Attachment and selective attention: Disorganization and emotional Stroop reaction time

Abstract

Although central to attachment theory, internal working models remain a useful heuristic in need of concretization. We compared the selective attention of organized and disorganized mothers using the emotional Stroop task. Both disorganized attachment and emotional Stroop response involve the coordination of strongly conflicting motivations under conditions of emotional arousal. Furthermore, much is known about the cognitive and neuromodulatory correlates of the Stroop that may inform attempts to substantiate the internal working model construct. We assessed 47 community mothers with the Adult Attachment Interview and the Working Model of the Child Interview in the third trimester of pregnancy. At 6 and 12 months postpartum, we assessed mothers with emotional Stroop tasks involving neutral, attachment, and emotion conditions. At 12 months, we observed their infants in the Strange Situation. Results showed that: disorganized attachment is related to relative Stroop reaction time, that is, unlike organized mothers, disorganized mothers respond to negative attachment/emotion stimuli more slowly than to neutral stimuli; relative speed of response is positively related to number of times the dyad was classified disorganized, and change in relative Stroop response time from 6 to 12 months is related to the match-mismatch status of mother and infant attachment classifications. We discuss implications in terms of automatic and controlled processing and, more specifically, cognitive threat tags, parallel distributed processing, and neuromodulation through norepinephrine and dopamine.

Attachment and Children’s Biased Attentional Processing: Evidence for the Exclusion of Attachment-Related Information

“…The relations between attachment and attentional biases have mostly been observed in adults using cognitive reaction-time tasks, such as modified Stroop [15], probe-detection [16], or exogenous cueing paradigms [7]. These studies confirm that more insecurely attached adults defensively exclude psychological painful attachment-related information.…”

Common and divergent psychobiological mechanisms underlying maternal behaviors in non-human and human mammals

“…Mothers with disturbed attachments to their own caregivers (disorganized/unresolved) and to their own infants (irrational fear of loss of the infant), and mothers of disorganized infants (infants whose attachment strategies collapse under stress), show attentional difficulties when assessed with emotional Stroop tasks (Atkinson et al, 2009). Furthermore, mothers with fewer errors on extra-dimensional shift and spatial working memory tasks at 2–6 months postpartum are more sensitive in their interactions with their infants and show more contingent responding to infant cues (Gonzalez et al, 2012).…”

Approaching the biology of human parental attachment: Brain imaging, oxytocin and coordinated assessments of mothers and fathers

“…Deficits in executive function measures of attention set-shifting, spatial working memory and a sustained attention measure have been linked with poor maternal sensitivity to non-distress infant cues (Gonzalez et al, 2012). In closely related work, mothers with a classification of disorganized attachment responded more slowly to negative attachment words and the speed of response to such stimuli was correlated with disorganization, suggesting negative associations with attachment stimuli that may contribute to ongoing cognitive difficulties during mother-infant interactions (Atkinson et al, 2009). Greater attention bias to infant distress cues in late pregnancy has also been associated with better scores on a parental bonding questionnaire (Pearson et al, 2010), raising the question of how attention deficit disorder affects parenting – an issue yet to be studied.…”