signals in line with abovementioned expectations because of the inconsistent findings empirical studies made. Another question is how attachment orientation is associated with attention and whether the abovementioned predictions would be confirmed to be true is still unknown for Chinese participants. Therefore, in order to find answers to aforementioned questions, author replicated and extended Dewitte, et al.’ work in China among 109 undergraduates. The extrogenous cued dot-probe task is consisted of extrogenous cues with three different expression pictures such as happy, angry, and neutral which appeared on the same or opposite position of target appearance at 50% of all trials differently, and an black square(2.5mm×2.5mm) as target which can appear on the left or right of compute screen at 50% of all trials corresponding. Participant task was pointed out the position the target appeared by pressing F key or J key as quickly as possible. The ECR was administered after the dot-probe task.. Based on reaction time and accuracy rate, the cue valid effect , attention engagement effect and attention disengagement effect were separately created as attention bias indices. Cue type and expression type and avoidant group were independent variables. The main results could be summarized as follows: The present study is a good paradigm for investigating the spatial distribute feature of attention, with better cue validity effect proved by a marginal significant cue validity effect for reaction time(F(1,108) =3.465, P=.07), and significant cue validity effect for accuracy rate (F(1,108)= 27.44, P<.001). There was significant negative association between avoidant dimension and each expression cue validity index, and ?=-.33, for angry expression, and ?=-.39, for angry expression, and ?=-.24, for neutral expression, all ps<.05. The greater a person’s attachment avoidance became, the lower the cue validity happened. Cue validity finally completely disappeared on people who were divided into high-score group, with the values of cue validity index changing from positive to negative for corresponding low-score group and high-score group (see table 6). A avoidant group×picture type repeated measures ANOVA also revealed this phenomenon , with avoidant group main effect significant(F(1,27)=11.71, p=.002). There were no correlations between attachment anxiety and all attention bias indices. The abovementioned results indicated attachment avoidance guide attention away not only attachment-related stimulus but also nonattachment-related stimulus. The intensity of this kind of bias heightened increasingly with the attachment valence increase. This stimulus-general and stimulus-specific attention bias underlined the deactivation strategies functioning and provided cross-cultural evidence for attachment theory about avoidant attachment orientation.

Key words

attachment / attention / extrogenous cue / expression / picture

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Adult Deactive Strategies and Attention Bias:Evidence From A Dot Probe Task Under Exogenous Cue With Pictures of Facial Expression[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2013, 36(3): 592-599
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