Attachment affects social information processing:Specific electrophysiological effects of maternal stimuli

Lili Wu1*, Ruolei Gu2*, and Jianxin Zhang1

1Key Laboratory of Mental Health, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences,Beijing, China2Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences,Beijing, China

Attachment is critical to each individual. It affects the cognitive-affective processing of social information. The presentstudy examines how attachment affects the processing of social information, specifically maternal information. Weassessed the behavioral and electrophysiological responses to maternal information (compared to non-specific others)in a Go/No-go Association Task (GNAT) with 22 participants. The results illustrated that attachment affected maternalinformation processing during three sequential stages of information processing. First, attachment affected visualperception, reflected by enhanced P100 and N170 elicited by maternal information as compared to others information.Second, compared to others, mother obtained more attentional resources, reflected by faster behavioral response tomaternal information and larger P200 and P300. Finally, mother was evaluated positively, reflected by shorter P300latency in a mother + good condition as compared to a mother + bad condition. These findings indicated that theprocessing of attachment-relevant information is neurologically differentiated from other types of social informationfrom an early stage of perceptual processing to late high-level processing.

Keywords: Attachment; P100; N170; P200; P300; Event-related potentials (ERPs).

Attachment is an important motivational system. Itaffects individuals in every aspect, including attention,memory, expectation, attribution, affective processingof social information, and the integration of newinformation into preexisting mental structures (for areview, see Dykas & Cassidy, 2011). Attachmentabnormality leads to a variety of behavioral problems,such as substance abuse (for a review, see Iglesias,Del Rio, Calafat, & Ramon, 2014), disinhibited eating(Wilkinson, Rowe, & Heath, 2013), and social disen-gagement (Engels, Finkenauer, Meeus, & Dekovic,2001). The present study examines how attachment

affects social information processing by using cogni-tive-neuroscience techniques. Previous researchfocusing on the same topic has illustrated that attach-ment-related information processing involves specificbrain mechanisms. For instance, attachment-relevantinformation elicits the regions mediating reward andmotivation, such as ventral tegmental area, nucleusaccumbens, and caudate nucleus, suggesting thatattachment-related information is of high motivationalsignificance (Acevedo, Aron, Fisher, & Brown, 2012;Aron et al., 2005; Bartels & Zeki, 2004; Strathearn,Li, Fonagy, & Montague, 2008). Indeed, attachment-

Correspondence should be addressed to: Lili Wu, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 16 Lincui Road, Chao-YangDistrict, Beijing 100101, China. E-mail: wull@psych.ac.cn; Jianxin Zhang, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 16 LincuiRoad, Chao-Yang District, Beijing 100101, China. E-mail: zhangjx@psych.ac.cn

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 31200789]; the Scientific Foundation of

Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences [grant number Y0CX363S01].*These authors contributed equally.

SOCIAL NEUROSCIENCE, 2015http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17470919.2015.1074103

© 2015 Taylor & Francis

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relevant information receives more attention and dee-per processing than attachment-irrelevant information(e.g., Arsalidou, Barbeau, Bayless, & Taylor, 2010; deHaan & Nelson, 1997).

In the present study, we chose maternal informa-tion as the attachment-related stimuli. From the theo-retical perspective, mother is the primary caregiver forinfants and children (Bowlby, 1982), as well as animportant attachment figure for teenagers and adults(Doherty & Feeney, 2004). From the empirical manip-ulation perspective, in previous studies, maternalinformation has been used as attachment-related sti-muli to examine the relationship between attachmentand interpersonal relationship and behaviors(Branstetter, Furman, & Cottrell, 2009; De La Rosa,Dillon, Rojas, Schwartz, & Duan, 2010), and to exam-ine the neural responses associated with attachment-related behaviors (e.g., Tottenham, Shapiro, Telzer, &Humphreys, 2012). One of our previous studies hasexamined behavioral and neural responses to mother(Wu, Gu, Cai, Luo, & Zhang, 2014), the results ofwhich suggested that both attentional processes andevaluative processes are modulated during attachmentinformation processing. Furthermore, this studydemonstrated that the attentional preference for andpositive evaluation of attachment-relevant informationare not due to familiarity, but the motivational signifi-cance of this kind of information. In order to clarifythe cognitive mechanism underlying the attachment-relevant information processing, two issues in ourprevious study needed to be addressed further. First,regarding the experimental stimuli, the attachment-relevant information was maternal and the non-speci-fic others (as the control condition) were mainly mas-culine. As such, our previous findings might havebeen contaminated by the “women are wonderful”effect, which means both males and females have ageneral tendency to associate women with more posi-tive attributes than men (Eagly & Mladinic, 1994).Further examination by controlling the gender infor-mation conveyed by stimulus materials would be ben-eficial to clarify the characteristics of maternalinformation processing. Here, we replaced the mascu-line others words with feminine others words todirectly rule out the “women are wonderful” effect.

The second issue was visual perception of attach-ment-relevant information, which remained unex-plored in our previous study (Wu et al., 2014).Previous research using various types of material,including faces (Pizzagalli, Regard, & Lehmann,1999; Pizzagalli et al., 2002; Pourtois, Grandjean,Sander, & Vuilleumier, 2004), pictures (Smith,Cacioppo, Larsen, & Chartrand, 2003), and words(Li, Zinbarg, & Paller, 2007), has showed that the

information related to survival receive deeper proces-sing during the perception stage. Attachment is essen-tial to human survival and it profoundly influenceseach individual across the life span (John Bowlby,1969, 1979, 1982). Accordingly, we hypothesizedthat such information would obtain more intensiveprocessing at as early as the perceptual stage.

We selected three groups of event-related potential(ERP) components to measure different cognitive pro-cesses associated with the processing of maternal sti-muli, including visual perception, attentionalallocation, and evaluation. First, to examine whetherthe attachment-relevant information could be differen-tiated from attachment-irrelevant information duringvisual perception, P100 and N170 were assessed andanalyzed. P100 is the first positive-going componentwith a parieto-occipital distribution, of which theamplitude is sensitive to different kinds of stimuliproperties, such as luminance (Johannes, Mireille,Arthur, Tatjana, & Thomas, 1997), stimulus size(Zani & Proverbio, 1995), spatial frequency (Pitts,Martinez, & Hillyard, 2010), and emotional salience(Pourtois et al., 2004). N170 peaks at about 170 msafter stimulus presentation with an occipital-temporalscalp distribution, which could be elicited by faces,objects, and words (for a review, see Dien, 2009). It isright lateralized for faces, bilateral distributed forobjects such as cars, and strongly left lateralized forprinted words (Rossion, Joyce, Cottrell, & Tarr,2003). The amplitude of N170 is found to beenhanced by the affective salience conveyed by thestimuli (Blau, Maurer, Tottenham, & McCandliss,2007; Montalan et al., 2008).

Second, to examine the attentional processing ofmaternal stimuli, P200 and N200 were measuredand analyzed. Enhanced amplitudes of these twocomponents reflect increased attention to stimuliwith intrinsic personal relevance, such as self-related information (e.g., Hu, Wu, & Fu, 2011;Meixner & Rosenfeld, 2010). We anticipated thatmother would draw more attention than others, asindicated by larger P200 and N200 components (deHaan & Nelson, 1997).

Finally, to further explore the evaluative processingof maternal stimuli, P300 that is maximal around theposterior region of the scalp (for a review, see Polich,2007) was examined. The P300 amplitude has beenused to assess the evaluation of specific categories(Cacioppo, Crites, Gardner, & Berntson, 1994;Crites, Cacioppo, Gardner, & Berntson, 1995), andits peak latency could be used as a neural indicatorof the speed of categorization and evaluation (for areview, see Kutas, McCarthy, & Donchin, 1977;McCarthy & Donchin, 1981). Both P300 amplitude

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and P300 latency have been used as indices of theactivation or accessibility of stereotyped information.For instance, P300 is larger for counter-stereotypeassociations than for stereotype-consistent associa-tions, reflecting a violation of implicit attitude(Bartholow, Dickter, & Sestir, 2006; Ito, Thompson,& Cacioppo, 2004). Likewise, compared with stereo-type-consistent information, the P300 latency waslonger when counter-stereotype information is pro-cessed (Bartholow et al., 2006; Henry, Bartholow, &Arndt, 2010). We anticipated that P300 elicited bymother words would be larger and would reach itspeak more slowly in the mother + bad condition thanin the mother + good condition due to a violation ofthe positive attitude toward the mother in the formercondition. By contrast, people usually hold neutralattitudes toward non-specific others (Karpinski,2004; Pinter & Greenwald, 2005). Therefore, weexpected that neither the P300 amplitude nor itslatency would show any difference between theothers + good and others +bad conditions.

In short, the current study further examined thecognitive components underlying maternal informa-tion processing. Based on our previous work (Wuet al., 2014), we hypothesized that the attentionalbias for maternal stimuli would be reflected by largerP200 and N200 components, and the violation ofpositive bias for maternal stimuli would be reflectedby a larger and/or slower P300. Meanwhile, we alsoexamined the visual perception of maternal informa-tion by assessing the P100 and N170 amplitudes.Results from other types of survival-relevant informa-tion (e.g., threatening stimuli) research suggest thatthe maternal information receive deeper processingduring visual perception (e.g., Li et al., 2007;Pizzagalli et al., 1999; Pourtois et al., 2004).However, we did not have a specific hypothesis dueto limited information in previous literature about theperceptual processing of attachment-relevantinformation.

METHOD

Participants

Twenty-four college students were recruited and paidfor their participation. None of them had a history ofneurological or psychiatric disorders. All participantswere healthy, right-handed, and had normal or cor-rected-to-normal vision. The Institutional ReviewBoard (IRB) at the Institute of Psychology, ChineseAcademy of Sciences, approved the experimental pro-tocol. We introduced the experimental procedure to

each participant after he/she arrived at the lab.Moreover, all participants gave their written informedconsent prior to the experiment. Data from two parti-cipants (one female) were discarded because of tech-nical problems during data acquisition. As a result, thefinal sample consisted of 22 participants (11 females;age: M = 22.5 years, SD = 1.85 years).

Materials

We selected 170 Chinese words as stimulus material:5 mother words (ma, mother, mama, ama (“阿妈”,means mom), niang (“娘”, also means mom)), 5others words (she, her, herself, other (“他人” inChinese) and other (“别人” in Chinese)), 80 good(i.e., positive) and 80 bad (i.e., negative) attributes.Among the 160 attributes, 159 were selected from theChinese version of personal trait words provided byAnderson (1968), and one was selected from aChinese attribute list developed by a prior studyexamining implicit and explicit self-enhancement(Zhao, 2008). The reliability of these materials asexperimental stimuli has been confirmed by our pre-vious study (Wu et al., 2014).

The familiarity of the target category words wasmanipulated by means of three ways to ensure theresponses we observed were not due to material famil-iarity. First, all the characters in the task are frequentlyused in daily life (i.e., they are among the top 8% ofthe 12,041 characters in the “Combined characterfrequency list of Classical and Modern Chinese”, seethe link http://lingua.mtsu.edu/chinese-computing/statistics/char/list.php?Which=TO). Second, the fre-quency of mother words is not significantlydifferent from that of others words (8001 vs. 48034,t(4.115) = 2.36, p > .05) in the Chinese language,according to the word frequency Dictionary ofChinese characters and words (developed by theInternational R&D Center for Chinese Education,http://nlp.blcu.edu.cn). Third, to ensure that partici-pants were familiar with both the mother and otherswords before the formal experiment, we required themto achieve response accuracy higher than 85% in thepractice task, otherwise they would have to redo thepractice.

Procedure

We used the same paradigm in our previous study (Wuet al., 2014), that is, the Go/No-go Association Task(GNAT, Nosek & Banaji, 2001). This paradigm is suita-ble for examining the cognitive processes by creating

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contrasts between different experimental blocks.Specifically, we used two blocks to explore the processingof maternal stimuli (mother + good and mother + bad)and two other blocks to explore the processing of non-specific others (others + good and others + bad). Theevaluation ofmother or others was operationalized as theassociative strength of these stimuli with positive ornegative attributes in the GNATs. The contrast betweenmother blocks and others blocks allowed for examiningthe differences in visual perception and attention betweenmother and others, whereas the contrast between themother + good and mother + bad conditions allowedfor examining the evaluation of maternal information.

The order of four blocks was counterbalanced acrossparticipants. In each block, four identical types of sti-muli were presented randomly on the computer screenone by one. The participants were required to respondto one pair of stimuli (targets) but ignore the other pairof stimuli (distracters). The ratio of target to distractorwas 1:1 in each block. The four blocks differed in thesettings of targets and distracters. For instance, in themother + good block, participants needed to press thespace bar if a stimulus was a mother word or a goodword (e.g., mother or delight), but did nothing if astimulus was an others word or a bad word (e.g., heor bragging), whereas in the others + bad block, parti-cipants pressed the space bar if a stimulus was an othersword or a bad word, but did nothing if a stimulus was amother word or a good word. The response hand wascounterbalanced across participants. Before eachexperimental block, the participants got pilot trials tobe familiar with the instructions about targets and dis-tractors settings.

Each block included 320 trials. The stimulus pre-sented in each trial was selected from four types ofstimuli with equal probability. The five target categorywords (mother and others) were presented 16 timeseach. The attribute words (good and bad) were pre-sented without repetition. As a result, there were 160trials that presented target category words and theother 160 trials that presented attribute words.

Figure 1 illustrates an example trial of stimuluspresentation. Each trial began with a fixation (across “+”) on the center of the screen with a rando-mized duration between 500 and 1500 ms. Afterthat, the stimulus word was presented on the centerof the screen for 1000 ms, and the participants wererequired to press the space bar if the stimulus wordwas a target item. Finally, the second fixation wouldbe presented for 500 ms. Thereafter, a new trialstarted.

Behavioral dependent variables

The accuracy and response latency for the target cate-gory words under each condition were recorded.

EEG data recording and analysis

The continuous electroencephalogram (EEG) wasrecorded from 64 scalp sites using Ag/AgCl electro-des mounted in an elastic cap (NeuroScan Inc.,Herndon, VA, USA), with an online reference to theright mastoid and off-line algebraic re-reference to theaverage of left and right mastoids. The vertical

Figure 1. Illustration of the experimental procedure.

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electrooculogram (VEOG) and horizontal electroocu-logram (HEOG) were recorded from two pairs ofelectrodes, with one placed above and below the lefteye, and the other 10 mm from the outer canthi ofeach eye. All interelectrode impedances were main-tained below 5 kΩ. The EEG and EOG were ampli-fied using a 0.05–100 Hz bandpass and continuouslysampled at 500 Hz/channel.

During the off-line analysis, the EEG data weredigitally filtered with a 30 Hz low-pass filter. Ocularartifacts were removed from the filtered EEG datausing a regression procedure implemented in theNeuroscan software (Semlitsch, Anderer, Schuster,& Presslich, 1986). The onset of the stimuli was setas zero point, and the continuous EEG data wereepoched into periods of 1000 ms including a200 ms pre-stimulus baseline. Trials with artifactsdue to eye blinks, amplifier clipping, and burst ofelectromyographic (EMG) activity exceeding±100 μV were excluded from averaging. The meanpercentage of trials excluded from averaging acrossthe four blocks was less than 10% (M = 2.3%,SD = 3.9%). In addition, trials where a participanthad responded incorrectly were also excluded from

the final averaging. After that, the ERPs for cate-gory words (mother or others) with Go responsefrom the four blocks were averaged separately.Finally, two types of ERPs for each of the targetcategory words were obtained.

Three stages of ERPs were measured and analyzedto examine the visual perception, attention, and eva-luation of maternal information, respectively. First, toexamine the visual perception of maternal informa-tion, the peak amplitudes of two ERP components,including P100 (within 70–110 ms) and N170 (within130–180 ms), were assessed and analyzed. Second, toexamine the attentional processing of maternal infor-mation, the peak amplitudes of two ERP components,including P200 (within 140–210 ms) and N200(within 250–320 ms), were analyzed. Finally, toexamine the evaluation processing of maternal infor-mation, the mean amplitudes, and peak latencies ofP300 (within 350–500 ms) were measured,respectively.

According to visual inspection of grand-averagedwaveforms and their scalp distributions, P100 dis-tributed over left and right occipital area and N170distributed over left and right parietal-occipital area,

Figure 2. Grand averaged ERPs for target category words. The scalp topographies at peak latency for P100 and N170 of each condition arepresented beneath.

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but not over the midline area (Figure 2).Accordingly, the bilateral rather than midline elec-trodes were chosen to measure these two compo-nents. Peak amplitude of P100 was measured fromfour parieto-occipital and two occipital sites (PO7,PO5, O1, O2, PO6, and PO8). The means of the leftand right sites on the four conditions were com-puted, respectively. The mean values were thenentered into a three-way ANOVA (target category(mother vs. others) × attribute (good vs. bad) × hemi-sphere (left vs. right)). Similarly, peak amplitude ofN170 was measured from eight sites (P7, PO7, PO5,O1, O2, PO6, PO8, and P8) across the parieto-occi-pital area. The means of the left and right sites onfour conditions were computed, respectively. Themean values were then entered into a three-wayANOVA (target category (mother vs. others) × attri-bute (good vs. bad) × hemisphere (left vs. right)).

Because the distributions of P200, N200, andP300 overlapped the midline area (see Figures 3and 4 for the distribution of each component), theelectrode at which these three ERP componentsreached their maximums was detected along themidline sites (FZ, FCZ, CZ, CPZ, PZ, POZ, andOZ); thereafter, the electrode with maximum

amplitude and eight adjacent electrodes were mea-sured and were entered into a four-way ANOVA(target category × attribute × Anterior-Posterior × Laterality).

For all the analyses listed below, the significancelevel was set at 0.05. Greenhouse–Geisser correctionwas used to compensate for sphericity violations whenappropriate. Post hoc analyses were conducted toexplore the interaction effects. Partial eta-squared (η2P)was reported to demonstrate the effect size of significantresults in ANOVA tests, such that 0.05 represents asmall effect, 0.10 represents a medium effect, and 0.20represents a large effect (Cohen, 1973).

RESULTS

Behavioral results

We performed an ANOVA on each of the behavioralindex (accuracy and response latency) with the targetcategory (mother vs. others) and attribute (good vs.bad) as two within-subject factors, respectively.Regarding the accuracy, there was no significant dif-ference between conditions (mother + good:

Figure 3. Grand averaged ERPs for target category words. The scalp topographies at peak latency for P200 and N200 of each condition arepresented beneath.

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M = 98.75%, SD = 2.81%; mother + bad:M = 98.24%, SD = 3.93%; others + good:M = 98.07%, SD = 3.81%; others + bad:M = 98.92%, SD = 1.23%), all Fs < 2.34 and all ps> .14. Regarding the reaction time, participants madefaster response to mother words (M = 494 ms,SD = 43) than to others words (M = 518 ms,SD = 43), F(1, 21) = 12.73, p = .002, η2P = 0.38. Themain effect of attribute was significant, F(1, 21) = 7.25,p = .014, η2P = 0.26, with category words paired withgood attributes eliciting faster response (M = 499 ms,SD = 42) than words paired with bad attributes(M = 512 ms, SD = 43). The category × attributeinteraction effect was not significant, F(1, 21) = 0.77,p = .39, η2P = 0.04.

ERP results

P100

The peak amplitude of P100 was submitted into athree-way ANOVA. The main effect of target categorywas significant, F(1, 21) = 7.72, p = .01, η2P = 0.27, withmother words eliciting a larger P100 (M = 3.25 µV)than others words (M = 2.81 µV). Neither the maineffect of attribute nor the interaction effectbetween target category and attribute was significant,F(1, 21) = .001 and 0.59, p = .98 and .45, η2P < 0.01 andη2P = .03, respectively. An interaction effect of target

category × hemisphere was found, F(1, 21) = 5.02,p = .036, η2P = .19. Over the left hemisphere, motherelicited a larger P100 (M = 3.46 µV) than others words(M = 2.71 µV), F(1, 21) = 5.58, p = .005, η2P = .31,whereas over the right hemisphere, no significant dif-ference was found (mother: M = 3.04 µV vs. others:M = 2.91 µV), F(1, 21) = 0.49, p = .49, η2P = .02.

N170

The peak amplitude of N170 was submitted into athree-way ANOVA. Neither the main effect of targetcategory nor that of attribute was significant, F(1, 21) =0.04 and 0.013, p = .85 and .91, η2P = .002 and .001,respectively. The interaction between target categoryand attribute was not significant, either, F(1, 21) = 0.92,p = 0.35, η2P = .04. A target category × hemisphereinteraction effect was found, F(1, 21) = 44.24, p < .001,η2P = .68. Over the left hemisphere, mother elicited alarger N170 (M = −7.03 µV) than others words (M =−6.12 µV), F(1, 21) = 7.13, p = .014, η2P = .26, whereasover the right hemisphere, others words elicited alarger N170 (M = −4.86 µV) than mother words(M = −4.07 µV), F(1, 21) = 5.97, p = .023, η2P = .22.

P200

The analysis of the peak amplitude across the mid-line revealed that P200 was the largest at electrodeFCZ (9.89 µV). Accordingly, this electrode and eight

Figure 4. Grand averaged ERPs for target category words. The light gray shaded areas indicate the time window for the detection of the P300component. The scalp topographies within 350–500 ms for P300 of each condition are presented beneath.

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adjacent electrodes (F1, FZ, F2, FC1, FC2, C1, CZ,and C2) were chosen for further analysis.

The peak amplitudes of P200 from these electrodeswere entered into a four-way ANOVA (target category(mother vs. others) × attribute (good vs. bad) × Anterior-Posterior (F vs. FC vs. C) × Laterality (left vs. midlinevs. right)).

The analysis of peak amplitude showed that the maineffect of target category was significant, F(1, 21) = 54.31,p < .001, η2P = 0.72, with mother words eliciting a largerP200 (M = 9.41 µV) than others words (M = 7.28 µV)(see Figure 3). Neither the main effect of attribute nor theinteraction between target category and attribute wassignificant, F(1, 21) = 0.81 and 0.64, p = .38 and .44,η2P = .04 and .03, respectively.

N200

The analysis of the peak amplitude across the mid-line revealed that N200 was the largest at electrodeFCZ (−1.89 µV). Accordingly, this electrode and eightadjacent electrodes (F1, FZ, F2, FC1, FC2, C1, CZ,and C2) were chosen for further analysis.

The peak amplitudes of N200 from these electrodeswere entered into a four-way ANOVA (target category(mother vs. others) × attribute (good vs. bad) × Anterior-Posterior (F vs. FC vs. C) × Laterality (left vs. midlinevs. right)).

The main effect of target category was significant,F(1, 21) = 5.79, p = .025, η2P = 0.22, with others wordseliciting a larger N200 (M = −1.43 µV) than motherwords (M = −0.49 µV) (see Figure 3). Neither themain effect of attribute nor the interaction effectbetween target category and attribute was significant,F(1, 21) = 3.35 and 0.53, p = .081 and 0.47, η2P = 0.14and 0.03, respectively.

P300

The analysis of the peak amplitude across the mid-line revealed that P300 was the largest at electrodeCPZ (13.64 µV). Accordingly, this electrode and eightadjacent electrodes (C1, CZ, C2, CP1, CP2, P1, PZ,and P2) were chosen for further analysis.

The mean amplitudes and peak latencies of P300were entered into a four-way ANOVA (target category(mother vs. others) × attribute (good vs.bad) × Anterior-Posterior (C vs. CP vs.P) × Laterality (left vs. midline vs. right)).

Regarding the mean amplitude, the main effect oftarget category was significant, F(1, 21) = 9.27,p = .006, η2P = .31, with mother words eliciting alarger P300 (M = 10.18 µV) than others words

(M = 8.78 µV). The main effect of attribute was notsignificant, F(1, 21) = 0.20, p = .66, η2P = .009.Interaction between target category and attribute wasnot significant, either, F(1, 21) = 1.16,p = .29, η2P = .052.

Regarding the P300 latency, neither the main effectof target category nor the main effect of attribute wassignificant, F(1, 21) = 2.10 and 2.35, p = .16 and .14,η2P = .09 and .10, respectively. As expected, the inter-action between target category and attribute was sig-nificant, F(1, 21) = 21.74, p < .001, η2P = .51. Test ofsimple effects indicated that the P300 latency in themother + bad condition (M = 482 ms) was longerthan that in the mother + good condition (M = 443ms), F(1, 21) = 14.21, p = .001, η2P = .35. By contrast,no significant difference was found in the P300latency between others + bad (M = 467 ms) andothers + good conditions (M = 479 ms), F(1, 21) =1.46, p = .24, η2P = .065.

DISCUSSION

The present study is an extension of our previousstudy (Wu et al., 2014), which examined howattachment affects maternal information processingby controlling the potential confounders (e.g., the“women are wonderful” effect and stimuli familiar-ity). The behavioral results showed that participantsmade faster responses to mother words than toothers words, reflecting stronger motivational sal-ience of maternal information. The ERP resultsprovided more information concerning the underly-ing process of this response bias. First, maternalinformation was differentiated from others informa-tion during the visual perceptual stage, reflected byenhanced P100 and N170 over the left hemisphere.Second, maternal information gained more atten-tional resources during the attentional and evalua-tive processing stages, reflected by enhanced P200and P300. Finally, using the P300 latency as anindex, we found a significant target category × attri-bute interaction. Tests of simple effects indicatedthat mother elicited a quicker P300 in themother + good condition than in the mother + badcondition, whereas there was no difference in otherswords across the two others conditions. This resultsuggests that maternal information received positiveevaluation compared to others information. Overall,these findings confirm our anticipation that partici-pants would pay more attentional resources tomaternal information and would evaluate maternalinformation positively. This point of view was

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consistent with the conclusion of our previous study(Wu et al., 2014). Furthermore, after strictly con-trolling stimulus material and eliminating the“women are wonderful” effect, the present studyextends the previous study by illustrating that parti-cipants differentiated maternal information fromothers at as early as the visual perception stage,indicating that attachment exerts its effects on infor-mation processing earlier than the common idea ofprevious literature (see Wu et al., 2014).

Mother is important for the survival of humanbeings across different developmental stages(Doherty & Feeney, 2004; Hofer, 1994; Steeger &Gondoli, 2013; Yap et al., 2011) and its significancecould be recognized at very early stages of humanlife (Bushneil, Sai, & Mullin, 1989; Field, Cohen,Garcia, & Greenberg, 1984; Walton, Bower, &Bower, 1992). For every individual, mother is apotent stimulus, which shapes the approach/avoid-ance system that guides individuals to navigatethemselves in the unpredictable world (Tottenhamet al., 2012). Previous studies suggest that, com-pared to others, mother-relevant informationreceives more attention and deeper processing dur-ing information processing (Arsalidou et al., 2010;de Haan & Nelson, 1997). To our knowledge, how-ever, these research have not yet illustrated at whichstage of information processing the maternal infor-mation receive deeper processing. Our previousstudy showed that the influence of maternal infor-mation manifests in both attention allocation andevaluation stages (Wu et al., 2014). The presentstudy extends this previous finding by showingthat compared to others words, mother words eli-cited larger P100 and N170 over the left hemi-sphere. The left lateralized P100 and N170distributions were consistent with the results ofprevious studies, which used written material(Rossion et al., 2003). We suggest the enhancedP100 and N170 indicated that mother wordsreceived deeper processing than others during thevisual perception stage due to the motivational sal-ience of maternal information. This interpretation isconsistent with previous studies on affective infor-mation processing, which have found that the infor-mation essential to human survival receive deeperprocessing during the visual perception stage (e.g.,Li et al., 2007; Pizzagalli et al., 2002; Pourtoiset al., 2004; Smith et al., 2003).

After the initial stage of visual perception,mother words attracted more attentional resourcesthan others words during the attention allocationand evaluation stage, reflected by larger P200 andP300. These findings were consistent with our

previous study (Wu et al., 2014), suggesting thatmaternal information was of higher motivationalsignificance. As a result, participants allocatedmore attentional resources to this kind of stimulus.Additionally, the attentional bias we observed wasconsistent with the results of previous studies wherestimulus salience was operationalized as a functionof the degree of self-relevance (Berlad & Pratt,1995; Chen, Zhang, Zhong, Hu, & Li, 2013;Miyakoshi, Nomura, & Ohira, 2007; Ninomiya,Onitsuka, Chen, Sato, & Tashiro, 1998;Tacikowski & Nowicka, 2010).

The evaluative processing of mother constructed anassociation between mother words and evaluative attri-butes. The behavioral indices showed a main effect ofattribute, such that participants responded faster tomother or others paired with good attributes than thosepaired with bad attributes. It is worth noting that theseresults did not suggest that participants tended to evalu-ate both mother and others positively. Although theinteraction between target category and attribute wasnot significant, a direct comparison of the reaction timebetween the mother + good condition (485 ms) and themother + bad condition (502 ms) showed a significantdifference (t(21) = −2.25, p = .036), which was not thecase when comparing others + good (522 ms) withothers + bad (513 ms) (t(21) = −1.61, p = .12).Moreover, the P300 latency was modulated by the inter-action between target category and attribute; it wasshorter in the mother + good condition than in themother + bad condition, suggesting a violation of inher-ent attitude. This result was consistent with our previousfinding (Wu et al., 2014) as well as previous research onother social targets, such as out-group members (e.g.,Bartholow et al., 2006; Henry et al., 2010). In contrast,there was no attribute effect in the others conditions,which was also consistent with our previous finding (Wuet al., 2014). Thus, according to both behavioral andERP data, we suggest that the positivity in evaluation isspecific formother and could not be generalized to otherpeople.

In general, both the present study and our previousresearch (Wu et al., 2014) confirmed the priority ofthe processing of maternal information. Nevertheless,it should be pointed out that there were three incon-sistencies in the experimental findings between thetwo studies. First, in our previous study (Wu et al.,2014), we did not observe difference in visual percep-tual process during the presentation of P100 andN170, whereas in the present study mother wordselicited larger P100 and N170 than others words.Second, in our previous study, mother words eliciteda larger N200 than others words, whereas the reversewas true in the present study. The third inconsistency

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was about the P300 component. We used both P300amplitude and P300 latency as indices of the evalua-tion of mother/others. In our previous study, an inter-action between target category and attributemodulated both the P300 amplitude and the P300latency (Wu et al., 2014). That is, the pairing ofmother and negative attributes resulted in enhancedP300 amplitude and slower P300 latency. In the pre-sent study, the P300 latency result confirmed ourhypothesis about the positive nature of maternal infor-mation, and it was also consistent with our previousconclusion (Wu et al., 2014). However, the P300amplitude failed to replicate our previous finding. Asthe only difference between the previous and presentstudy was the others stimuli, it is reasonable to con-sider whether this difference accounted for the threeinconsistencies listed above.

In our previous study, the mother and others wordswere distinct in terms of the gender information theyconveyed (mother was feminine and others weremainly masculine) (see Wu et al., 2014), while themother and others words used in the present studywere comparable regarding this dimension (otherswere mainly feminine). Previous study has shownthat the gender information manifests after the visualperception process, and the N200 amplitude is sensi-tive to gender information, with female stimuli elicit-ing a larger N200 than male stimuli (Ito & Urland,2003). According to this finding, it is possible that inour previous study, the participants might have cate-gorized the stimuli words based on gender informa-tion. Because the visual perceptual process was notaffected by the gender information, P100 and N170were not modulated. The gender information modu-lated the N200 amplitude, with mother words elicitinga larger N200 than masculine others words.Therefore, we suggest that the N200 results in ourprevious study might have been contaminated by thegender information conveyed by the others words(Wu et al., 2014), while those in the current studywere closer to our main interest.

Regarding the P300 component, in our previousstudy, due to the distinction of gender informationconveyed by mother and others words, the pairingof mother with bad attributes contradicted two impli-cit beliefs: mother is good and female is good in themother + bad condition. By contrast, in the presentstudy, the pairing of mother with bad attributes onlycontradicted the belief that mother is good. As aresult, participants in our previous study may haveencountered a stronger inconsistency in themother + bad condition compared to themother + good condition than those in the presentstudy, thus leading to a larger difference in P300

between the two conditions. An alternative interpreta-tion lies in the individual differences in the processingof maternal information. That is, the tendency oflinking maternal information with positive attributesmanifested as deeper processing of the mother + goodcondition (indexed by a larger P300 amplitude)among some individuals, while the same tendencymanifested as higher speed of processing of thesame condition (indexed by shorter P300 latency)among others. The personality construct underlyingthis trade-off is unknown, but we suggest the levelof attachment to one’s mother might play a crucialrole in this trade-off. We admit the above-mentionedinterpretations are highly speculative; therefore, afurther study investigating whether situational factorsand/or different types of individual variables affectparticipant’s responses to maternal stimuli would behelpful to account for the inconsistency between twostudies.

Previous studies have shown that mother and self-share the same area in the brain (Ray et al., 2010),especially for Chinese people (Zhu, Zhang, Fan, &Han, 2007). Thus, one might suggest that the maternaleffect observed in this study can be explained by theself-relevant effect. Regarding the experimentalmanipulation, there was not a self-condition for com-paring with the mother condition in the present study.Therefore a conclusion could not be drawn here.Previous ERP studies focusing on self-relevant effecthave revealed that P200 (Hu et al., 2011; Mu & Han,2010; Tacikowski, Cygan, & Nowicka, 2014), N250(Tacikowski et al., 2014; Zhao et al., 2009), and P300(Berlad & Pratt, 1995; Fan et al., 2011; Gray,Ambady, Lowenthal, & Deldin, 2004; Ninomiyaet al., 1998; Tacikowski & Nowicka, 2010; Zhuet al., 2007), but not early components during thevisual perception stage, are sensitive to self-relatedprocessing. Accordingly, we suggest that even thoughthe self-related effect was involved, it could onlyaccount for a part of the present findings, but not theP100 and N170 results.

Another significant limitation of the present studywas that we only used maternal information to exam-ine attachment-relevant information processing.Therefore, we do not know whether our findings areunique to the mother or could be generalized to otherattachment figures, such as the father, peers, or roman-tic partners. According to the evolutionary models ofthe attachment bond formation in humans, differentkinds of attachment (such as parental attachment andromantic attachment) shared similar underlyingmechanisms (Belsky, 1997; Carter et al., 2005). Thisidea has been confirmed by a recent study (Weisman,Feldman, & Goldstein, 2012). Accordingly, it is

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possible that the processing of other types of attach-ment-relevant information involves similar cognitiveand affective components with the processing ofmaternal stimuli. Future studies are awaited to clarifythis issue.

In conclusion, the present study shows that mater-nal information is differentiated from non-specificothers in visual perception, attention allocation, andstimuli evaluation. The characteristics of maternalinformation manifest in sequential stages of informa-tion processing, the temporal course of which wasevident in our ERP data. Our findings indicated thatattachment has both instantaneous and tenaciouseffects on information processing, which result incomplicated physiological, emotional, and behavioralconsequences.

Original manuscript received 14 January 2015Revised manuscript accepted 14 July 2015

First published online 11 August 2015

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