Attachment style and attention bias to emotional information: The moderating effect of stress, stimulus characteristics, and attention stage

Objective: We examined whether insecurely attached individuals exhibit an attention bias to emotional information, and further tested the potential moderating role of stress, information valence, information attachment relevance, and attention stage.

Background: Attachment style can predict people's attention to emotional information. However, the empirical findings are inconsistent, making it difficult to determine the associations between attachment style and attention bias to emotional information.

Method: We included 68 studies (N = 5417) across 46 published and unpublished articles (the initial pool was 627 articles) in the meta-analysis.

Results: People high on attachment avoidance exhibited decreased attention toward emotional stimuli (d = -0.129, p = 0.020), which was not affected by stress, information valence, information attachment relevance, or attention stage. Conversely, people high on attachment anxiety exhibited increased attention toward emotional stimuli, especially under stress, if the information was attachment-related, and during late-stage attentional processing. They exhibited an early bias away from and a late bias toward emotional information, which was intensified under stress.

Conclusion: Our findings support the proposition that people high on attachment avoidance use deactivating strategies in attentional processing; whereas people high on attachment anxiety use hyperactivating strategies, especially when resources are limited (under stress). When resources are available, and it is relatively early in the process, people high on attachment anxiety respond similarly to those high on attachment avoidance.