Abstract:
The purpose of this study was to investigate how attachment anxiety and empathy for experimentally stimulated pain influenced participants’ attention to negative social stimuli as measured with the Event-Related Potentials technique. Participants underwent a cold-bottle pain stimulation task, after which they were given a manipulated empathy rating from a falsified unfamiliar observer. Participants then completed an oddball discrimination task wherein they were expected to select a button for rare angry-faced pictures and ignore more frequent neutral-faced pictures. Neural correlates of attention, as measured by the P300 component for angry-faced images, were then analyzed. While no group differences were observed for participants with low attachment anxiety, among those with high attachment anxiety, participants who were given high empathy demonstrated lower P300 amplitudes, suggestive of less attention for the angry-faced images, than participants given low empathy. Accordingly, participants with high attachment anxiety appeared to benefit from the empathy of the falsified unfamiliar observer in modulating their own attention to the unpleasant social stimuli. There are clinical implications of the findings that can be useful for psychologists treating patients with attachment anxiety who are coping with chronic pain.
