Adult Attachment and the Perception of Facial Expressions of Emotion: Activating the Attachment System with a Distress Manipulation

Abstract

Past research on attachment theory and the perception of facial expressions of emotion has revealed that individuals who exhibit higher attachment anxiety process facial emotions more quickly than do less anxiously attached individuals. In this study, I attempted to replicate and extend this previous research by adding a distress component to an experiment. Using a movie morph paradigm, participants viewed movies of faces in which emotional expressions changed from displaying an emotion to displaying no emotion. Participants were asked to indicate the point at which they could no longer tell that an emotional expression was present. Results revealed that participants who scored higher in attachment anxiety in the no-distress condition perceived the offset of angry emotions earlier than did less anxious participants in the no-distress condition. With respect to the offsetting of happy emotions, highly anxious participants in the distress condition perceived the offset of happy emotions later than did less anxious participants in the distress condition. These results suggest that the perception of facial expressions of emotion is dependent on the level of distress that an individual feels.