Faculté de Psychologie et des Sciences de l'Education, Université de Genève, Geneva, Switzerland.
Department of Psychology, University of Essex, Colchester, UK.
Attach Hum Dev. 2023 Feb;25(1):181-198. doi: 10.1080/14616734.2022.2091337. Epub 2022 Aug 4.
Attachment theory suggests that interindividual differences in attachment security versus insecurity (anxiety and avoidance) contribute to the ways in which people perceive social emotional signals, particularly from the human face. Among different facial features, eye gaze conveys crucial information for social interaction, with a straight gaze triggering different cognitive and emotional processes as compared to an averted gaze. It remains unknown, however, how interindividual differences in attachment associate with early face encoding in the context of a straight versus averted gaze. Using electroencephalography (EEG) and recording event-related potentials (ERPs), specifically the N170 component, the present study ( = 50 healthy adults) measured how the characteristics of attachment anxiety and avoidance relate to the encoding of faces with respect to gaze direction and head orientation. Our findings reveal a significant relationship between gaze direction (irrespective of head orientation) and attachment anxiety on the interhemispheric (i.e. right) asymmetry of the N170 and thus provide evidence for an association between attachment anxiety and eye gaze processing during early visual face encoding.
依恋理论表明，个体在依恋安全性与非安全性（焦虑和回避）方面的差异，会影响人们感知社交情绪信号的方式，尤其是来自人脸的信号。在不同的面部特征中，目光注视传递着社交互动的关键信息，与回避的目光相比，正视的目光会引发不同的认知和情绪过程。然而，目前尚不清楚个体在依恋方面的差异如何与正视和回避时的早期面部编码相关联。本研究（ = 50 名健康成年人）使用脑电图 (EEG) 和记录事件相关电位 (ERP)，特别是 N170 成分，来测量依恋焦虑和回避的特征与注视方向和头部方向的关系，以此来研究面部编码。我们的研究结果表明，注视方向（无论头部方向如何）与依恋焦虑之间存在显著关系，表现在 N170 的大脑两半球（即右半球）不对称性上，因此为依恋焦虑与早期视觉面部编码过程中的目光注视处理之间的关联提供了证据。
