Research On Avoidantly Attached Individuals On The Forming Condition And Intervention Of Attachment Security

Attachment security stems from infancy when the attachment figure could always respond positively to one’s needs when he/she encountered threats,and this facilitates one’s understanding and trust of the availability and support ability of that attachment figure.In order to avoid the frustration and pain that come from the unavailability of the attachment figure,some people learned to deny their attachment needs,and to deal with distress by themselves.They avoid the proximity in attachment relationships,and keep the greatest distance with others cognitively,emotionally and physically.These people gradually developed into those avoidantly attached ones who are characterized by the inhibition and avoidance of information.In their early attachment experiences,attachment figures are always insensitive,and may always ignore or reject them when they are in need,therefore,in the working models of avoidantly attached individuals,others may always be non-responding,untrustworthy,and they themselves are not worthy of being loved.However,the insecure internal working model of avoidantly attached individuals are not always stable,researchers believed that the internal working model would assimilate and accommodate new information,and change accordingly.Researchers indicated that the encoding of experiences in the past determines the way one processes similar information in the future,when confronted with a new event,one would first record it as an accident,but when it repeatedly happen,then a new schema would be established.Attachment avoidance is often related to the avoidance of emotional information in cognition and behavior.However,the present study is designed to created the situation in which avoidantly attached individuals couldconstantly feel support and respond from others during the process of building new relationships.Searching for the responding other and always acquiring support under threat is taken by the present study as the method to help avoidantly attached individuals to reconstruct a secure base script,and in that way to obtain information about the forming condition of their attachment security,and to focus on the effects of this process.The effects of the interventions on avoidantly attached individuals on their possibility of the forming of attachment security were also investigated.The present study contains two parts,carrying out experiments focusing on avoidantly attached individuals on the condition and the ways of intervention of the forming of attachment security.Part one contains study one to five.Study one focused on avoidantly attached individuals’ selective attention on smiling faces.Study two investigated how responsive smiling faces regulate avoidantly attached individuals’ emotions.Study three explored the affective priming effect on avoidantly attached individuals.Study four studied the secure priming effect on avoidantly attached individuals.Study five explored the possibility of the secure attachment behavioral tendency carrying out by avoidantly attached individuals.The major findings of Part one were obtained: Firstly,high and low avoidantly attached individuals exposed greater effectiveness in searching for smiling faces with responsive smiling faces under threat conditions,and the searching for responsive others under threats might be an unconscious process.Secondly,threats could reduce positive emotions and enhance negative emotions of avoidantly attached individuals,however,repeatedly searching for responsive smiling faces under threats could prevent the reduction of positive emotion and diminish negative emotion of avoidantly attached people.Thirdly,searching responsive smiling faces under either threat or non-threat condition could prime positive emotion of individuals with low attachment avoidance,but with regard to individuals with high attachment avoidance,only under threat condition could their positive emotion be primed.Fourthly,to reconstruct the secure base script using the way of repeated searching of responsive other under threats might be effective,and the reconstruction of secure base script could prime avoidantly attached individuals’ secure attachment affect.Fifthly,individuals with high attachment avoidance may widely shunned from attachment related information,their avoidance tendency may not be affected by threat conditions.However,positive responses from others may have positive impact on avoidantly attached individuals’ behavior.Using the way of reconstructing secure base script to prime attachment security enabled avoidantlyattached individuals to display approach tendency towards secure attachment-related information,and this proved the variability of the behavior tendency of high avoidantly attached individuals.Part two contains studies six and seven,the two focused on behavior and cognition respectively and used different experiment patterns to make interventions on avoidantly attached individuals on their possibility of the forming of attachment security.Study six took Approach Avoidance Task(AAT)as the tool for the intervention of individuals with high attachment avoidance,specifically,to explore the effectiveness of the training of their behavioral tendency and its influence to emotion.Study six includes two sub-experiments.Sub-experiment one studied on the training of behavioral tendency of individuals with high attachment avoidance,and sub-experiment two tested the effectiveness of sub-experiment one.Study seven applied the way of group counseling to rectify the internal working model of avoidantly attached individuals.The main findings of study six and seven are: Firstly,the higher degree of the attachment avoidance,the easier to have the avoidance tendency towards secure attachment-related information.AAT is an effective measure for behavioral tendency training,the behavioral tendency of individuals with high attachment avoidance towards secure attachment emotional information could be trained,and in a similar experiment condition,such training effect remained stable.Besides,individuals with high attachment avoidance gained positive emotional experience during the interaction with new partners through the approach training towards secure attachment emotional information.Secondly,group counseling with the purpose of enhancing interpersonal relationships could promote avoidantly attached individuals their level of self-esteem as well as their level of the acceptance of others,and thus help them to build the positive models about themselves and others.Through the changing of cognitive pattern,group counseling rectified avoidantly attached individuals’ attachment internal working model.Taken together,the results of the present research proved that the forming of attachment security of avoidantly attached individuals has a psychological foundation,and using the way of repeated searching for responsive smiling face under threat to reconstruct secure base script is the key to the forming of attachment security of avoidantly attached individuals.Threat,responsive other and the repetition of this searching process are conditions for avoidantly attached individuals to form a securely attached relationship.Making interventions on avoidantly attached individuals’ behavioral tendency and cognitive pattern could both facilitate them to form secure attachment relationship.The innovations of the present study are embodied as follows: Firstly,the innovation of research thinking.The present study took the reconstruction of the secure base script of individuals with high attachment avoidance as the precondition,and on the basis of which to discussed the possibility of their forming of attachment security.Secondly,the innovation of research method.The present study took repeated searching for responsive smiling face under threats as the way to reconstruct the secure base script,this research method restored the initial process of the forming of secure attachment(i.e.,obtain positive respond from attachment figure under threats),and it holds greater ecological significance compared with other secure priming methods.Thirdly,the innovation of research materials.The present study chose strangers’ smiling faces instead of the smiling face of the attachment figure to represent responsive other,because strangers’ facial expressions are valuable in exploring the establishment of new secure attachment relationships.Besides,the smiling faces used were endowed with the meaning of attachment security in order to symbolically activate the secure attachment representation of avoidantly attached individuals.Fourthly,the innovation of the ways of intervention.In the attachment research field,the present study is the first one which adopted behavior training and group counseling as the way to explore the change of the insecure attachment style,and these two methods are feasible in practice.