Abstract
One of teenagers’ key developmental tasks is to engage in new and meaningful relationships with peers and adults outside the family context. Attachment-derived expectations about the self and others in terms of internal attachment working models have the potential to shape such social reorientation processes critically and thereby influence adolescents’ social-emotional development and social integration. Because the neural underpinnings of this developmental task remain largely unknown, we sought to investigate them by functional magnetic resonance imaging. We asked n = 44 adolescents (ages 12.01–18.84 years) to evaluate positive and negative adjectives regarding either themselves or a close other during an adapted version of the well-established self-other trait-evaluation task. As measures of attachment, we obtained scores reflecting participants’ positive versus negative attachment-derived self- and other-models by means of the Relationship Questionnaire. We controlled for possible confounding factors by also obtaining scores reflecting internalizing/externalizing problems, schizotypy, and borderline symptomatology. Our results revealed that participants with a more negative attachment-derived self-model showed increased brain activity during positive and negative adjective evaluation regarding the self, but decreased brain activity during negative adjective evaluation regarding a close other, in bilateral amygdala/parahippocampus, bilateral anterior temporal pole/anterior superior temporal gyrus, and left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. These findings suggest that a low positivity of the self-concept characteristic for the attachment anxiety dimension may influence neural information processing, but in opposite directions when it comes to self- versus (close) other-representations. We discuss our results in the framework of attachment theory and regarding their implications especially for adolescent social-emotional development and social integration.
Highlights
Attachment theoryAttachment theory, developed by John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth (Ainsworth, Blehar, Walters, & Wall, 1978; Bowlby, 1969, 1980), postulates that humans are born with an innate attachment system
The independent validation analysis with Relationship Scales Questionnaire (RSQ) scores reflecting the dimensions of attachment avoidance and anxiety revealed that, as expected (Griffin & Bartholomew, 1994), the self-model was Externalization (YSR/Adult Self Report (ASR)) Internalization (YSR/ASR) Schizotypy (SPQ) Borderline Personality (BPI) Self-Model (RQ) Other-Model (RQ) Attachment Avoidance (RSQ) Attachment Anxiety (RSQ)
Our results suggest that adolescents who hold a negative attachment-derived view of themselves show increased brain activity in the left amygdala/parahippocampus, bilateral anterior temporal pole (ATP)/anterior superior temporal gyrus (aSTG),cuneus, and left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), while attributing positive and negative adjectives to themselves
Summary
Attachment theoryAttachment theory, developed by John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth (Ainsworth, Blehar, Walters, & Wall, 1978; Bowlby, 1969, 1980), postulates that humans are born with an innate attachment system. In the course of development, the fundamental qualities of secure or insecure attachment are thought to become cognitively encoded by means of different internal self- and other-representations (Bartholomew & Horowitz, 1991), referred to as internal working models (IWMs; Mikulincer & Shaver, 2007). Once established, these IWMs are believed to remain relatively stable throughout the lifespan and to considerably influence the perception of new significant others entering individuals’ lives. IWMs can influence many social interactions with, in particular, friends, peers, romantic partners, and, eventually, a person’s own children, thereby completing the cycle of intergenerational attachment style transmission (Belsky, 2006; Mikulincer & Shaver, 2007; Pascuzzo, Cyr, & Moss, 2013; Shah, Fonagy, & Strathearn, 2010)
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