Gillath Omri, Bunge Silvia A, Shaver Phillip R, Wendelken Carter, Mikulincer Mario
Department of Psychology, University of California, Davis, CA 95616, USA.
Neuroimage. 2005 Dec;28(4):835-47. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2005.06.048. Epub 2005 Aug 8.
Beginning in infancy, people can be characterized in terms of two dimensions of attachment insecurity: attachment anxiety (i.e., fear of rejection and abandonment) and attachment avoidance (distancing oneself from close others, shunning dependency; Bowlby, J., 1969/1982. Attachment and loss: Vol. 1. Attachment, 2nd ed., Basic Books, New York). The capacity for emotion regulation varies with attachment style, such that attachment-anxious individuals become highly emotional when threatened with social rejection or relationship loss, whereas avoidant individuals tend to distance themselves or disengage from emotional situations. In the present study, 20 women participated in an fMRI experiment in which they thought about--and were asked to stop thinking about--various relationship scenarios. When they thought about negative ones (conflict, breakup, death of partner), their level of attachment anxiety was positively correlated with activation in emotion-related areas of the brain (e.g., the anterior temporal pole, implicated in sadness) and inversely correlated with activation in a region associated with emotion regulation (orbitofrontal cortex). This suggests that anxious people react more strongly than non-anxious people to thoughts of loss while under-recruiting brain regions normally used to down-regulate negative emotions. Participants high on avoidance failed to show as much deactivation as less avoidant participants in two brain regions (subcallosal cingulate cortex; lateral prefrontal cortex). This suggests that the avoidant peoples' suppression was less complete or less efficient, in line with results from previous behavioral experiments. These are among the first findings to identify some of the neural processes underlying adult attachment orientations and emotion regulation.
从婴儿期开始，人们就可以根据依恋不安全感的两个维度来进行特征描述：依恋焦虑（即害怕被拒绝和被抛弃）和依恋回避（与亲密他人保持距离，回避依赖；鲍尔比，J.，1969/1982。《依恋与失落：第1卷。依恋》，第2版，基础图书公司，纽约）。情绪调节能力随依恋风格而变化，依恋焦虑型个体在面临社会拒绝或关系丧失的威胁时会变得情绪高度激动，而回避型个体则倾向于在情绪情境中与他人保持距离或脱离接触。在本研究中，20名女性参与了一项功能磁共振成像实验，她们在实验中思考——并被要求停止思考——各种关系场景。当她们想到负面场景（冲突、分手、伴侣死亡）时，她们的依恋焦虑水平与大脑中与情绪相关区域的激活呈正相关（例如，前颞极，与悲伤有关），与与情绪调节相关区域（眶额皮质）的激活呈负相关。这表明，焦虑的人在面对失落想法时的反应比不焦虑的人更强烈，同时用于下调负面情绪的大脑区域的激活不足。回避程度高的参与者在两个脑区（胼胝体下扣带回皮质；外侧前额叶皮质）未能表现出与回避程度较低的参与者一样多的失活。这表明回避型个体的抑制不那么完全或效率较低，这与之前的行为实验结果一致。这些是最早识别出成人依恋取向和情绪调节背后一些神经过程的研究结果之一。
