Adult attachment avoidance and automatic affective response to sad facial expressions

The present work represents the first study to investigate the relationship between adult attachment avoidance and anxiety and automatic affective responses to basic facial emotions. Subliminal affective priming methods allowed for the assessment of unconscious affective reactions. An affective priming task using masked sad and happy faces, both of which are approach‐related facial expressions, was administered to 30 healthy volunteers. Participants also completed the Relationship Scales Questionnaire and measures of anxiety and depression. Attachment avoidance was negatively associated with affective priming due to sad (but not happy) facial expressions. This association occurred independently of attachment anxiety, depressivity, and trait anxiety. Attachment anxiety was not correlated with priming due to sad or happy facial expressions. The present results are consistent with the assumption that attachment avoidance moderates automatic affective reaction to sad faces. Our data indicate that avoidant attachment is related to a low automatic affective responsivity to sad facial expressions.     

Not all attachment relationships develop alike: Normative cross-sectional age trajectories in attachment to romantic partners,best friends,and parents

Previous research has found that age is negatively correlated with general-romantic attachment anxiety and positively correlated with general-romantic attachment avoidance. The present study examined cross-sectional age trajectories in global attachment, as well as relationship-specific attachment with romantic partners, best friends, mothers, and fathers. Across all specific relationships, older individuals reported higher attachment avoidance. In contrast, attachment anxiety with romantic partners and friends was negatively associated with age, whereas attachment anxiety with parents normatively increased as a function of age. These findings underscore the importance of examining the normative age trajectories of attachment across both global and specific levels of abstraction.     

Attachment theory as a framework for explaining engagement with Facebook

Research on the relation between personality and styles of engagement with social media is surprisingly limited and has generated mixed results. The present research applied attachment theory to illuminate individual differences in styles of Facebook engagement. Two studies (N = 583) supported a mediational model explaining various forms of active Facebook use as stemming from attachment anxiety, which predisposes individuals to sensitivity about social feedback, thereby leading them to engage in attention-seeking social media behavior. These results held while controlling for extraversion, neuroticism, and self-esteem. Attachment avoidance predicted restrained Facebook use, primarily due to its association with (low) extraversion. These findings resolve inconsistencies in previous research and demonstrate that attachment theory is a particularly useful framework through which to study the influence of personality on social-media behavior.     

The State Adult Attachment Measure (SAAM): A construct and incremental validity study

Recent studies have shown that relationship experiences and contextual factors may influence attachment security, anxiety, and avoidance. In the present study, we investigated the psychometric properties of the Italian translation of the State Adult Attachment Measure (SAAM), a personality scale aimed to assess temporary variations in adult attachment styles (Gillath, Hart, Noftle, & Stockdale, 2009). Four hundred Italian participants took a set of standardized self-report attachment scales and other measures of subjective wellbeing and mental-health. Confirmatory Factor Analysis showed an acceptable fit between the SAAM three-factor model and the data, confirming the hypothesized measurement model for security, anxiety, and avoidance. SAAM subscales also attained high internal consistency reliability, were properly related to mainstream attachment style scales, and had incremental validity in predicting psychological well-being and mental health. The Italian SAAM translation is indeed a reliable and valid measure, showing promise as a clinical assessment of short-term changes in attachment states, even in non-English cultural context.     

Trauma Exposure and Health: A Review of Outcomes and Pathways

A growing body of literature has established robust relations between trauma and a variety of adverse physical health outcomes. In both retrospective and prospective research, adults with a history of self-reported or court-substantiated maltreatment report significantly more health concerns than those without maltreatment histories, in both clinical and community samples, whether health problems are self-reported or physician-diagnosed. Two pathways by which poor health outcomes are theorized to occur include the biological pathway, which largely implicates severe stress and subsequent dysregulations in central stress-response systems as the underlying cause of health problems, and the behavioral pathway, which suggests that health risk behaviors are largely responsible for the relations between trauma and health. This article reviews the research evaluating the relations between various types of trauma, particularly physical and sexual abuse in childhood, and three such health outcomes: pain, gastrointestinal disorders, and cardiovascular disease. Evidence to support the biological and behavioral pathways is also reviewed.     

Getting one step closer to deduction: Introducing an alternative paradigm for transitive inference

Transitive inference is claimed to be “deductive”. Yet every group/species ever reported apparently uses it. We asked 58 adults to solve five-term transitive tasks, requiring neither training nor premise learning. A computer-based procedure ensured all premises were continually visible. Response accuracy and RT (non-discriminative nRT) were measured as is typically done. We also measured RT confined to correct responses (cRT). Overall, very few typical transitive phenomena emerged. The symbolic distance effect never extended to premise recall and was not at all evident for nRT; suggesting the use of non-deductive end-anchor strategies. For overall performance, and particularly the critical B?D inference, our findings indicate that deductive transitive inference is far more intellectually challenging than previously thought. Contrasts of our present findings against previous findings suggest at least two distinct transitive inference modes, with most research and most computational models to date targeting an associative mode rather than their desired deductive mode. This conclusion fits well with the growing number of theories embracing a “dual process” conception of reasoning. Finally, our differing findings for nRT versus cRT suggest that researchers should give closer consideration to matching the RT measure they use to the particular conception of transitive inference they pre-held.     

The basic components of adult playfulness and their relation with personality: The hierarchical factor structure of seventeen instruments

The primary aim of this study was testing the structure of adult playfulness in a joint analysis of seventeen questionnaires and testing the relation of the factors with the big five personality traits. A sample of 244 adults completed the questionnaires and a five factor-solution fit the data best; i.e., (a) Humorousness; (b) Cheerfulness–Uninhibitedness; (c) Expressiveness; (d) Other-directedness; and (e) Intellectuality–Creativity. Correlation analyses (bivariate, canonical) and regression analyses indicated strong overlap of the broader personality factors and the Cheerfulness–Uninhibitedness-factor (extraversion and emotional stability) as well as the Expressiveness-factor (extraversion). The study contributes towards a better understanding of the structure of playfulness in questionnaires developed for adults. Implications for future research are discussed.     

Feature or location? Infants and adults adopt different strategies to search for a hidden toy in an ambiguous task

Evidence suggests that infants and adults attribute different importance to certain object properties when performing object-directed actions. Namely, infants tend to rely on information about an object's location, whereas adults are more likely to base their actions on its features. In this study, we tested whether the strategic choices of infants (aged 13 months) and adults would be modified by the context of the demonstration. Participants watched as an experimenter hid a ball under one of two different coloured containers, using either a communicative or a non-communicative manner. Then, the locations of the two containers were changed out of sight of the participant. During the test, participants were encouraged to look for the ball under one of the containers. We found that adults were more likely to follow a feature-based strategy than infants. However, there was no effect of the context of the demonstration, suggesting that communication may play different roles in encoding object properties and directing overt behaviour.     

The cost of thinking about false beliefs: evidence from adults' performance on a non-inferential theory of mind task

Much of what we know about other people's beliefs comes non-inferentially from what people tell us. Developmental research suggests that 3-year-olds have difficulty processing such information: they suffer interference from their own knowledge of reality when told about someone's false belief (e.g., [Wellman, H. M., & Bartsch, K. (1988). Young children's reasoning about beliefs. Cognition, 30, 239-277.]). The current studies examined for the first time whether similar interference occurs in adult participants. In two experiments participants read sentences describing the real colour of an object and a man's false belief about the colour of the object, then judged the accuracy of a picture probe depicting either reality or the man's belief. Processing costs for picture probes depicting reality were consistently greater in this false belief condition than in a matched control condition in which the sentences described the real colour of one object and a man's unrelated belief about the colour of another object. A similar pattern was observed for picture probes depicting the man's belief in most cases. Processing costs were not sensitive to the time available for encoding the information presented in the sentences: costs were observed when participants read the sentences at their own pace (Experiment 1) or at a faster or a slower pace (Experiment 2). This suggests that adults' difficulty was not with encoding information about reality and a conflicting false belief, but with holding this information in mind and using it to inform a subsequent judgement.     

Microstructural integrity of the corpus callosum linked with neuropsychological performance in adolescents

Background: Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) has revealed microstructural aspects of adolescent brain development, the cognitive correlates of which remain relatively uncharacterized. Methods: DTI was used to assess white matter microstructure in 18 typically developing adolescents (ages 16–18). Fractional anisotropy (FA) and mean diffusion (MD) were evaluated within the splenium and body of the corpus callosum in relation to cognitive performance. Results: Visuospatial construction abilities were associated with white matter integrity in both the splenium and body of the corpus callosum, while only splenium integrity was associated with language and psychomotor function. Conclusion: Results suggest that, for typically developing adolescents, white matter coherence positively relates to visuospatial, psychomotor, and language skills. These findings may have implications for the cognitive functioning of clinical populations in which typical white matter development is altered.