ABSTRACT

Neurophysiological evidence suggests associations between attachment and the neural processing of emotion expressions. This study asks whether this relationship is also evident in middle childhood, and how it is affected by facial familiarity. Attachment strategies (deactivation, hyperactivation) were assessed in 51 children (9 - 11 years) using a story stem completion task. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded during children's passive viewing of mother and stranger emotional faces (angry/happy). At the stage of facial information encoding (N250), attachment deactivation was associated with a pattern pointing to increased vigilance towards angry faces. Further, the attention-driven LPP was increased to happy mother faces as highly salient stimuli overall, but not in children scoring high on deactivation. These children did not discriminate between mothers’ facial emotions and showed a general attentional withdrawal from facial stimuli. While our results on attachment deactivation support a two-stage processing model, no effect of hyperactivation was found.

摘要

神经生理学证据表明依恋与情绪表达的神经处理之间存在关联。这项研究询问这种关系是否在童年中期也很明显，以及它如何受到面部熟悉度的影响。使用故事主干完成任务对 51 名儿童（9-11 岁）的依恋策略（停用、过度激活）进行了评估。事件相关电位 (ERP) 在儿童被动观看母亲和陌生人的情绪面孔（愤怒/快乐）期间被记录下来。在面部信息编码阶段（N250），依恋失活与一种模式相关，这种模式表明对愤怒面孔的警惕性提高。此外，注意力驱动的 LPP 增加到快乐的母亲面孔，作为整体高度显着的刺激，但在停用得分高的儿童中没有。这些孩子不区分母亲的面部情绪，并表现出对面部刺激的普遍注意退缩。虽然我们关于附件停用的结果支持两阶段处理模型，但未发现过度激活的影响。