The Influence of the Attachment Style on the Decoding Accuracy of Emotional Vocal Expressions

This study aimed at examining the effects of attachment style on the ability of recognizing emotions, from acoustic stimuli, in subjects with induced emotional states. An adequate sample of 145 university students (71 females and 74 males; mean age = 23.37 ± 2.05) was recruited from the Second University of Naples (Italy). The subjects, classified for attachment style into Secure, Insecure Dismissing, Insecure Preoccupied and Insecure Fearful, were randomly assigned with one of three (sad, fearful or neutral) different elicited emotional conditions induced by viewing short movies. Immediately after the mood-induction procedure, subjects undertook a vocal emotion-decoding task. Secure subjects were more accurate in recognizing surprise and sadness than the Insecure group; Fearfully attached individuals were less accurate in identifying vocal stimuli conveying sadness than the Securely and Dismissively attached groups. The recognition of vocal stimuli was not affected by induced mood conditions. No mood-congruity effects were found. The study sheds light on some of the factors underlying the emotion-recognition process. Possible explanations of the contribution of attachment style on the ability to decode vocal stimuli were discussed.

[1]  J. Bowlby,et al.  Maternal Care and Mental Health , 1952 .

[2]  R. Plutchik.  Emotions as adaptive reactions: implications for therapy. , 1966, Psychoanalytic review.

[3]  T. Chang.  [Maternal care and mental health]. , 1968, Hu li za zhi The journal of nursing.

[4]  J. Bowlby.  The making & breaking of affectional bonds , 1979 .

[5]  T. Brazelton,et al.  Affective development in infancy. , 1986 .

[6]  M. Main,et al.  Discovery of an insecure-disorganized/disoriented attachment pattern. , 1986 .

[7]  D. Olson,et al.  Developing theories of mind , 1988 .

[8]  D. Cicchetti,et al.  Attachment in the preschool years: Theory, research, and intervention. , 1990 .

[9]  K. Scherer,et al.  Vocal cues in emotion encoding and decoding , 1991 .

[10]  C. M. Parkes,et al.  Attachment Across the Life Cycle , 1991 .

[11]  Claudia Bullerjahn,et al.  An empirical investigation of effects of film music using qualitative content analysis. , 1994 .

[12]  A. Bouhuys,et al.  Induction of depressed and elated mood by music influences the perception of facial emotional expressions in healthy subjects. , 1995, Journal of affective disorders.

[13]  K. Lay,et al.  Attachment security, affect regulation, and defensive responses to mood induction. , 1995, Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development.

[14]  D. Laible,et al.  Attachment and emotional understanding in preschool children. , 1998, Developmental psychology.

[15]  Kelly A. Brennan,et al.  Self-report measurement of adult attachment: An integrative overview. , 1998 .

[16]  J. Simpson,et al.  Attachment theory and close relationships. , 1998 .

[17]  P. Harris.  Individual differences in understanding emotion: the role of attachment status and psychological discourse. , 1999, Attachment & human development.

[18]  E. McClure.  A meta-analytic review of sex differences in facial expression processing and their development in infants, children, and adolescents. , 2000, Psychological bulletin.

[19]  P. Niedenthal,et al.  Emotional state and the detection of change in facial expression of emotion , 2000 .

[20]  A. Picardi,et al.  La scala "Experiences in close relationships" (ECL), un nuovo strumento per la valutazione dell’attaccamento negli adulti: traduzione, adattamento e validazione della versione italiana , 2000 .

[21]  P. Niedenthal,et al.  When did her smile drop? Facial mimicry and the influences of emotional state on the detection of change in emotional expression , 2001 .

[22]  P. Harris,et al.  Individual differences in children's understanding of emotion: The roles of attachment and language , 2002, Attachment & human development.

[23]  P. Niedenthal,et al.  Adult attachment and the perception of facial expression of emotion. , 2002, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[24]  J. Russell,et al.  Facial and vocal expressions of emotion. , 2003, Annual review of psychology.

[25]  Klaus R. Scherer,et al.  Vocal communication of emotion: A review of research paradigms , 2003, Speech Commun..

[26]  G. Liotti.  TRAUMA, DISSOCIATION, AND DISORGANIZED ATTACHMENT: THREE STRANDS OF A SINGLE BRAID , 2004 .

[27]  Selcuk R. Sirin.  Socioeconomic Status and Academic Achievement: A Meta-Analytic Review of Research , 2005 .

[28]  Julia Hirschberg,et al.  A Framework for Eliciting Emotional Speech: Capitalizing on the Actor’s Process , 2006 .

[29]  C. Conklin,et al.  Affect Regulation in Borderline Personality Disorder , 2006, The Journal of nervous and mental disease.

[30]  W. Thompson,et al.  Decoding speech prosody in five languages , 2006 .

[31]  Matthew P. Spackman,et al.  Viewers' Interpretations of Film Characters' Emotions: Effects of Presenting Film Music Before or After a Character is Shown , 2007 .

[32]  M. Farah,et al.  The influence of sad mood on cognition. , 2007, Emotion.

[33]  H. Steele,et al.  Early attachment predicts emotion recognition at 6 and 11 years old , 2008, Attachment & human development.

[34]  Björn W. Schuller,et al.  Patterns, prototypes, performance: classifying emotional user states , 2008, INTERSPEECH.

[35]  Carlos Busso,et al.  IEMOCAP: interactive emotional dyadic motion capture database , 2008, Lang. Resour. Evaluation.

[36]  Anna Esposito,et al.  The New Italian Audio and Video Emotional Database , 2009, COST 2102 Training School.

[37]  D. Caro.  Socio-Economic Status and Academic Achievement Trajectories from Childhood to Adolescence. , 2009 .

[38]  K. Robertson.  The Making and Breaking of Affectional Bonds , 2009, BMJ : British Medical Journal.

[39]  Anna Esposito,et al.  The Perceptual and Cognitive Role of Visual and Auditory Channels in Conveying Emotional Information , 2009, Cognitive Computation.

[40]  Anna Esposito,et al.  The COST 2102 Italian Audio and Video Emotional Database , 2009, WIRN.

[41]  P. Schmid,et al.  Mood effects on emotion recognition , 2010 .

[42]  T. Suslow,et al.  Adult attachment avoidance and automatic affective response to sad facial expressions , 2010 .

[43]  L. Colle,et al.  Patterns of Attachment and Emotional Competence in Middle Childhood , 2011 .

[44]  Marcos Faúndez-Zanuy,et al.  A Naturalistic Database of Thermal Emotional Facial Expressions and Effects of Induced Emotions on Memory , 2011, COST 2102 Training School.

[45]  Vincent C. Müller,et al.  Proceedings of the 2011 international conference on Cognitive Behavioural Systems , 2011 .

[46]  Katherine B. Martin,et al.  Facial Action Coding System , 2015 .