The Influence Of The Guiding Role Of Working Memory On Bias Attention In Attachment Avoidance

In recent years, more and more research began to focus on the relationship between relevant emotional information and cognitive processing. These studies are divided into two types: one is some emotion-related stimuli(such as words or pictures) are used in many cognitive experiments, these studies also have shown that this type of individual cognitive systems typically suppress the negative emotional stimuli process. Another type is the emotional state of information processing has become an important research term in recent decades. Mainly with a large number of cognitive tasks, they explore the relationship between emotional state and the emotional stimuli. At the same time, a large number of ERP and f MRI experiments found that some specific types of attachment subjects prefer to be consistent with the specific kind of emotional information and the result of the preference is different in the active brain areas. The activity in relevant emotional areas of the brain of attachment anxiety(such as: anterior temporal pole ATP) and the memory-related region(such as: hippocampus) are all increased when facing attachment-related negative events(conflict, division, death companions). While, the activity in emotional and cognitive-related region(such as: lateral prefrontal cortex OFC) of attachment avoidance are decreased. Attachment anxiety has hypervigilance attention preference, oriented to unavailable signal and threats signal of attachment subject; attachment avoidance used to avoid and ignore the threat information with deactivation strategy.Individuals’ response to the above emotional information is fatal for human survival, evolution and development. To be able to quickly and accurately produce the reaction to the same or similar stimuli, individual always keep the event or scene in the brain, this is the memory. Studies show that when people are in the visual search task, they will selectively pay attention to the contents of the stimuli matched with the one in the working memory. It means selective attention in visual search tasks is affected by content that is in working memory, and this effect is automatic. When subjects asked to only look at the stimuli without memorizing, this top-down automatic attention process will not appear.Previous studies suggest that, compared to a pleasant or neutral emotional stimuli, the individual is more likely to produce bias attention effects with negative stimuli. When investigating the specific type of subjects such as attachment avoidance, they always keep their bias attention away from emotional information. However, the existed researches on adult attachment attention bias are short of focusing on the guiding effect of working memory to the bias attention. Most studies using different experimental paradigms to discuss attention bias and memory. However, few studies have shown that working memory has a significant impact on attention bias. Therefore, this study will be focused on the guiding effect of working memory to the selective attention bias of attachment avoidance when facing emotional information.There are three experiments in this study: In Experiment One, we have a discussion of the guiding role of the content of emotional working memory to the bias attention in the group of avoidance attachment. Positive, negative and neutral emotional faces will be presented in this experiment and subjects are required to complete the face memory, identify the nature of emotional faces and recognition tasks of emotional faces. It aims to explore the impact of emotional stimuli in the working memory on the judgment of the nature of these emotional faces; In Experiment Two, we discuss if the content of working memory produces an automatic influence to bias attention. Downing(2000) paradigm of the automatic guidance of working memory to bias attention is used. Subjects are asked to complete a distinguish detection task when they keep the faces in working memory in order to discuss the differences between matching and non-matching position in the target test. Through this analysis, we can discuss whether the working memory can automatically guide the bias attention; In Experiment Three, it is based on the second experiment, using the same experimental paradigm, but controlled the number of the presented stimuli to find the further evidence of strategy of the non-automatic guidance.Some major results are obtained:(1) the degree of the avoidance is increased by the dimensions of emotional information. It means that high avoidant group has the higher avoidance than low avoidant group.(2) Under the condition of the happiness and anger, determination of the emotional face will be inhibited in high avoidant group; while low avoidant group inhibit the judgment on the angry faces.(3) The effect of cues prompt only in the low avoidant group when they face happy emotional information.(4) The working memory of attachment avoidance can not automatically guide selective attention and this non-automatically effect is both universality and particularity on emotional information.(5) The non-automatic guide effect to the bias attention is due to the deactivation strategy of the attachment avoidance.It is concluded that: the guiding role of working memory to the bias attention of attachment avoidance is affected by different emotional content and the dimension of avoidance; the avoidance is universal; this leading role belongs to non-automatic guiding role because attachment avoidance use deactivation attachment strategy; the results provide the evidence for the deactivation strategy. Working memory and bias attention is an important component of information processing in cognitive psychology. The relationship between working memory and bias attention is a hot topic in cognitive psychology. The influence of the contents of working memory on selective attention is important. In the study of adult attachment, this research introduces the guiding role of the contents of working memory to discuss the influence on attention bias in different dimensions of emotional information and explain the reason is deactivation strategy.