The Impact Of Attachment On Interpersonal Attitude: The Priming Effect Of The Mental Scripts

Considerable adult attachment research has been conducted to examine attachment-styledifferences in social cognition. Researchers have reckoned that the internal working modelsare the important psychological factors of attachment-style differences in the social behaviors.However, previous studies based on self-report measures and cognitive experiments justillustrate there are respective internal working models in different attachment-style persons,and it performs in many aspects of social life, are difficult to illustrate the question thatwhether the internal working models can change or not. Recently, researchers have propsedthe term of mental script to illustrate the attachment-related predispositions and reactionswhen in danger or threat situation. The core assumption is that there are unique cognitvemodels in different attachment style, and they reflect on the procession and reaction to socialinformation. Many studies based on the assumption and the cognitive experiment explored thefeature of mental scripts in different attachment style, and summarized the mental script ofdifferent attachment style. The researches conclude that mental scripts are the particular wayto process the cognitive information, and individuals in different attachment style behavesaccording to their own mental script.However, the researches have not ever concluded whether the mental scripts can influentthe process of the social information, the emotion and the reaction afterwards. Based on theprevious investigations on the mental scripts and cognitve and behavioral dispreposition, thepresent study, which contains four experiments, systematically examines the priming effectof mental scripts on the interpersonal attitude of unsecure individuals. The main conclusionsare as follows:(1)The interpersonal attitude of anxious individuals concludes: high in attachment need,contradictory in cognitive appraisal, high in emotional distress, a mixture of adaptiveand maladaptive behavioral intentions. The interpersonal attitude of avoid individualsconcludes: low in attachment need, negative appraisal in positive events, high in emotional distress, maladaptive behavioral intentions.(2) The sentinel script promotes the contradictory attitude of anxious individuals(want tobe close and at the same time be afraid of hurt); the rapid fight-flight script does notaffect the attitude of avoid individuals.(3) The secure script does not affect the attitude of anxious individuals, but expose theattitude of avoid individuals of his nonconfendence to others and disregard toattachment.