Behavior studies demonstrate that the attachment-orientation difference is a powerful predictor for emotional processing in children and adults, with anxious individuals being hyperactive and avoidant individuals being deactive to emotional stimuli. This study used the event-related potential technique to explore brain responses to facial expressions by adults with anxious, avoidant, or secure attachment-orientation. Differences were found in N1, N2, P2, and N400 components between the groups of participants, suggesting that adults with different attachment-orientations have differences in both earlier, automatic encoding of the structural properties of faces and later, more elaborative retrieval of emotional contents.

In this study the relationships between attachment to parents, parental rearing, and adolescent subjective well-being were investigated. A total of 448 senior high school students completed the Adult Attachment Relationship Questionnaire (RQ; Bartholomew & Horowitz, 1991), the Experiences in Close Relationships Scale (ECR; Brennan, Clark, & Shaver, 1998), EMBU (Egna Minnen av Barndoms Uppfostran, or "Own memories of parental rearing"), the Index of Well-Being (IWB) and the Face Subjective Well-Being (FSWB; Andrews & Withey, 1976). The results suggested that the subjective well-being of securely attached adolescents was higher than that of insecurely attached adolescents. Avoidance of parents negatively predicted adolescents' subjective well-being. Maternal punishment was negatively associated with Chinese adolescents' subjective well-being. However, paternal care and warm emotion, as well as paternal overprotection, were positively associated with Chinese adolescents' subjective well-being. Furthermore, maternal negative rearing and paternal positive rearing predicted male adolescents' subjective well-being.

This target article presents an integrated evolutionary model of the development of attachment and human reproductive strategies. It is argued that sex differences in attachment emerge in middle childhood, have adaptive significance in both children and adults, and are part of sex-specific life history strategies. Early psychosocial stress and insecure attachment act as cues of environmental risk, and tend to switch development towards reproductive strategies favoring current reproduction and higher mating effort. However, due to sex differences in life history trade-offs between mating and parenting, insecure males tend to adopt avoidant strategies, whereas insecure females tend to adopt anxious/ambivalent strategies, which maximize investment from kin and mates. Females are expected to shift to avoidant patterns when environmental risk is more severe. Avoidant and ambivalent attachment patterns also have different adaptive values for boys and girls, in the context of same-sex competition in the peer group: in particular, the competitive and aggressive traits related to avoidant attachment can be favored as a status-seeking strategy for males. Finally, adrenarche is proposed as the endocrine mechanism underlying the reorganization of attachment in middle childhood, and the implications for the relationship between attachment and sexual development are explored. Sex differences in the development of attachment can be fruitfully integrated within the broader framework of adaptive plasticity in life history strategies, thus contributing to a coherent evolutionary theory of human development.MARCO DEL GIUDICE is an evolutionary developmental psychologist at the Center for Cognitive Science, University of Turin, Italy. Still at the beginning of his research career, he has published in leading psychology and biology journals, including Developmental Psychology, Developmental Science, and Evolution. He is especially interested in the dynamics of developmental plasticity, the evolution of human life history, and the origins of individual differences in behavioral strategies.

This study investigated the relationship between adult attachment, social support, and depression of post-stroke patients. A total of 100 post-stroke patients were recruited to complete 4 questionnaires, which include 2 widely used measurements of adult attachment – the Relationship Questionnaire (Bartholomew & Horowitz, 1991) and the Experiences of Close Relationships Inventory (Brennan, Clark, & Shaver, 1998) – to measure patients' attachment style, the Social Support Inventory (Xiao, 1994) measuring four aspects of social support, and the Beck Depression Inventory (Beck, 1967) measuring their depression level. The results suggested that patients differ in adult attachment styles and varied significantly in all indices of social support and depression. Secure subjects got higher scores in social support and lower scores of depression. Their depression level had significant positive correlations with attachment avoidance and attachment anxiety, and was negatively correlated to all indices of social support. Furthermore, both attachment-anxiety and subjective social support can predicate the depression level of poststroke patients.