Attachment
Do warm, sociable people look longer at scenes of affection?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
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.
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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Key findings
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).
Methodology
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.
Limitations
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.
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