The effects of attachment avoidance and the defensive regulation of emotional faces: Brain potentials examining the role of preemptive and postemptive strategies

Deactivating strategies, including preemptive and postemptive strategies, are effective methods used by avoidant adults to regulate emotional processing. In the present study, we examined the mechanisms of preemptive and postemptive strategies used by highly avoidant participants to defend against emotional faces. Event-related potentials were recorded while participants performed a face version of a study-test task that comprised emotional and neutral faces. Emotional faces elicited larger N170 amplitude than did neutral faces in highly avoidant individuals. In addition, early and parietal old/new effects were observed in highly avoidant participants in response to neutral but not emotional faces. Less-avoidant participants exhibited an extensive old/new effect in response to negative and neutral faces. These results suggest that highly avoidant individuals allocate more cognitive resources when encoding emotional faces at an early stage, which contributes to the use of postemptive strategies to suppress the accessibility of previously encoded emotional information in recognition.