Influence Of Attachment Style On Emotional Prosody Recognition Under Different Semantic Backgrounds

Emotional prosody is a kind of emotional clues,which refers to the emotions expressed by phonetic sentences when only acoustic clues such as tone and sound intensity are considered without considering the grammatical structure and meaning of the text itself.In daily interpersonal communication,we need to identify the real purpose of others’ expression through emotional prosody,and there are great individual differences in the ability to identify emotional prosody.Poor emotional prosody is highly correlated with poor interpersonal relationships and more suicide risks,but researchers have not yet explained the individual differences in emotional prosody recognition.A large number of studies show that attachment is an important factor in emotion recognition,and the sense of security in attachment relationship will enhance the ability to infer emotional state,while the trauma of attachment relationship will hinder this ability.Therefore,attachment may be an important factor affecting the identification of individual emotional prosody.Emotional prosody recognition is a multi-stage processing model,and the influence of attachment style on it may also be embodied in the time process.At the same time,in the expression of language,semantic information often appears at the same time as emotional prosody.Although researchers often think that emotions in language can be conveyed only through emotional prosody,semantics will still affect the recognition of emotional prosody as emotional background,and emotional background information is also one of the factors that affect the emotional processing of individuals with attachment style.Therefore,semantic information may play a moderating role between attachment style and emotional prosody recognition.Previous studies have pointed out that secure attachment individuals have less negative evaluation of threats and dangerous information and use attachment base strategy;Anxious attachment individuals often maintain excessive vigilance and attention to emotional information and use over-activation strategies;Avoidant attachment individuals often keep a distance from intimacy and dependence for fear of rejection,and often show low arousal to emotional information,but are very sensitive to information of rejection significance.At the same time,insecure attachment is greatly influenced by emotional background,especially anxious attachment.Therefore,we speculate that in the process of emotional prosody recognition,anxious attachment is highly alert to emotional prosody information,consumes more attention resources and is greatly influenced by semantic background,while avoidant attachment is highly avoidable to emotional prosody information and is less influenced by semantic background.In order to verify these conjectures,based on the theory of emotional information processing of attachment,this study explored the influence of attachment style on individual’s emotional prosodic recognition,the characteristics of time process,and the adjustment of different semantic backgrounds.The research adopts classification paradigm and event-related potential technology.Through three experiments,the influence of attachment style on emotional prosody recognition and its time process characteristics are investigated by using meaningless semantics,neutral semantics and emotional conflict respectively.In the first experiment,phonetic materials with meaningless semantic information were used to explore whether the differences of attachment styles would affect the recognition of emotional prosody after excluding the influence of semantic background.The results show that anxious attachment appears high vigilance and high activation in the early recognition of emotional rhythm,and this phenomenon disappears in the late recognition.Avoidant attachment individuals and safe attachment individuals show similar recognition characteristics.On this basis,Experiment 2 uses phonetic materials with neutral semantic information to explore how the differences of attachment styles affect the recognition of emotional prosody when the semantics are neutral,and how semantics can adjust this influence.The results show that compared with secure attachment,insecure attachment shows more concentrated and alert attention to emotional rhythm,especially avoidant attachment individuals,which can better ignore the semantic influence.To this end,we further enrich the types of semantics.In Experiment 3,using phonetic materials with conflicting emotions between semantics and prosody,we explored how the differences of attachment styles affect the recognition of emotional prosody when the emotions between semantics and prosody conflict,and how semantics can adjust this influence.The results show that the overactivation strategy of anxious attachment is manifested in the late stage of recognition,and it shows indiscriminate activation of consistent and conflicting conditions for speech recognition.Avoidant attachment also shows the characteristics of deactivation strategy,but it shows more attention to conflict conditions and differential activation.The conclusions of this study are as follows:(1)Attachment style affects the performance of emotional prosody recognition.Compared with secure attachment individuals,anxious attachment individuals show faster recognition of all emotional prosody types and faster and better recognition of negative emotions.Avoidant attachment individuals often show slow recognition of emotional rhythm and low accuracy,but the difference between them and safe attachment individuals is not significant.(2)Attachment style affects the time course of emotional prosody recognition.Compared with safe attachment individuals,anxious attachment individuals are more alert in the early perceptual stage and pay attention to the late fine processing process by emotional prosody,especially for negative emotions.Avoidant attachment individuals showed avoidance of emotional information in early sensory perception,but there was no significant difference between them and safe attachment individuals in amplitude.(3)Semantic background has an influence on emotional prosodic recognition of people with different attachment styles.Compared with safe attachment individuals,anxious attachment individuals occupy more attention resources by semantic information in emotional prosodic recognition,while avoidant attachment individuals are in between.In this study,the characteristics and time process of emotional prosody recognition of people with different attachment styles were discussed,and some individual differences of emotional prosody were explained,which confirmed the influence of attachment style and the regulating role of semantics in emotional prosody recognition,providing a new idea for explaining the inconsistency of results in related research on emotional prosody.This study also improved the Chinese phonetic material database of emotional prosody in the experiment,providing complete materials for the study of emotional prosody under the Chinese cultural background.We have grasped the characteristics and differences of emotional prosody recognition by people with different attachment styles,better explained the behaviors of individuals with different attachment styles,provided solutions and suggestions for the problems they faced in the process of interpersonal communication,and provided targeted help in the process of psychological consultation and counseling,thus providing a certain theoretical basis for improving interpersonal communication skills and avoiding suicide risks.