Abstract:

The research of the neural mechanism of adult attachment style contributes to a the deeper understanding of attachment behaviors and attachment types: The differences in N1, N200, N400 and P300 reflect that people with different attachment styles may differ in encoding, retrieving, and the allocation of attentional resources. The activities of brain areas, such as frontal cortex, cingulate cortex, temporal pole, amygdala, and hippocampus, might reflect the fact that people with different attachment styles have different cognitive mechanisms and ways to allocate attentional resources in the information processing. So far there is only a consistency between fMRI studies and the attachment theories on the effectiveness of secure and insecure attachment strategies, and studies other than that are still in dispute. Future researches can focus on developing higher quality questionnaires to measure adult attachment styles, exploring the neural mechanism of the processing of implicit stimulus affected by attachment styles, and refining how attachment styles influence the neural activities and brain images of different stages of the information processing, and examining the application of attachment styles’ impact on brain mechanisms of information processing in clinical treatment.

Key words: adult attachment style, information processing, neural mechanism, ERP, fMRI