The Emotional Integration of Childhood Experience: Physiological, Facial Expressive, and Self-Reported Emotional Response During the Adult Attachment Interview.

Abstract

Attachment researchers claim that individual differences in how adults talk about their early memories reflect qualitatively distinct organizations of emotion regarding childhood experiences with caregivers. Testing this assumption, the present study examined the relationship between attachment dimensions and physiological, facial expressive, as well as self-reported emotional responses during the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI). Consistent with theoretical predictions, more prototypically secure adults behaviorally expressed and reported experiencing emotion consistent with the valence of the childhood events they described. Insecure adults also showed distinctive and theoretically anticipated forms of emotional response: Dismissing participants evidenced increased electrodermal activity during the interview, a sign of emotional suppression, whereas preoccupied adults showed reliable discrepancies between the valence of their inferred childhood experiences and their facial expressive as well as reported emotion during the AAI. Results substantiate a case that the AAI reflects individual differences in emotion regulation that conceptually parallel observations of attachment relationships in infancy.

Attachment styles and secure base priming in relation to emotional reactivity after frustration induction

“…In prior research, people have been found to smile when frustrated, perhaps as an emotion regulation strategy to reduce frustration (Hoque & Picard, 2011). Facial expressions that are incongruent with the emotional situation have also been considered as reflecting individuals' confusion and emotional dysregulation or the attempt to block the experience and expression of negative emotions (Roisman et al, 2004;Sonnby-Borgström & Jönsson, 2004). During the performance of the neutral cognitive task, individuals experienced a decreased intensity of negative and positive emotions, possibly because concentration is needed to fulfil the task and the task does not make an appeal to specific emotions.…”

“…Diamond and Hicks (2005) showed that attachment anxiety was positively associated with self-reported distress and anger during and after anger-inducing tasks, also expressed by their vagal tone. Studies further report that anxiously and avoidantly attached individuals' facial expressions were incongruent with the emotional situation, which might reflect anxiously attached individuals' confusion and emotional dysregulation and avoidantly attached individuals' attempts to block negative emotions (Roisman, Tsai, & Chiang, 2004;Sonnby-Borgström & Jönsson, 2004). …”

Speech Emotion Analysis: Exploring the Role of Context

“…Another important application of automated systems for human affect recognition is in affectrelated research (e.g., in psychology, psychiatry, behavior science, and neuroscience), where such systems can eliminate the tedious manual task of processing data. Research areas like social and emotional development studies [1], mother-infant interaction [2], and psychiatric disorders [3] would be substantially benefited. Automatic detection of fatigue, depression, and anxiety could also form an important step towards personal wellness and assistive technologies [4].…”

Audio-Visual Spontaneous Emotion Recognition

“…Facial Action Unit System (FACS) [13]), more and more reports of emotion analysis have been conducted in psychology, psychiatry, education, anthropology, neurophysiology [14][15] [16]. The emotion-related research includes attachment [17], mother-infant interaction [18], tutoring [19], and psychiatric disorders [20]. All of the above research requires measurement of emotion expressions.…”