Attachment Security Priming Decreases Children's Physiological Response to Threat

Abstract

Ninety 6- and 7-year-olds (49.3% White, mostly middle class) from greater Washington, DC were randomly assigned to a subliminal priming condition (secure, happy, or neutral) to determine if attachment security priming decreases physiological, expressive, and self-reported fear reactions to threatening stimuli. Dispositional attachment security was also assessed. Secure priming and attachment security each decreased electrodermal reactivity, increased vagal augmentation, and decreased fearful facial expressions compared to control conditions. Examination of a statistical interaction between security priming and child attachment indicated that, although secure children had increased vagal augmentation and fewer fearful expressions than insecure children, the effects of priming were constant across secure and insecure children. There were no priming or attachment effects associated with children's self-reported fear.

The Effectiveness of Attachment Security Priming in Improving Positive Affect and Reducing Negative Affect: A Systematic Review

“…Across studies 3459 participants received priming. The samples largely consisted of university students, but two tested child and adolescent participants [24], [26] (b), one a clinical sample [27], and one heterosexual romantic couples [29] (c). Most studies reported age ranges between 6 to 76 year, mean-21.9 years but not all [25], [29] (a-c), [30].…”

“…Most studies reported age ranges between 6 to 76 year, mean-21.9 years but not all [25], [29] (a-c), [30]. Studies were conducted in five countries: twelve in Israel [17] (a-e), [33] (a-g), ten in the US [24], [26] (a,b), [29] (a-c), [30,31], [32] (b), six in the UK [13,18], [22] (a,b), [25,27], one in China [16] and one in Canada [32] (a). The average percentage of females across studies was 64.3%.…”

“…Research design. Seventeen studies utilised a between-subject experimental design [13], [17] (a-e), [18], [22] (a,b), [24,25], [26] (b), [27,28,30], [32] (a,b) and five used a within-subject experimental design [29] (c), [31], [33] (b-d). Seven studies used mixed method designs [26] (a), [29] (a,b), [33] (a,e-g), and one adopted a quasi-experimental design [6].…”

“…Additional measures included interpersonal experience or expectation [13], [17] (a-e), [18], [25], [28], felt security [41] in a few studies [13], [22] (a,b), [27] and attachment figure information in others [18,27], [33] (d). Two studies used heart rate monitoring, facial expression coding [24], and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scans [31].…”

“…(101 PsychINFO, 66 Web of Science, 132 MEDLINE, 56 Scopus). Backward and forward chaining techniques, including examining reference lists and citations in the three key studies most closely related to our systematic review question [22][23][24] yielded 196 papers, resulting in 507 results in total. Searches were conducted using the following terms (a) attachment security priming, (b) affect, and (c) children and adults.…”