Deactivating attachment strategies associate with early processing of facial emotion and familiarity in middle childhood: An ERP study

Neurophysiological evidence suggests associations between attachment and the neural processing of emotional cues (i.e., facial emotion). The current study asks whether this relationship is also evident in middle childhood, and whether there is an additional influence of social relevance (i.e., facial familiarity). Attachment strategies (deactivation, hyperactivation) were assessed in 51 children aged 9 to 11 years using a story stem completion task. Electroencephalography (EEG) was recorded while children passively viewed pictures of their mother and a female stranger displaying angry and happy emotional facial expressions. At the stage of early facial information encoding (N250), we observed attachment deactivation to be associated with a pattern pointing to an increased vigilance towards angry faces. Finally, we found the attention-driven LPP to be increased to happy mother faces as motivationally highly relevant stimuli overall, but not in children scoring high on attachment deactivation. These children did not seem to discriminate between mothers’ facial emotions, besides showing a general attentional withdrawal from social-emotional stimuli. While our results on attachment deactivation support a two-stage processing approach, there was no effect of attachment hyperactivation on any of the assessed EEG components.