Brain activity during emotion perception: the role of attachment representation

Abstract

To examine emotional face processing in mothers of different attachment representations, event-related potentials were recorded from 16 mothers during presentation of infant emotion faces with positive, negative or neutral emotional expressions within a three-stimulus oddball paradigm, and frontal asymmetries were assessed. Insecure mothers, as compared to secure ones, showed a more pronounced negativity in the face-sensitive N170 component and a smaller N200 amplitude. Regarding the P300 component, secure mothers showed a stronger response to face stimuli than insecure mothers. No differences were found for frontal asymmetry scores. The results indicate that attachment differences may be related to neuropsychological functioning.

The Adult Attachment Projective Picture System: Integrating Attachment Into Clinical Assessment

“…Clinical studies have used the AAP to examine posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms following trauma, depression, and emotional development in psychiatric patients, and as part of a parent evaluation battery in custody evaluation (Benoit et al, 2010;Buchheim & George, 2011;Buchheim, George, Liebl, Moser, & Benecke, 2007;Isaacs, George, & Marvin, 2009;Subic-Wrana, Beetz, Langenbach, Paulussen, & Beutel, 2007;West & George, 2002). The AAP has also been shown to be useful in studying the neurobiological and emotional expression correlates of attachment in nonclinical and clinical samples Buchheim, Erk, et al, 2008;Buchheim et al, 2006;Buchheim et al, 2009;Fraedrich, Lakatos, & Spangler, 2010).…”

Review and Classification of Emotion Recognition Based on EEG Brain-Computer Interface System Research: A Systematic Review

“…Some studies were conducted on a single gender, such as those investigating women's emotions during motherhood and parental status [133,134,164] and a study of men [215]. Some studies targeted a specific type of subject, such as healthy people or patients, to investigate and observe the differences in emotions between two different groups, such as control and healthy groups in [76,107,135], groups of women and men in [46,97,177], young adults versus older adults in [87,216], or children versus adults in [126,143].…”

The Application of Electroencephalography to Investigate the Neural Bases of Parenting: A Review

“…Further adaptation of this paradigm to examining the neural correlates of rejection by mother and child has recently been advanced (Sreekrishnan et al, 2014). A natural extension of this work would be to examine the attachment style of mothers and their children and how the quality of dyadic relationships influences the response both to infant cues and to similar social exclusion paradigms (e.g., Fraedrich, Lakatos, & Spangler, 2010). Further, ERPs associated with error or feedback processing when elicited by infant stimuli and embedded in decision-making tasks may provide a novel measure of parental responding to infant cues that may not be captured by simpler passive viewing tasks.…”