Impact of Attachment on Emotional Experience and Expression: A Physiological and Acoustic Investigation

Attachment is a psychobiological system that is deeply intertwined with emotion regulation. The goal of this study was to investigate how one's attachment style modulates physiological responses during emotional experience and acoustic manifestations in vocal emotional expression.

Using film-watching emotion elicitation and subliminal priming paradigms, we investigated the impact of attachment styles (secure, dismissive, preoccupied, and fearful) on physiological responses and vocal expression across four basic emotional states: amusement, anger, sadness, and fear. After 44 participants with romantic experiences completed the Experiences in Close Relationship questionnaire, they underwent physiological measurements while watching emotional film clips. They were then acoustically recorded as they spoke Mandarin pseudosentences-grammatical but semantically meaningless-to convey the emotions they perceived from the film clips.

Univariate analyses showed the joint effects of attachment and emotion on three physiological measures tied to emotional experience, as well as on 14 acoustic measures associated with vocal emotional expression. Multivariate analyses revealed that, in both physiological and acoustic spaces, the secure group was relatively distinct from the dismissive and preoccupied groups, whereas the fearful group showed considerable variability across emotions. Using random forest classifiers, attachment style was identified with 73% accuracy based on 13 acoustic measures. Redundancy analysis further revealed a congruence between physiological and vocal emotional activations in the secure and fearful groups, whereas a contradiction between the two was observed in the preoccupied group.

The results provide solid support for attachment theory, demonstrating that individual differences in emotional experience and expression are closely linked to one's attachment style.

https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.32191047.