The attachment blink: The relation between adult attachment and attention

Abstract

Adult attachment theory describes the many ways people behave when emotionally connected to another person, but falls short in describing how their beliefs about relationships come to be, particularly when considering the subjective nature of experience. Because attention is the gatekeeper of the social information people actually perceive, it is predicted that differences in attention must be related to adult attachment. Following evidence of cognitive variations between individuals with different attachment styles, an attentional blink procedure was implemented to determine if attention is deeply related to the adult attachment dimensions of anxiety and avoidance, which in combination can be used to create four attachment styles: secure, fearful, preoccupied, and dismissing. People were found to be more distracted by highly arousing emotional pictures presented directly before a target picture in a stream of rapidly presented images, replicating and expanding previous research on the attentional blink phenomenon. While attachment anxiety did not seem to predict task performance, individuals with greater attachment avoidance were found to perform less effectively than less avoidant individuals at the task. The analysis also suggests that examining adult attachment categorically provides a more complete explanation for attentional differences.