The neural substrates of social emotion perception and regulation are
modulated by adult attachment style.
Source
a Swiss Center for Affective Sciences , University of Geneva , Geneva ,
Switzerland.
Abstract
Adult attachment style (AAS) refers to individual differences in the way
people experience and regulate their social relationships and corresponding
emotions. Based on developmental and psychological research, it has been
hypothesized that avoidant attachment
style (AV) entails deactivating strategies
in social contexts, whereas anxious attachment style
(AX) involves hyper vigilance and up-regulation mechanisms. However, the neural
substrates of differences in social emotion regulation associated with AAS have
not been systematically investigated. Here we used fMRI in 19 healthy adults to
investigate the effect of AAS on the processing of pleasant or unpleasant social
and nonsocial scenes. Participants were asked either to naturally attend (NAT),
cognitively reappraise (REAP), or behaviorally suppress (ESUP) their emotional
responses. Avoidantly attached participants showed increased prefrontal and
anterior cingulate activation to social negative scenes when making spontaneous
emotion judgments. They also exhibited persistent increases in dorsolateral
prefrontal cortex and left amygdala activity for the same stimuli during
reappraisal, as well as additional activation in supplementary motor area and
ventral caudate during the suppression of social positive emotions. These
results suggest that AV may imply less efficient reappraisal strategies to
regulate social negative emotions, and lead to higher conflict or effortful
control when suppression cannot be employed. In contrast, anxiously attached
participants showed differential increases in the right amygdala and left
parahippocampal cortex for social negative and positive stimuli, respectively,
but only when making spontaneous emotion judgments. No effect of AX was found
during down-regulation conditions. This suggests heightened arousal to negative
information without difficulty in down-regulating emotions through cognitive
re-evaluation or suppression. Taken together, these findings reveal for the
first time the neural underpinnings of attachment-related differences in social emotion
regulation.
