Do warm, sociable people look longer at scenes of affection?
Women who value close relationships looked more at images of affectionate contact, while those with an avoidant attachment style looked at them less, and this held only for social warmth, not for exciting non-social scenes.
Source
Social traits modulate attention to affiliative cues
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Free-viewing eye-tracking task with controlled picture pairs (affiliative vs neutral, incentive vs neutral, affiliative vs incentive); picture type varied within subjects while social closeness and attachment were measured by questionnaire and tested as moderators, plus a moderated-mediation model.
- N
- N=57 · 57 female undergraduates analysed, from 62 who took part after random selection from volunteers (5 lost to equipment failure).
- Population
- Female undergraduate students at Cornell University
- Outcome
- Number of eye fixations on each picture of a pair, related to trait social closeness and attachment anxiety and avoidance
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What they did
Female students viewed 36 pairs of photos side by side while an eye tracker counted their fixations. Pairs set affiliative scenes (parents hugging children, couples in caring touch) against neutral faces, exciting sports scenes against neutral faces, or affiliative against exciting scenes, matched for size, brightness and complexity. Participants' trait social closeness (how much they value and enjoy close relationships) and adult attachment anxiety and avoidance were measured by questionnaire and tested as predictors of where they looked.
What they found
Higher social closeness predicted more fixations on affiliative pictures relative to neutral or exciting ones: low scorers made about 2.61 more fixations on the affiliative than the neutral picture, high scorers about 5.43 more. Attachment avoidance showed the reverse pattern (about 5.32 extra fixations for low-avoidance versus 2.74 for high-avoidance women), while attachment anxiety was unrelated to attention to affiliative scenes. Social closeness did not predict attention to exciting versus neutral scenes, suggesting the bias is specific to affiliation, and a mediation model indicated the social-closeness effect ran through lower avoidance, with a modest effect size (K-squared of 0.15).
The limits
What it doesn't show
All participants were female college students, so the results may not generalise to men or other populations. Social closeness and avoidance were strongly correlated self-report measures collected at nearly the same time, so the mediation model is a statistical decomposition resting on the authors' theoretical assumption about which comes first, not evidence of a causal pathway. The study cannot separate inborn disposition from relationship history, and fixation counts during free viewing are only an indirect proxy for the amygdala-based encoding processes the authors propose.
Key terms
- Social closeness (SC)
- A personality trait describing how much a person values, enjoys and seeks close, warm relationships versus being alone.
- Attachment avoidance
- An adult attachment dimension involving discomfort with intimacy and dependence on others, and a strong preference for self-reliance.
- Attachment anxiety
- An adult attachment dimension involving fear of rejection or abandonment and a strong need for reassurance from partners.
- Fixation
- A pause of the eyes on one location (here at least 100 ms) during which visual information is taken in; more fixations indicate more attention.
- Moderated mediation
- A model in which an indirect effect (X affects Y through M) is tested for whether its strength depends on a third variable, here picture type.
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What was the main outcome measure in this study?
Common questions
Why include exciting sports pictures as well as neutral ones?
They are positive and arousing but not affiliative, so they test whether sociable people simply look at anything pleasant or specifically at warmth and closeness. Social closeness only predicted attention when affiliative pictures were involved.
Does this show avoidant attachment causes people to look away from affection?
No. Traits were measured, not manipulated, so the link is correlational; the authors suggest longitudinal or intervention studies would be needed to test causation.
Why was only women tested?
The authors chose a female sample to reduce noise with pictures of romantic and parent-child embraces, since sex differences were not their question, but this limits generalisation.
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