Elsevier

NeuroImage

Volume 28, Issue 4, December 2005, Pages 835-847
NeuroImage

Attachment-style differences in the ability to suppress negative thoughts: Exploring the neural correlates

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2005.06.048Get rights and content

Abstract

Beginning in infancy, people can be characterized in terms of two dimensions of attachment insecurity: attachment anxiety (i.e., fear of rejection and abandonment) and attachment avoidance (distancing oneself from close others, shunning dependency; Bowlby, J., 1969/1982. Attachment and loss: Vol. 1. Attachment, 2nd ed., Basic Books, New York). The capacity for emotion regulation varies with attachment style, such that attachment-anxious individuals become highly emotional when threatened with social rejection or relationship loss, whereas avoidant individuals tend to distance themselves or disengage from emotional situations. In the present study, 20 women participated in an fMRI experiment in which they thought about—and were asked to stop thinking about—various relationship scenarios. When they thought about negative ones (conflict, breakup, death of partner), their level of attachment anxiety was positively correlated with activation in emotion-related areas of the brain (e.g., the anterior temporal pole, implicated in sadness) and inversely correlated with activation in a region associated with emotion regulation (orbitofrontal cortex). This suggests that anxious people react more strongly than non-anxious people to thoughts of loss while under-recruiting brain regions normally used to down-regulate negative emotions. Participants high on avoidance failed to show as much deactivation as less avoidant participants in two brain regions (subcallosal cingulate cortex; lateral prefrontal cortex). This suggests that the avoidant peoples' suppression was less complete or less efficient, in line with results from previous behavioral experiments. These are among the first findings to identify some of the neural processes underlying adult attachment orientations and emotion regulation.

Section snippets

Participants

Participants were 20 women students from the subject pool at the University of California, Davis, selected on the basis of their attachment scores. Each participant had either (1) a relatively high score on one of the two attachment dimensions (anxiety, avoidance) and a score close to the median on the other or (2) low scores on the two dimensions (indicating a relatively secure attachment style)2

Questionnaire measures

Attachment anxiety and avoidance were uncorrelated (r = 0.034, P = 0.88), as intended. As expected, there was a positive correlation between attachment anxiety and trait anxiety (r = 0.46, P < 0.05) and a trend toward a positive correlation between attachment anxiety and neuroticism (r = 0.42, P = 0.065). Neuroticism and trait anxiety were highly correlated (r = 0.81, P < 0.001).

Behavioral data

Participants made fewer button presses in the not-thinking conditions than in the thinking conditions overall (t(1,19)

Discussion

In general, we replicated previous findings (e.g., Wyland et al., 2003) associating thought suppression with higher activation in the ACC and MPFC. Based on prior behavioral research on adult attachment style, we predicted that people high on attachment anxiety would show greater activation in emotion-related brain regions when thinking about negative attachment-related events (conflicts, breakups, death of partner). In line with our predictions, attachment anxiety was associated both with

Conclusion

Despite these limitations, the study revealed associations between self-reported attachment style and brain activation in regions associated with emotion, memory, and emotion regulation. The results fit well with other neuroscientific studies of emotion regulation (e.g., Ochsner and Gross, 2004), which suggests that emotional processes are modulated by top–down control from the OFC and PFC and bottom–up processes in the anterior temporal pole and hippocampus. Our findings indicate that

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    Preparation of this article was facilitated by a grant from the UC Davis Imaging Center. The authors would like to thank Sarah Donohue and Kateri Evans for assistance with data collection and analysis, Shelley Blozis for statistical advice, and Matthew Lieberman for very helpful editorial comments.

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