Relationship between adult attachment patterns, emotional experience and EEG frontal asymmetry

This study investigated whether adult attachment styles influence subjective and neurophysiological aspects of emotion. Self-reported emotional arousal and pleasantness and EEG frontal asymmetry were analysed while subjects watched emotional video-clips inducing happiness, fear and sadness with attachment-related content. Results showed a clear difference between attachment patterns on emotional arousal, resting frontal asymmetry and fluctuating asymmetry changes. Avoidant individuals responded to positive stimuli with less arousing subjective experience and right frontal asymmetry. In turn, preoccupied individuals showed higher arousal feelings and wider frontal left activation. Opposite patterns were observed in response to fear. These findings support the involvement of attachment in modelling individual emotional response and underlying brain functional processes, accounting partly for individual variability in human emotion.