Attachment and the Processing of Social Information Across the Life Span: Theory and Evidence

Abstract

Researchers have used J. Bowlby's (1969/1982, 1973, 1980, 1988) attachment theory frequently as a basis for examining whether experiences in close personal relationships relate to the processing of social information across childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. We present an integrative life-span-encompassing theoretical model to explain the patterns of results that have emerged from these studies. The central proposition is that individuals who possess secure experience-based internal working models of attachment will process--in a relatively open manner--a broad range of positive and negative attachment-relevant social information. Moreover, secure individuals will draw on their positive attachment-related knowledge to process this information in a positively biased schematic way. In contrast, individuals who possess insecure internal working models of attachment will process attachment-relevant social information in one of two ways, depending on whether the information could cause the individual psychological pain. If processing the information is likely to lead to psychological pain, insecure individuals will defensively exclude this information from further processing. If, however, the information is unlikely to lead to psychological pain, then insecure individuals will process this information in a negatively biased schematic fashion that is congruent with their negative attachment-related experiences. In a comprehensive literature review, we describe studies that illustrate these patterns of attachment-related information processing from childhood to adulthood. This review focuses on studies that have examined specific components (e.g., attention and memory) and broader aspects (e.g., attributions) of social information processing. We also provide general conclusions and suggestions for future research.

Full text

Attachment and the Processing of Social Information Across the Life Span:
Theory and Evidence
Matthew J. Dykas
State University of New York at Oswego Jude Cassidy
University of Maryland
Researchers have used J. Bowlby’s (1969/1982, 1973, 1980, 1988) attachment theory frequently as a
basis for examining whether experiences in close personal relationships relate to the processing of social
information across childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. We present an integrative life-span–
encompassing theoretical model to explain the patterns of results that have emerged from these studies.
The central proposition is that individuals who possess secure experience-based internal working models
of attachment will process—in a relatively open manner—a broad range of positive and negative
attachment-relevant social information. Moreover, secure individuals will draw on their positive
attachment-related knowledge to process this information in a positively biased schematic way. In
contrast, individuals who possess insecure internal working models of attachment will process
attachment-relevant social information in one of two ways, depending on whether the information could
cause the individual psychological pain. If processing the information is likely to lead to psychological
pain, insecure individuals will defensively exclude this information from further processing. If, however,
the information is unlikely to lead to psychological pain, then insecure individuals will process this
information in a negatively biased schematic fashion that is congruent with their negative attachment-
related experiences. In a comprehensive literature review, we describe studies that illustrate these patterns
of attachment-related information processing from childhood to adulthood. This review focuses on
studies that have examined specific components (e.g., attention and memory) and broader aspects (e.g.,
attributions) of social information processing. We also provide general conclusions and suggestions for
future research.
Keywords: attachment, attachment styles, information processing, social cognition, Adult Attachment
Interview
Decades of research have shown that across the life span,
individuals differ in how they process information in their social
environments. Social information related to parents, peers, and
romantic partners, for example, is often processed with varying
degrees of accuracy, objectivity, and positivity. These and other
variations in social information processing are considered to play
a significant role in development because they affect individuals’
social and emotional adaptation across the life span (Bowlby,
1973; Dodge & Pettit, 2003; Fletcher, Overall, & Friesen, 2006;
Gifford-Smith & Rabiner, 2004; Sacco & Vaughan, 2006). Thus,
researchers have sought to identify the factors associated with
individual differences in social information processing (see Dodge
& Pettit, 2003, for a review), and emerging theory and data lend
considerable support to the notion that an important source of these
differences is individuals’ experiences in close personal relation-
ships.
One perspective that continues to receive considerable attention
from psychologists interested in understanding the emergence of
individual differences in social information processing is attach-
ment theory (Bowlby, 1969/1982, 1973, 1980, 1988; see also
Cassidy & Shaver, 1999, 2008). This attention stems from one of
the theory’s principal notions—that social information processing
patterns are lawful and emerge directly from the ways in which
individuals have mentally internalized their experiences within
close relationships. In this regard, John Bowlby (1973), the orig-
inator of attachment theory, advocated for the particular impor-
tance of attachment experiences (e.g., experiences of children with
their principal caregivers). He theorized that humans have evolved
to develop experience-based mental representations (internal
working models) of attachment relationships and that such models
function to assist individuals in gathering and interpreting infor-
mation related to an array of social agents (such as parents, peers,
and romantic partners). Yet, because the internal working models
forged from attachment experiences can be either qualitatively
favorable or qualitatively unfavorable (i.e., secure or insecure), the
functions performed by these models can ultimately lead to either
adaptive or maladaptive social information processing patterns.
Thus, by knowing the quality of individuals’ internal working
models of attachment, theoretical predictions and explanations can
be made about how individuals will process a wide array of social
information.
The literature on attachment and social information processing
has grown considerably since Bowlby (1969/1982, 1973, 1980,
1988) first formulated his theory. During the past few decades,
Matthew J. Dykas, Department of Psychology, State University of New
York at Oswego; Jude Cassidy, Department of Psychology, University of
Maryland.
We thank Brittany Riesbeck for assisting us while writing this article.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Matthew
J. Dykas, Department of Psychology, State University of New York at
Oswego, Oswego, NY 13126. E-mail: matt.dykas@oswego.edu
Psychological Bulletin © 2011 American Psychological Association
2011, Vol. 137, No. 1, 19– 46 0033-2909/11/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0021367
19

contemporary attachment theorists have advanced Bowlby’s con-
ceptualization of the internal working model construct and have
shown that such conceptualizations are consistent with current
theory and research in cognitive neuroscience (such as that related
to mirror neuron systems; see Bretherton & Munholland, 2008).
Investigators have also collected much empirical evidence chron-
icling internal working model processes in regard to attachment-
relevant social information processing. Interestingly, however,
these empirical advances have added substantial complexity to
existing theory and have even provided some conceptual chal-
lenges along the way. For example, in the child, adolescent, and
adult literatures, insecure attachment has been linked to poorer
memory for attachment-relevant social information in some stud-
ies but to enhanced memory in others. Secure attachment, in
contrast, has been linked to the processing of a wide array of
attachment-relevant social information, regardless of whether it
has a positive or a negative valence. These and other intriguing
data patterns enhance the richness of the attachment literature and
are notable given some researchers’ claims (e.g., Hinde, 1988;
Rutter, 1995) that the internal working model construct has been
too broadly conceptualized and has lacked empirical support.
Our aim is to review and integrate into a theoretical and life-
span–encompassing model the many important conceptual and
empirical advances in the study of attachment-relevant social in-
formation processing. We begin by discussing the form and func-
tion of internal working models of attachment and then present
Bowlby’s (1969/1982, 1973, 1980, 1988) thinking about two ways
in which individual differences in the processing of attachment-
relevant social information can be understood: (a) as reflections of
strategies for avoiding potential psychological pain or (b) as indi-
cators of experience-based, schema-driven processing. After pre-
senting this theoretical background, we review the empirical liter-
ature examining relations between attachment and social
information processing in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood.
Next, we describe research on the intergenerational connections
between attachment and information processing in children and
their parents. We end with general conclusions based on our
review of the literature, propositions adding greater specificity to
previous theorizing, and suggestions for future research.
Attachment and Social Information Processing:
A Theoretical Perspective
The Core Concept of Internal Working Models
According to attachment theory, infants are biologically predis-
posed to form attachments to available adult caregivers (i.e., par-
ents and other principal biologically and nonbiologically related
caregivers). These attachments form because infants see their adult
caregivers as safe havens who demonstrate—typically on a re-
peated daily basis—an investment in the infant’s survival by
protecting the infant (e.g., by ameliorating a fearful situation for
the infant or by soothing the infant when ill or in pain; Bowlby,
1969/1982; see also Goldberg, Grusec, & Jenkins, 1999). Attach-
ments are also characterized by the tendency of infants to use their
caregivers as secure bases from which they can confidently ex-
plore their environments during normal day-to-day activities
(Bowlby, 1969/1982; Goldberg et al., 1999; E. Waters & Cum-
mings, 2000). Access to a secure base is developmentally signif-
icant because one of the infant’s core developmental tasks involves
mastering the environment (see K. E. Grossmann, Grossmann, &
Zimmermann, 1999; see also Sorce & Emde, 1981, for experimen-
tal evidence that a parental secure base enhances exploration).
Through repeated daily experiences with attachment figures,
infants (between the ages of 6 and 9 months) begin to acquire
event-based information of their attachment figures’ tendencies to
be available, responsive, and sensitive to the infant’s needs for
contact and desire for exploration (see Ainsworth, Bell, & Stayton,
1971; Bowlby, 1973; Marvin & Britner, 2008; see also Stern,
1985). Bowlby drew on the work of Young (1964) and theorized
that this knowledge likely emerged through the formation of
mental structures representing the realistic reproduction, or “men-
tal simulation,” of previous interactions with attachment figures
(see Bretherton & Munholland, 1999, 2008). Bretherton (1985,
1991) later proposed that this knowledge likely constitutes cogni-
tive structures called scripts (which H. S. Waters and her col-
leagues labeled secure base scripts; H. S. Waters & Waters, 2006;
H. S. Waters, Rodrigues, & Ridgeway, 1998; see also Fivush,
2006; Nelson & Gruendel, 1986; Schank & Abelson, 1977; Stern,
1985). These scripts are considered to provide infants with a
causal–temporal prototype of the ways in which attachment-
related events typically unfold (e.g., “when I am hurt, I go to my
mother and get comfort”).
According to Bretherton (1991), secure base scripts can be
viewed as the building blocks of the emergent experience-based
mental structures that Bowlby (1973) called internal working
models of attachment, a term he adopted from Craik (1943; see
Bretherton & Munholland, 1999, 2008, for a discussion of Bowl-
by’s choice of this term). Bowlby (1973, 1980) believed that these
models are quite stable and become increasingly resistant to
change over time, which allows individuals to habituate to their
social worlds (see also Main, Kaplan, & Cassidy, 1985). (Indeed,
if these models were to change easily, individuals would develop
muddled and confused understandings of their social worlds—
which would cause severe anxiety and psychological suffering—
and the load on cognitive functioning would be overwhelming; see
Bretherton & Munholland, 1999, 2008). Thus, for example, indi-
viduals who possess internal working models of their parents as
secure bases and safe havens will be inclined to retain those
models even when their parents sometimes fail to perform effec-
tively in such roles (see Bretherton & Munholland, 2008). The
notion that infants develop stable internal working models and that
the contents of these models vary as a function of real-life events
is supported by considerable data (for reviews, see Belsky &
Fearon, 2008; De Wolff & van IJzendoorn, 1997).
According to Bretherton and Munholland (1999, 2008), the idea
that individuals possess internal working models of attachment
meshes with broader research in cognitive neuroscience and social
cognition. For example, Bowlby’s (1969/1982) early idea that
mental “small-scale experiments” (p. 81) constitute internal work-
ing models of attachment is supported by Gallese’s (2005) more
current proposition that premotor mirror neurons enable primates
to understand others’ actions through “embodied simulation” (see
Bretherton & Munholland, 2008, for a detailed analysis of the
physiological underpinning of the internal working model con-
struct). These theorists also have pointed out that the internal
working model construct is, in general, consistent with both clas-
sical and contemporary theories of social cognition stating that
20 DYKAS AND CASSIDY

individuals develop internal representations of social experience;
these theories include those proposed by Mead (1934; i.e., that
individuals understand themselves and their worlds through their
experiences of how others respond to their social bids), Lewin
(1933; i.e., that people understand their environments subjectively
through the personal meaning they derive from the ways in which
their behaviors are elicited and responded to by environmental
agents; see also Heider, 1958), and Baldwin (1995; i.e., that people
develop interpersonal cognitive scripts of their transactional expe-
riences with other persons; see also Dweck & London, 2004,
Nelson & Gruendel, 1986, Schank & Abelson, 1977). Overall, the
notion that internal working models develop and vary as a function
of real-life attachment-related experiences is central to attachment
theory and distinguishes it from other perspectives suggesting that
infants mentally internalize their experiences with caregivers
through other nonexperiential processes (e.g., unconscious fanta-
sies; Freud, 1909/1999; Klein, 1932).
In developmental research, the knowledge contained in infants’
internal working models of attachment is most frequently inferred
from observations during the 20-min laboratory Strange Situation
procedure in which infants undergo a series of separation and
reunion episodes with their attachment figure (Ainsworth, Blehar,
Waters, & Wall, 1978). As Main et al. (1985) proposed, infant
behavior, principally during the reunions, likely reflects the in-
fant’s working model of attachment. Secure infants, for example,
use their parent as both a safe haven and a secure base during the
Strange Situation; they seek proximity to or interaction with their
parents when stressed and/or frightened, derive comfort from such
interaction, and reengage in exploration once they have been
comforted. This behavior reflects internal working models of their
parents as available, responsive, and sensitive to their attachment
and exploratory needs (Ainsworth et al., 1978). In contrast, the
behavior of insecure-avoidant infants who fail to seek proximity or
interaction on reunion reflects an internal working model of their
parents as consistently failing to provide a safe haven in times of
need. The inability of insecure-resistant infants to derive comfort
from their parents and to reengage successfully in exploration
reflects an internal working model of their parents as unpredictable
caregivers who should be kept nearby in order to increase the
likelihood of gaining access to those attachment figures if needed
(Cassidy & Berlin, 1994; Main, 1990). Unlike the secure and
insecure children described above who appear to have an orga-
nized behavioral strategy for managing their attachment relation-
ships (Main, 1990), some children appear to lack such a strategy
and are classified as insecure-disorganized. These children engage
in anomalous behavioral movements and postures, exhibit sequen-
tial or simultaneous displays of contradictory attachment behavior
(e.g., strong avoidance coupled with strong proximity seeking),
and/or show subtle and/or overt signs of being frightened by the
parent (see Main & Solomon, 1986, 1990). Insecure-disorganized
infants likely possess an internal working model of their parent as
a source of danger, which leads them to behave in a frightened
and/or disoriented manner (Hesse & Main, 2006; Main & Hesse,
1990).
The secure and insecure classifications assigned to children in
the Strange Situation have been linked repeatedly to the quality of
infants’ secure base and safe haven behaviors exhibited in the
home (Ainsworth et al., 1978), as well as to the quality of parental
caregiving received in the home context (e.g., parents of secure
infants show more sensitivity to their infants than do parents of
insecure infants; see Belsky & Fearon, 2008; DeWolff & van
IJzendoorn, 1997; & Lyons-Ruth & Jacobvitz, 2008, for reviews);
meta-analytic data also indicate that frightening maternal behavior
is a principal contributor to infant disorganized (vs. organized)
attachment (see Madigan et al., 2006). Although the Strange Sit-
uation is the predominant measure of attachment in infancy, other
related laboratory measures of attachment in young children have
been devised by Cassidy, Marvin, and the MacArthur Attachment
Working Group (1992) and by Main and Cassidy (1988; see also
E. Waters and Deane, 1985, for the Attachment Q-Sort). More-
over, for measures that provide windows into children’s represen-
tations of parent-related and/or dyadic child–parent-related knowl-
edge, see Klagsbrun and Bowlby (1976; see also Kaplan, 1987,
and Slough & Greenberg, 1990) for the Separation Anxiety Test
and Bretherton, Ridgeway, and Cassidy (1990) for the Attachment
Story Completion Task (Solomon & George, 2008, review these
well-validated measures).
The quality of adolescents’ and adults’ internal working models
of attachment is most often assessed with the Adult Attachment
Interview (AAI; George, Kaplan, & Main, 1984, 1985, 1996) and
the self-report Experiences in Close Relationships inventory
(ECR; Brennan, Clark, & Shaver, 1998). These two measures are
stable (see Bakermans-Kranenburg & van IJzendoorn, 1993, and
Lopez & Gormley, 2002, for test–retest reliability data) and have
overall excellent psychometric properties (especially with regard
to discriminant validity; see Hesse, 2008, and Shaver & Miku-
lincer, 2004, for a review of the validity of these measures). Both
measures are also thought to tap into the quality of individuals’
internal working models of attachment. Although the construct
validity of each measure is strong, much data indicate that these
two measures are statistically unrelated and essentially may assess
different aspects of working models (see Roisman et al., 2007, for
meta-analytic data; see also Roisman, 2009).
The AAI, for example, was designed by developmental psychol-
ogists to tap an individual’s current “state of mind with respect to
attachment” (Hesse, 2008, p. 554) by asking interviewees to pro-
vide both general descriptions of their childhood relationships with
their parents and specific memories in support of such descrip-
tions. Individuals are also asked about attachment-related experi-
ences during childhood, such as memories of being upset, ill, or
hurt, and memories of separation, rejection, and loss (see Hesse,
1999, 2008, and Main, Hesse, & Goldwyn, 2008, for detailed
descriptions of the AAI; see Hesse, 2008, for validity data). Using
Main, Goldwyn, and Hesse’s (2008) classification system, coders
rate each transcribed interview on a series of 9-point scales that
reflect the inferred quality of the individual’s childhood experi-
ences (e.g., having received loving parenting behavior) and the
individual’s current state of mind with respect to attachment (e.g.,
coherence of mind). On the basis of an integrated consideration of
both the inferred experience and state of mind scores, coders
assign one of four principal attachments classifications to the
transcript (see Hesse, 2008; see also Bakermans-Kranenburg &
van IJzendoorn, 2009, for information about the distribution of
these classifications across various samples). Individuals classified
as secure-autonomous describe childhood experiences coherently,
value attachment relationships, and consider attachment experi-
ences as important to personal development. Individuals classified
as insecure-dismissing either deny the impact that negative child-
21
ATTACHMENT AND INFORMATION PROCESSING

hood experiences have on personal development or present a
global portrait of a positive past while failing to provide specific
supporting details. Individuals classified as insecure-preoccupied
demonstrate an excessive, confused and/or passive, and unobjec-
tive (e.g., angry) preoccupation with attachment relationships
and/or experiences. Individuals can also be classified as insecure-
unresolved if they show lapses in the monitoring of reasoning or
discourse when discussing loss or trauma, but this classification
rarely has been included in studies examining attachment-relevant
social information processing. In some investigations, researchers
have used a coding system based on the Main, Goldwyn, and
Hesse (2008) classification system (i.e., Kobak’s, 1993, Attach-
ment Interview Q-Sort) to code AAI transcripts on secure–insecure
and dismissing–preoccupied dimensions.
The focus on the linguistic analysis of the coherence of the
interview discourse is the hallmark feature of the AAI coding
system and sets the AAI apart from methodologies aimed at
assessing retrospective memories of personal experience. More-
over, the AAI is considered a principal measure in attachment
research for two main reasons. First, the AAI has a striking
association with parental caregiving behavior (meta-analytic data
indicate a .72 effect size of the link between maternal AAI security
to sensitive caregiving; van IJzendoorn, 1995). Parents’ AAI clas-
sifications are also concordant with infants’ Strange Situation
classifications (i.e., secure-autonomous, insecure-dismissing, and
insecure-preoccupied parents typically have infants classified as
secure, insecure-avoidant, and insecure-resistant, respectively;
meta-analytic data indicate a 75% concordance, [d⫽1.06 effect
size] between mothers’ AAI security–insecurity classification and
infant Strange Situation security–insecurity classification; van
IJzendoorn, 1995). (Note that whereas the AAI is used with
adolescents and adults, Target, Fonagy, Shmueli-Goetz, Datta, &
Schneider, 1999, have recently developed a similar measure that
assesses AAI-related representational processes during late child-
hood, i.e., the Child Attachment Interview; for validity data, see
Shmueli-Goetz, Target, Fonagy, & Datta, 2008).
In contrast to the AAI, the ECR is a self-report measure of
adolescents’ and adults’ attachment styles, or the stylistic
attachment-related expectations, emotions, and behaviors that in-
dividuals exhibit in the context of close adult romantic relation-
ships (see Mikulincer & Shaver, 2007a, and Crowell, Fraley, &
Shaver, 2008, for reviews and validity data; for a similar mea-
sure—the Adult Attachment Questionnaire, —see Simpson,
Rholes, & Phillips, 1996). The ECR draws on two attachment-
related dimensions—attachment avoidance and attachment anxi-
ety. Attachment avoidance refers to an unwillingness to go to close
others for comfort and support, and attachment anxiety, in contrast,
refers to the fear of losing others or being abandoned by them.
Individuals who display a secure attachment style have relatively
little attachment-related anxiety or avoidance. Some attachment
theorists believe that individuals’ attachment styles may emerge
from their childhood attachment experiences, and research has
shown that adults with insecure attachment styles, compared with
those with secure attachment styles, provide more negative retro-
spective reports of their childhood attachment relationships (see
Mikulincer & Shaver, 2007a, for a review). Some commonly used
attachment style measures use attachment anxiety- and avoidance-
related scales to derive attachment categories (e.g., Bartholomew
& Horowitz, 1991; Hazan & Shaver, 1987, 1990; see also Griffin
& Bartholomew, 1994; see Crowell et al., 2008, for information
about the validity of these measures). For example, Hazan and
Shaver’s measure yields three attachment groups (secure,
avoidant, and ambivalent-anxious/resistant), and Bartholomew and
Horowitz’s Relationship Questionnaire adds a fourth (fearful). It is
again important to note that although these attachment style clas-
sifications appear similar to AAI classifications, meta-analytic data
indicate that there is trivial to small overlap between these mea-
sures (i.e., between AAI security–insecurity and self-reported se-
curity, between AAI dismissing state of mind and self-reported
avoidance, between AAI preoccupied state of mind and self-
reported anxiety/ambivalence, and between the AAI unresolved
classification and self-reported fearfulness; see Roisman et al.,
2007).
Finally, social psychologists have recently devised innovative
methodologies to prime adults’ attachment security using supra-
liminal and/or subliminal priming techniques (see Mikulincer &
Shaver, 2007c; Shaver & Mikulincer, 2002). These methodologies
differ from interview and self-report measures of attachment in
that they do not tap the quality of adults’ dispositional internal
working models of attachment. Instead, adults are exposed to a
priming stimulus (e.g., positive attachment-related words) and
such words are expected to activate (to some extent) the positive
attachment-related knowledge contained in internal working mod-
els of attachment. The activation of this knowledge is thought to
implicitly promote security within the individual temporarily.
A Model of Attachment and Social
Information Processing
At their core, internal working models of attachment are mental
structures that are conceived of as playing a role in the processing
of attachment-relevant social information. As alluded to earlier,
one basic function of these models is thought to be that of storing
attachment-related knowledge (e.g., knowledge about past experi-
ences with attachment figures; Bowlby, 1973; see also Delius,
Bovenschen, & Spangler, 2008, for recent cross-sectional data
indicating that some aspects of children’s attachment-related
knowledge increase with age). Another important function is the
generation of expectations (i.e., predictions) regarding how attach-
ment figures will behave in subsequent interactions (Bowlby,
1973; Collins & Allard, 2004; Thompson, 2006); these predictions
are useful because they calibrate the attachment behavioral system
so that it corresponds to the (probable) type of care to be received
from the parent (e.g., a child who has stored information about his
mother’s repeated sensitivity toward him will expect his mother to
be sensitive in future interactions). This notion is consistent with a
variety of theories claiming that individuals rely on existing cog-
nitive structures in coming to understand new information (e.g.,
Crick & Dodge, 1994; Holmes, 2002; Piaget, 1954). As individ-
uals acquire more advanced cognitive capacities, internal working
models of attachment will also perform other important functions
related to social information processing, such as providing indi-
viduals with information—or perhaps misinformation—about the
self (Bowlby, 1973). For example, beginning early in life, children
begin to understand whether they are accepted or unaccepted by
attachment figures. Such knowledge will contribute to either a
representation of the self as a person who is meant to be loved and
valued by others or a representation of the self as a person who is
22 DYKAS AND CASSIDY

not meant to be loved or valued (Bowlby, 1973; see also Fonagy,
Gergely, & Target, 2007, for theory and a review of research about
how attachment experiences shape children’s construction of self).
Perhaps most centrally, internal working models of attachment
are thought to function to influence the ways in which individuals
obtain, organize, and operate on attachment-relevant social infor-
mation (Bowlby, 1980). As Main et al. (1985) noted, internal
working models provide individuals with both conscious and un-
conscious rules “for the direction and organization of attention and
memory, rules that permit or limit the individual’s access to certain
forms of knowledge regarding the self, the attachment figure, and
the relationship between the self and the attachment figure” (p. 77;
see also Egeland & Carlson, 2004). As such, individuals are likely
to use different (i.e., biased) rules to process attachment-relevant
social information as a function of whether they have a secure or
an insecure internal working model of attachment. Indeed, under-
standing these information processing biases has become a major
focus among attachment theorists (initially by Suess, Grossmann,
& Sroufe, 1992) and relates to psychologists’ more general inter-
ests in understanding biased social information processing (Crick
& Dodge, 1994; Lemerise & Arsenio, 2000). Moreover, this in-
triguing idea that individuals follow biased rules to process social
information is in agreement with the widespread notion that indi-
viduals are—not necessarily conscious—active agents in their own
development, processing information selectively (e.g., by orienting
mental awareness toward or away from social stimuli) in order to
understand past and ongoing social experiences and to shape future
ones (e.g., Piaget, 1954; Scarr & McCartney, 1983). Put another
way, internal working models of attachment can be perceived as
representational bridges that mediate—through a variety of infor-
mation processing mechanisms—longitudinal links between early
experience and later adaptation (see Dweck & London, 2004;
Thompson, 2008).
If individuals are biased and use different rules to process social
information as a function of their internal working models of
attachment, these rules are likely manifested in different ways as a
function of the type of attachment-relevant social information that
an individual is required to process. One important dimension on
which attachment-relevant social information can vary relates to
its potential for causing psychological pain. According to Bowlby
(1980), insecure individuals are expected to use these rules to filter
out (from conscious awareness) attachment-relevant social infor-
mation that would cause excessive emotional pain; secure individ-
uals, in contrast, are not expected to use such rules to process
potentially pain-inducing information. These differences are ex-
pected to emerge because insecure individuals are less likely to
have had experiences with an attachment figure in which painful
emotions were understood and responded to (Cassidy & Kobak,
1988; Mikulincer, Shaver, Cassidy, & Berant, 2009). For example,
referring to the work of Gill (1970), Bowlby (1988) remarked that
children’s abilities to process social information is influenced in
large part by parents’ abilities—and inabilities—to discuss diffi-
cult emotions in the presence of their children.
Yet there are times when individuals are expected to process
information in a schema-driven manner so that this information
can be processed rapidly and efficiently (Bowlby, 1973; Brether-
ton & Munholland, 1999). It is further expected that schema-
driven information processing will occur when the processing of
attachment-relevant social information does not potentially in-
volve the experience of psychological pain. Thus, secure individ-
uals would process information in a positively biased fashion and
insecure individuals would process information in a negatively
biased fashion—in both cases—as a function of their experience-
based internal working models of attachment. We discuss these
ideas in greater detail below.
An information processing approach to defense. Bowlby
(1980) drew on the work of previous theorists and cognitive
scientists (most notably Erdelyi, 1974, and Peterfreund, 1971) in
developing what he called “an information processing approach to
defence” (p. 44). Bowlby posited that when an individual is
presented with attachment-relevant social information that “when
accepted previously [for processing has] led to suffering” (p. 73),
his or her internal working models function to provide a defense
from this information. Thus, if an individual has experienced
distress when his or her attachment system has been activated in
the past (e.g., during times in which he or she sought care from a
parent but was rejected), these models could function to protect the
individual from reexperiencing such distress by limiting access to
attachment-relevant social information that might activate the at-
tachment system (Bowlby, 1980). Interestingly, although these
protective patterns most likely emerge when individuals process
potentially painful negative attachment-relevant social information
(e.g., information about the absence of attachment figures when
needed), they also likely emerge when individuals process poten-
tially painful positive social information (i.e., information about
events in which an attachment figure served as a secure base). For
example, an individual may filter out from conscious awareness
information about an attachment figure serving as a secure base
because thinking about such information may lead the individual
to recall that he or she has experienced few—if any—actual secure
base experiences with that figure. The idea that individuals can
protect themselves from experiencing psychological pain by fil-
tering out social information is long-standing in attachment theory
(Bowlby, 1980; see also Fearon & Mansell, 2001; Fraley, Davis, &
Shaver, 1998; Main, 2000; Mikulincer et al., 2009; Thompson,
2008) as well as in the field of psychology more broadly (e.g.,
Freud, 1915/1957; Joffe & Sandler, 1965; Thornhill & Thornhill,
1989) and in the clinical literature on dissociation and posttrau-
matic stress disorder (e.g., Putnam, 1997).
Bowlby (1980) used the term defensive exclusion when referring
to the capacity to process information in ways that prohibit poten-
tially painful information from entering conscious awareness. He
described two main forms of defensive exclusion that may look
quite different from each other, yet share the common outcomes of
halting or diverting information processing. Such outcomes are
effectively adaptive because they protect the individual from psy-
chological pain associated with the conscious processing of infor-
mation that may be linked to stored mental knowledge that one’s
previous attachment needs have gone unmet.
Bowlby (1980) proposed that one form of defensive exclusion—
deactivation—occurs when internal working models of attachment
function to partially or completely deactivate information from
further processing by turning the individual’s attention away from
or limiting memory for attachment-relevant social information.
However, if this information cannot be completely excluded from
conscious awareness (e.g., because a person is being asked directly
about a specific incident), internal working models of attachment
may alternately function to help individuals cope with the affec-
23
ATTACHMENT AND INFORMATION PROCESSING

tively laden content of this information through cognitive suppres-
sion. Thus, individuals are able to halt the conscious cognitive
processing of the information’s emotional components that could
cause psychological distress and instead divert the processing to
the information’s more rote and emotionally neutral aspects (e.g.,
the context in which the social information was obtained). There-
fore, an insecure individual might be able to remember a negative
attachment-related experience but not remember the full extent of
the emotions experienced during the event because the insecure
internal working models have filtered from conscious awareness
any emotional (positive and/or negative) content that could cause
psychological pain. Bowlby (1980) also identified a second form
of defensive exclusion: “cognitive disconnection of response from
situation” (p. 67). This form of exclusion occurs when an individ-
ual shifts attention away from the true source of distress and
mistakenly identifies another person (including the self) or situa-
tion as the cause of the distress. This strategy results in replacing
one form of distress with another.
If attachment insecurity is associated with defensive exclusion,
through what developmental pathways might attachment security
come to be associated with the capacity to process painful expe-
riences without engaging in defensive exclusion? Representations
of others as available and responsive and of the self as capable of
eliciting care contained in secure working models of attachment
could contribute to confidence that distressing emotions are toler-
able (i.e., that distressing emotions can be recognized, acknowl-
edged, accepted, and recovered from rather than having to be
denied or avoided). In addition, these representations could guide
individuals to seek soothing when distressed and, through the
repetition of experiences of being soothed, the child could develop
capacities for competent self-soothing (Fonagy et al., 2007; Sr-
oufe, Egeland, Carlson, & Collins, 2005). The quality of the
child’s attachment and the corresponding internal representations
can be viewed as providing the context in which the child comes
to understand and organize his or her responses to distress. For the
child who interacts with a parent sensitive to his or her signals,
emotions will be experienced as useful in alerting the parent during
times of distress. Sensitive parental response, in turn, will enhance
the child’s sense of efficacy in modulating his or her distress
responses (Bell & Ainsworth, 1972). In this type of dyad, the
child’s experience of distressing emotions, such as fear and anger,
comes to be associated with expectations of ameliorative parental
response. As a result, the experience of distressing emotions may
be less threatening to the child. The experience of security is not
based on the denial of distress but on the ability to temporarily
tolerate distress in order to achieve mastery over threatening or
frustrating situations (Cassidy & Kobak, 1988). In sum, it is
reasonable to assume that most individuals, regardless of attach-
ment security, will exclude from processing information that is too
painful to tolerate. Secure people may attend to more painful
information before they reach the point that they need to exclude
it because of experiences with supportive others who have helped
them gain capacities for tolerating painful feelings (see Master et
al., 2009, for evidence of physical pain reduction in women both
while holding the hand of a male romantic partner and while
looking at his photograph). It is also likely that heritable factors
contribute to the tolerance of psychological pain, as is the case
with physical pain (Edwards, 2006), and that these factors interact
with attachment security.
These tendencies of secure individuals to process potentially
psychologically painful information in a cognitively open manner
and of insecure individuals, in contrast, to engage in defensive
exclusion to block psychological pain from conscious awareness
are thought to be evident from infancy through adulthood. As one
example, we describe in the section below the ways in which these
attachment-related differences in social information processing are
evident in adults’ AAI transcripts.
Information processing strategies evident in the Adult At-
tachment Interview. Although generally conceived of as pro-
viding information about an individual’s state of mind with respect
to attachment (George et al., 1984, 1985, 1996; Hesse, 1999, 2008;
Main, Goldwyn, & Hesse, 2008), AAI interviews can also be
viewed as providing a window into the individual’s attachment-
related information processing strategies (see Kobak & Cole,
1994; Main, 2000; Main, Goldwyn, & Hesse, 2008), and we
present examples related to three of the AAI patterns. AAI inter-
viewees classified as secure-autonomous demonstrate the capacity
to process openly attachment-relevant social information because
they can attend to questions regarding their attachment experi-
ences, provide autobiographical (i.e., semantic and episodic) mem-
ories that support their general descriptions of their attachment
relationships, and explore freely (in a thorough and coherent
manner) thoughts and feelings related to both the positive and
negative aspects of their attachment experiences (Hesse, 1999,
2008; see also Tulving, 1972). For some individuals, a secure state
of mind could stem from positive attachment-related experiences
with caregivers (i.e., experiences in which they were able to use
their attachment figure successfully as both a secure base and a
safe haven; Beckwith, Cohen, & Hamilton, 1999; Hamilton, 2000;
Main, Hesse, & Kaplan, 2005; Sroufe et al., 2005; E. Waters,
Merrick, Treboux, Crowell, & Albersheim, 2000). For other indi-
viduals, a secure state of mind may not stem from positive
attachment-related experiences with caregivers because these in-
dividuals state that such experiences did not occur (i.e., they
describe experiences indicating that they were not able to use their
attachment figures as either a secure base or a safe haven during
their lives; Pearson, Cohn, Cowan, & Cowan, 1994). Instead, these
individuals (who are classified as “earned secure” in the AAI)
demonstrate a capacity to think about and discuss their negative
attachment-related childhood experiences coherently and thought-
fully without engaging in information processing strategies that
serve to exclude the processing of painful childhood attachment-
related experiences. Such individuals also value and appreciate
attachment relationships, despite personal claims that these rela-
tionships were unfulfilling in their own childhoods (see Hesse,
1999, 2008).
In contrast, AAI interviewees classified as having an insecure
state of mind with respect to attachment show defensive exclusion
when discussing their childhood attachment experiences (i.e., they
have difficulties answering questions about their childhood attach-
ment experiences in an open, thoughtful, and coherent manner).
For example, when asked specific questions about their parents,
dismissing individuals may give a global impression that their
relationships with their parents were generally positive (or even
perfect) while failing to provide specific memories that support
such positive and/or idealized perceptions; at times, these individ-
uals seem unaware that the specific memories they provide con-
tradict the positive global descriptions. Other individuals in this
24 DYKAS AND CASSIDY

group describe their attachment experiences as highly negative yet
claim that these experiences had little or no negative effect on their
personal development. An insecure-dismissing state of mind may
emerge when individuals’ internal working models of attachment
are limiting access to attachment memories that are emotionally
difficult and painful, possibly because these individuals have ex-
perienced considerable rejection, insensitivity, and/or lack of love
in relationships with their own parents (see Cassidy & Kobak,
1988; Hesse, 1999, 2008). Indeed, experimental evidence of sup-
pression of negative attachment-relevant information comes from
studies in which insecure-dismissing adults showed increased elec-
trodermal activity (considered to be an indicator of the effortful
suppression of negative emotion) when thinking about potentially
painful attachment-related experiences (Dozier & Kobak, 1992;
Roisman, Tsai, & Chiang, 2004).
It is easy to understand how insecure-dismissing attachment,
with its characteristic denial of distress, functions to shut out
psychological pain. It is less obvious that the heightened negative
emotionality characteristic of insecure-preoccupied individuals
might also serve to shut out pain. These individuals provide
answers to questions about their childhood attachment experi-
ences, yet their answers contain components of anger, one-
sidedness, passivity, fear, and/or confusion (Hesse, 1999, 2008).
For example, these individuals shift attention away from the focus
of a question and instead show (off-topic) angry and confused
preoccupation with particular aspects of their childhood experi-
ences (e.g., by attending excessively to the details of childhood
memories that have angered them). Such shifts in attention both
prevent participation in a collaborative, focused interview and
interfere with the sort of reflection necessary to objectively assess
the nature of the childhood attachment experiences. Cassidy and
her colleagues (Cassidy, 2005; Dykas & Cassidy, 2007; Miku-
lincer, Shaver, Cassidy, & Berant, 2009) have proposed that this
pattern of behavior may emerge because these individuals’ internal
working models of attachment serve to divert attention away from
genuine hurtful memories of parental insensitivity and redirect
attention to memories that are not as emotionally damaging or
hurtful. This pattern evident in the AAI is also congruent with
Bowlby’s (1980) clinically identified form of defensive exclusion
characterized by “the redirection of responses away from the
person arousing them” and “preoccupation with personal reactions
and sufferings” (p. 68). In keeping with this proposition, recent
research from the self-report literature has indicated that height-
ened negative emotionality (in the form of worry) is associated
with a tendency to avoid or control internal experiences rather than
accept them (Roemer, Salters, Raffa, & Orsillo, 2005) and has
shown that such negative emotionality actually does prevent ef-
fective processing of painful emotions (Borkovec, Alcaine, &
Behar, 2004; see also Hayes, Wilson, Gifford, Follette, & Strosahl,
1996). Fosha (2000) has observed clinically that the exaggerated
emotional expression characteristic of preoccupied individuals can
be “a defense against genuine emotion” (p. 118).
Schema-driven social information processing. Of course,
not all attachment-relevant social information is potentially pain-
inducing. When an individual is presented with information that
can be processed without risk of psychological pain, it is reason-
able to believe that internal working models of attachment insti-
gate less effortful, nondefensive information processing functions.
More precisely, as others have noted, internal working models
could function to process this information schematically, in ways
that are consistent with previously obtained attachment-related
knowledge (e.g., information related to the availability, respon-
siveness, and sensitivity of attachment figures; see Bretherton &
Munholland, 1999, 2008). According to this thinking (Bretherton
& Munholland, 1999), insecure individuals will process this
attachment-relevant social information in a negatively biased sche-
matic fashion (drawing on negative experiences with attachment
figures); secure individuals, in contrast, will be more likely to
process this information in a positively biased schematic fashion
(because they are more likely to have had positive experiences
with attachment figures on which to draw). We note that although
Bowlby did not use the term schematic (or similar terminologies)
when discussing this particular information processing pathway,
he clearly suggested a conceptual link between individuals’ inter-
nal working models of attachment and their tendencies to perceive
their worlds in a positive light if they possessed positive
attachment-related knowledge or in a negative light if such knowl-
edge was negative (e.g., Bowlby, 1973).
The belief that individuals process certain types of attachment-
relevant social information in a schematic fashion is based on the
notion that internal working models of attachment function to
process social information in the most rapid and efficient ways
possible (Bowlby, 1973; Bretherton & Munholland, 1999, 2008;
see also Baldwin, 1992). By tapping into experience-based knowl-
edge, internal working models of attachment provide individuals
with the capacity to interpret and evaluate attachment-relevant
social information relatively quickly, a capacity that is highly
adaptive for individuals considering that such interpretations and
evaluations often need to be made in real-time. Moreover, it is
efficient for individuals to draw on stored knowledge when pro-
cessing new information so that they do not have to spend valuable
time (and limited mental resources) processing this information
from scratch (see Bowlby, 1973; Bretherton & Munholland, 1999).
Indeed, the notion that individuals engage in schema-driven infor-
mation processing is not new, and individuals are believed to
process many other types of social information in a schematic
fashion (e.g., according to gender schema theory, individuals ac-
quire stereotypical information about gender roles and use this
knowledge schematically when interpreting and evaluating new
gender-related information; Bem, 1981, 1985).
A note about generalization. Although internal working
models are thought to function principally to assist in the process-
ing of social information related directly to attachment (Ainsworth,
1989; Bowlby, 1973, 1980), these models likely also have consid-
erable influence over how individuals process social information
that is unrelated to attachment (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2007c;
Sroufe, 1988; Suess et al., 1992). This argument stems from
Bowlby’s (1973) claim that attachment experiences, and the inter-
nal working models forged from them, generalize to influence
behavior and relationships with other persons. Thus, in the absence
of considerable information about other persons, individuals will
use knowledge about people they do know (by tapping into their
internal working models of attachment) to understand their inter-
actions with these unfamiliar people. (Note again that this propo-
sition meshes with a widespread notion held by developmentalists
that individuals use existing cognitive structures in coming to
understand new information; Piaget, 1954; see also Dweck &
London, 2004). Moreover, the rules that internal working models
25
ATTACHMENT AND INFORMATION PROCESSING

employ to process attachment-relevant information (seen in the
AAI, for example) likely generalize to process these new types of
social information (e.g., individuals classified as secure on the AAI
and who show nondefensive access to attachment-related informa-
tion will not likely suppress new information related to peers and
other persons). There are many factors to consider when delineat-
ing the extent to which internal working models of attachment
should guide the processing of social information that is not related
directly to attachment (Belsky & Cassidy, 1994; Berlin & Cassidy,
1999). Yet, there is growing evidence (reviewed later in this
article) that these models are associated with the processing of
social information related to peers, romantic partners, and strang-
ers.
Summary
Bowlby (1973, 1980) proposed that individuals develop
experience-based internal working models of attachment that con-
tain knowledge about both attachment figures and the self and that
aid extensively in the processing of attachment-relevant social
information across the life span. Individuals who possess secure
internal working models will process a broad range of positive and
negative attachment-relevant social information relatively fully,
and information processing that draws on existing schema will
tend to be positively biased in ways congruent with their generally
positive experienced-based attachment-related knowledge
(Bowlby, 1969/1982; Mikulincer & Shaver, 2005; Pietromonaco
& Barrett, 2000). In contrast, individuals who possess insecure
internal working models will process attachment-relevant social
information in one of two ways, depending on whether the infor-
mation could cause the individual psychological pain. If process-
ing the information could lead to psychological pain, insecure
individuals will defensively exclude or suppress this information
from further processing. If, however, the information in unlikely to
be painful, then insecure individuals will process this information
in a negatively biased schematic fashion (that is congruent with
their negative experienced-based attachment-related knowledge).
In the next section, we provide a detailed and comprehensive
review of the literature that reveals these attachment-related social
information processing patterns.
Review of the Empirical Literature
In this four-part section, we review the empirical literature on
relations between attachment and the processing of social infor-
mation. We begin by examining these relations in three develop-
mental periods: childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. In the final
part, we examine intergenerational links between attachment and
social information processing in parents and their children. Using
Bowlby’s (1973, 1980) theorizing described above, we explain
how this literature meshes with the notions of secure versus
insecure patterns of attachment-relevant social information pro-
cessing, more precisely, the secure pattern of relatively open and
positively biased schematic processing versus the insecure pattern
of exclusion or suppression and negatively biased schematic pro-
cessing. Moreover, to explain the different ways in which these
patterns are manifested across the life span, we organize our
review by focusing on a variety of studies (e.g., experimental
studies, correlational studies, longitudinal studies) that have exam-
ined specific components (e.g., attention and memory) and broader
aspects (e.g., perceptions of and attributions about other persons,
feedback seeking, secure base scripts, theory of mind, and emo-
tional understanding) of social information processing.
Attachment and the Processing of Social
Information in Childhood
Attachment and children’s attention to social information.
Several studies have examined whether attachment is linked to
children’s attention to attachment-relevant social information.
Johnson and her colleagues (Johnson, Dweck, & Chen, 2007;
Johnson et al., 2010), for example, have recently examined these
links using visual habituation paradigms. In an initial experiment
and a replication, these researchers examined 12- to 16-month-old
infants’ attention to responsive and unresponsive computer ani-
mated mother–child scenarios. This experiment began with a
series of habituation trials in which infant participants viewed a
mother (larger) ellipse appearing with a child (smaller) ellipse at
the bottom of a steep incline. The mother ellipse then traveled
halfway up the incline to a plateau and stopped, and the child
ellipse protested the separation (i.e., by bouncing and pulsating).
Infant participants viewed this sequence repeatedly until they no
longer looked at it (which indicated that they were fully habituated
to the animated mother–infant separation). Then, after viewing
these habituation trials, infants viewed either a reunion episode
(i.e., the mother ellipse returning responsively to the distressed
child ellipse) or an increased separation episode (i.e., the mother
ellipse not responding to the distressed child ellipse but instead
moving farther away).
As expected, in both the initial experiment and the replication,
infant participants’ Strange Situation classifications were linked to
their looking times at the reunion and separation episodes: Secure
infants looked longer at the increased separation/unresponsive
episode than at the reunion/responsive episode, whereas the oppo-
site pattern emerged for insecure infants. These data supported the
researchers’ hypothesis that secure infants, compared with inse-
cure infants, would attend longer to the unresponsive caregiver
stimulus because it is not congruent with secure infants’ working
models of attachment of the caregiver as responsive and is thus
more unexpected. As such, these findings can be viewed as an
example of schema-driven processing. These findings are also
consistent with the notion presented in this article that insecure
infants suppress their attention to distressing infant–mother
attachment-related information, whereas secure infants can process
such information openly by attending to it. (See Johnson et al.,
2010, for findings from a study using a similar habituation para-
digm that revealed expected links between infant attachment in the
Strange Situation and infant attention to animated “infant” behav-
ior on reunion with an animated “mother.”)
Evidence of suppression-related attentional processes has
emerged from longitudinal studies of older children. Main et al.
(1985), for example, reported that 6-year-old children who had
been classified as insecurely attached to mother in the Strange
Situation during infancy showed greater difficulty attending to
family photographs than did secure children. Insecure-avoidant
children avoided these photographs (e.g., by actively turning away
from them), whereas insecure-disorganized children tended to
show a disorganized pattern of attention (e.g., by focusing exces-
26 DYKAS AND CASSIDY

sively on the picture for a relatively long period of time without
attending to the experimenter’s queries). In another study, Kirsh
and Cassidy (1997) reported longitudinal links between infant
attachment (as assessed with the Strange Situation) and young
children’s later attentional biases for attachment-relevant informa-
tion (as assessed with recorded eye movements). In one task,
3.5-year-old children were presented with three drawings of a
child–mother dyad. In one drawing, the dyad was engaging in an
affectively positive interaction, and in the other two drawings, the
dyad was engaging in either an affectively neutral or a negative
interaction. The investigators reported that children classified as
insecure-avoidant in infancy looked away from all three drawings
proportionately longer than children classified as either secure or
insecure-ambivalent. In another task, the children viewed eight
sets of complementary drawings. In each set, one drawing was
attachment related (i.e., child–mother dyad engaging in a positive
interaction and displaying positive affect), whereas the other draw-
ing was not attachment related (i.e., a pair of noninteracting
adults). In one analysis, the researchers calculated the amount of
time participants looked at each drawing as a proportion of the
amount of time looking at both drawings; as expected, insecure
children looked at the attachment-relevant drawings significantly
less than did their secure counterparts.
In contrast, Belsky, Spritz, and Crnic (1996) failed to find
longitudinal links between infants’ Strange Situation classifica-
tions and 3.5-year-olds’ attention to puppet shows containing both
positive and negative social events; however, these nonsignificant
findings might have emerged because the measure of attention was
based on participants’ vulnerability to distraction (i.e., researchers
coded children’s facial expression for momentary distraction when
a clicking sound accompanied the presentation of a positive or a
negative social event). Indeed, children might have habituated to
the repeated administration of a clicking sound during the exper-
iment, which might have made this measure of attention ineffec-
tive.
Attachment and children’s memory for social information.
The available data indicate that attachment is associated with
children’s memory for social information. Two studies, for exam-
ple, have reported longitudinal connections between infant attach-
ment insecurity (as assessed with the Strange Situation) and young
children’s impaired memory for social events involving close
others. Interestingly, however, these studies suggested that inse-
cure children suppress attachment-relevant social information in
some cases and process it in a negatively biased schematic manner
in others, whereas secure children show openness to remembering
a range of positive and negative emotions. In one study, Kirsh and
Cassidy (1997) asked children to listen to and recall information
from six stories about a child’s bid for care from his or her mother
following a minor injury. In these stories, mothers were responsive
and sensitive to the child’s bid, rejecting of the child’s bid, or
self-involved following the child’s injury. After controlling for
general cognitive functioning, results consistent with the notion of
suppression showed that compared with their secure counterparts,
children with insecure-avoidant attachment histories had poorer
memory for the responsive/sensitive stories, and children with
insecure-ambivalent attachment histories showed poorer memory
for the rejecting stories. In the other longitudinal study (Belsky et
al., 1996), children viewed two puppet shows that contained a
series of positive and negative social events. After viewing the
puppet shows, children were presented with a pair of drawings that
reflected each of the positive and negative events that occurred in
the puppet show, but only one of each pair depicted the event as it
actually occurred. Consistent with the notion of schematic infor-
mation processing were data indicating that children classified as
secure in infancy remembered the positive social events more
accurately than the negative events, whereas children classified as
insecure in infancy remembered the negative social events more
accurately than the positive events. Unexpectedly, in another lon-
gitudinal study, Ziv, Oppenheim, and Sagi-Schwartz (2004) did
not find connections between infants’ Strange Situation classifica-
tions and older children’s memory for videotaped mother- and
peer-related social events in middle childhood; however, the fail-
ure to find such links could be attributed to the memory measure
used (i.e., researchers simply asked participants to tell them “what
happened” in the viewed interactions, a procedure that may not
have served as a sufficiently structured memory prompt).
Attachment and children’s perceptions and attributions.
Several studies of children’s perceptions and attributions lend
support to the claim that children perceive others in a schemati-
cally biased manner as a function of attachment. In an early
contemporaneous study, Cassidy (1988) reported that insecurity at
6 years of age (assessed with the Main and Cassidy system) was
linked to perceptions of low peer acceptance. With respect to
attributions, Suess et al. (1992) reported longitudinal data indicat-
ing that 5-year-old children who had been classified as insecure as
infants in the Strange Situation were less likely than children who
had been classified as secure to attribute positive intentions to peer
behavior in social conflict situations. Similarly, Ziv et al. (2004)
found that 7.5-year-old children’s infant Strange Situation classi-
fications were connected longitudinally to the attributions that they
generated in response to a videotaped peer-group entry script (i.e.,
a script portraying a child who attempts to play with two peers but
is responded to either aggressively, nonaggressively, or ambigu-
ously; see Dodge & Price, 1994). Secure children processed the
social information by properly attributing the nonaggressive re-
sponses to positive motives and the aggressive responses to neg-
ative motives. In contrast, insecure children showed less flexible
and more negative attributions (e.g., attributing both the aggressive
and nonaggressive responses to negative motives). Raikes and
Thompson (2008) also reported that toddler attachment insecurity
(assessed with the Strange Situation at multiple time points be-
tween the ages of 15 months and 36 months in the National
Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early
Child Care and Youth Development) was linked to hostile attri-
bution biases of ambiguous peer behavior at first grade (see also
Elicker, Englund, & Sroufe, 1992, for similar longitudinal evi-
dence). Interestingly, Raikes and Thompson did not find a link
between attachment and peer attributions at an earlier age (4.5
years of age; see also Cassidy, Kirsh, Scolton, & Parke, 1996, for
similar null results with preschoolers). In a study of older children,
however, Cassidy et al. (1996) reported contemporaneous links
between attachment and children’s attributions of hypothetical
stories in which a peer clearly caused something negative to
happen to the child, but the circumstances and the peer’s intent
were ambiguous (stories based on the work of Dodge & Frame,
1982). More specifically, kindergarten and first-grade children
classified as insecure (with the Main & Cassidy, 1988, classifica-
tion system) were more likely than their secure counterparts to
27
ATTACHMENT AND INFORMATION PROCESSING

have negative perceptions of the peer’s feelings and to attribute the
peer’s behavior to more negative underlying intentions and mo-
tives.
Attachment and children’s secure base scripts. From a
schematic information processing perspective, securely attached
individuals should be capable of drawing on their positive
attachment-related knowledge (i.e., their secure base scripts) to
create attachment-related “stories” in which a person can success-
fully use another person as a secure base from which to explore
and as a safe haven to which to return in time of need and/or
distress (see H. S. Waters et al., 1998). H. S. Waters et al. (1998)
tested this hypothesis by examining children’s responses to an
attachment-related story completion task (Bretherton et al., 1990).
In this task, children were given the beginning of a story and were
instructed to describe how the story would end (e.g., participants
were asked to finish a story in which a child is rock climbing with
his parents and hurts his knee). Children classified as insecure at
25 months of age (assessed with the observer-completed Attach-
ment Q-Sort) were less likely than other children to create stories
involving knowledge of and access to secure base scripts at ages
37 and 54 months. For example, the stories of insecure children
contained child protagonists who failed to turn to and/or be com-
forted by an attachment figure when distressed.
Attachment, children’s theory of mind, and emotional un-
derstanding. Researchers have shown considerable interest in
understanding whether attachment is linked to children’s theory of
mind and emotional understanding. Theory of mind refers to a
person’s knowledge that other individuals’ mental states are inde-
pendent from his or her own, as well as the capacity to understand
that mental states influence behavior (e.g., by explaining how a
person’s behavior is motivated by independent knowledge, desires,
and/or perceptions; see Wellman, 1990). The most frequent tool
used to assess children’s theory of mind performance has been the
false-belief task, in which children are presented with a situation in
which they must predict the behavior of an actor on the basis of the
actor’s perceived mental state (see Wellman, Cross, & Watson,
2001, and Wimmer & Perner, 1983, for detailed descriptions of
this task).
Attachment theorists have hypothesized that insecurely attached
children should demonstrate poorer theory of mind performance
than secure children because their negative attachment-related
experiences should lead them to have difficulties processing the
feeling states of other persons thoughtfully and systematically (cf.
Bretherton, 1990; Main, 1991). Moreover, Fonagy and his col-
leagues (Fonagy, Gergely, Jurist, & Target, 2002; Fonagy, Steele,
Steele, Moran, & Higgitt, 1991; Fonagy & Target, 1997) have
suggested that insecure children should have a less well developed
capacity for “reflective functioning,” a term used to describe the
“psychological processes underlying the capacity to perceive and
understand oneself and others’ behavior in terms of mental states”
(Fonagy, Steele, Steele, & Target, 1997, p. 5; see also Fonagy et
al., 2007). Essentially, insecure children should struggle in both
“reading” the minds of others and in understanding others’ behav-
iors as meaningful and predictable (Slade, 1999).
As predicted, links have emerged between attachment and chil-
dren’s theory of mind performance. Using the Strange Situation,
for example, researchers have reported longitudinal evidence that
children with insecure infant attachment histories have poorer
theory of mind than their secure counterparts (McElwain & Vol-
ling, 2004; Meins, Fernyhough, Russell, & Clark-Carter, 1998).
Contemporaneous linkages have also emerged between attachment
(as assessed with the Separation Anxiety Test or the observer-rated
Attachment Q-Sort) and theory of mind (De Rosnay & Harris,
2002; Fonagy, Redfern, & Charman, 1997; Symons & Clark,
2000). In addition, attachment researchers have used modified
versions of standard false-belief tasks to assess children’s under-
standing of the mental states of particular attachment figures.
Repacholi and Trapolini (2004) reported that when insecure chil-
dren (as assessed with the Separation Anxiety Test) were required
to read the mental states of both attachment figures and other
individuals, their poor mind-reading capacities became more pro-
nounced when they were required to read the mental states of their
attachment figures (i.e., children who scored high on attachment
avoidance showed particular difficulties reasoning about their
mothers’ false beliefs but not in reasoning about the false beliefs of
an adult stranger). Evidence linking attachment to children’s un-
derstanding of mental states also comes from a study examining
older children’s mentalizing capacities (Humfress, O’Connor,
Slaughter, Target, & Fonagy, 2002). In this study, 12-year-old
children listened to several short stories in which the main char-
acters engaged in some type of behavior (e.g., joking about some-
one, lying to another person) and were asked to explain the
characters’ behaviors. As expected, lower attachment coherence
(as assessed with the Child Attachment Interview) was linked to
children’s less sophisticated understanding of how behaviors re-
flected the characters’ underlying mental states. Despite this evi-
dence, not all studies have linked attachment (either longitudinally
or contemporaneously) to theory of mind (see Greig & Howe,
2001; Meins et al., 2002; Symons & Clark, 2000). Given that these
latter studies assessed children’s attachment and theory of mind in
ways similar to the studies described above (albeit with relatively
small sample sizes, ranging from 45 to 57 participants), their null
results bring into question the nature of the link between attach-
ment and theory of mind.
Similar to research on theory of mind, research on children’s
emotional understanding has revealed that insecure attachment is
linked to relative difficulties in interpreting and understanding
emotions (e.g., De Rosnay & Harris, 2002; Main et al., 1985; H.
Steele, Steele, & Croft, 2008; but see M. Steele, Steele, & Johan-
sson, 2002, for contradictory evidence). In an early longitudinal
study, for example, Main et al. (1985) asked 6-year-old children to
indicate how a hypothetical child would respond to an expected
2-week separation from his or her parents. Children with insecure-
avoidant attachment histories (as assessed with the Strange Situ-
ation) had difficulty discussing the child’s response to the separa-
tion and often refused to discuss possible ways in which children
would cope with the separation. Children with insecure-
disorganized/disoriented attachment histories tended to become
distressed, silent, self-destructive, and/or irrational when discuss-
ing the hypothetical separations. However, children who had been
classified as secure in infancy tended to give a variety of positive
responses, such as that the child should engage in fun activities to
pass the time or should find an alternative attachment figure with
whom to stay. De Rosnay and Harris (2002) reported similar
contemporaneous data that lower attachment security (as assessed
with the Separation Anxiety Test) was linked to children’s inabil-
ities to understand emotions in different situations, including
child–parent separations.
28 DYKAS AND CASSIDY

Similarly, H. Steele, Steele, Croft, and Fonagy (1999) used an
emotion understanding task to tap 6-year-old children’s percep-
tions of individuals’ responses to social and emotional dilemmas.
Compared with their secure counterparts, children classified as
insecure (in the Strange Situation at age 1 year) were less likely (a)
to appropriately identify which facial expressions individuals
would express in these dilemmas and (b) to justify why such
expressions would be warranted (see also Greig & Howe, 2001, for
contemporaneous data linking attachment—as assessed with the
Attachment Story Completion Task—and children’s perceptions
of affective responses to emotional events). Relatedly, using the
observer-rated Attachment Q-Sort to assess attachment, Thompson
and his colleagues (Raikes & Thompson, 2006, 2008) have re-
ported a variety of contemporaneous and longitudinal data indi-
cating that insecurely attached children compared with secure
children show poorer emotional understanding of themselves and
others and difficulties identifying socially competent solutions to
peer-related social problem-solving tasks.
Attachment and the Processing of Social Information
in Adolescence
Attachment and adolescents’ attention to social information.
Cassidy, Ziv, Mehta, and Feeney (2003) have been the only
researchers to examine links between attachment and adolescents’
attention to social information. In this study, they used a feedback
seeking paradigm to examine adolescents’ explicit decisions about
the type of information from peers to which they wanted to attend.
Eleventh-grade participants were informed that students from an-
other school would be asked six questions about them and that
“because of time” the participants could view the responses to only
three of the six questions. Three of the questions conveyed the
impression that the participant would receive positive feedback
(e.g., “Why might this person be happy with himself or herself
most of the time?”). The other three questions suggested that the
participant would receive negative feedback (e.g., “Why would
this person often wish he or she was different?”). As expected,
between-groups analyses indicated that more secure adolescents
(as assessed with a security composite score derived from the
ECR) sought more positive feedback about the self as a worth-
while person than did less secure adolescents. Moreover, within-
group analyses indicated that more secure adolescents sought
significantly more positive feedback than expected by chance,
demonstrating positively biased schematic processing; no within-
group findings emerged for insecure adolescents. Interestingly,
mediation analyses indicated that adolescents’ degree of global
self-worth mediated the link between attachment style and adoles-
cent feedback seeking.
Attachment and adolescents’ memory for social informa-
tion. Four studies have examined links between attachment and
adolescents’ memory for social information. Three of these studies
(Dykas, Woodhouse, Ehrlich, & Cassidy, 2010; Feeney & Cassidy,
2003) used the same sample to examine whether adolescents
reconstructed their memory for short 10-min adolescent–parent
laboratory conflict interactions over time as a function of attach-
ment. These investigators assessed memory by having adolescents
rate their perceptions of the laboratory conflicts immediately fol-
lowing the interaction and again 6 weeks later. The results from
these studies lend support to the notion that over time, when the
memory for specific attachment-related events degrades, adoles-
cents tap into their internal working models of attachment sche-
matically to reconstruct their memory for that event. More pre-
cisely, using the AAI to assess attachment, Dykas et al. reported
that secure adolescents reconstructed interactions with each parent
more favorably over the 6-week period, whereas insecure adoles-
cents showed less favorable reconstructive memory over the same
amount of time. Adolescents’ memory for these interactions was
also associated with observational ratings in theoretically interest-
ing ways (e.g., secure adolescents had an initial bias to perceive
their interactions with both mothers and fathers as less negative
than observed ratings, and this bias grew stronger over time;
however, insecure adolescents’ ratings did not change over time in
relation to the observers’ ratings). Moreover, using a battery of
self-report measures to tap attachment-related representations of
parents, Feeney and Cassidy reported results from two (initial and
replication) studies indicating that when adolescents’ attachment-
related self-reported perceptions of the parent were more negative,
adolescents were more likely to remember the discussion as less
positive and more negative than they had reported 6 weeks earlier.
In another study with the same sample, Dykas and Cassidy
(2010) used the AAI to assess attachment security and a method-
ology devised by Mikulincer and Orbach (1995; Childhood Mem-
ory Task) to assess adolescents’ memory for emotionally salient
childhood events. Adolescents recalled four emotionally signifi-
cant memories from childhood and then rated the emotional inten-
sity of these memories. Evidence of suppression emerged such that
insecure adolescents (i.e., insecure-dismissing and insecure-
preoccupied groups combined) retrieved emotionally significant
childhood memories more slowly than did secure adolescents.
Attachment and adolescents’ perceptions, expectations, and
attributions. The available data indicate that insecure adoles-
cents perceive and generate expectations and attributions about
others in a negatively biased schematic manner, whereas their
secure counterparts process such information in a positively biased
schematic manner. For example, Dykas, Cassidy, and Woodhouse
(2009) reported that lower AAI coherence of mind was linked to
greater expectations of rejection by others. In several other studies
that used the AAI, researchers reported that compared with secure
adolescents, insecure adolescents were more likely to have inse-
cure working models of peers (and, if classified as insecure-
preoccupied, of romantic partners; Furman, Simon, Shaffer, &
Bouchey, 2002); to have less positive and flexible expectations
about the outcomes of hypothetical peer rejection situations (Zim-
mermann, 1999); and to make less positive attributions of peer
integration and friendships (Zimmermann, 2004; see also Miku-
lincer & Selinger, 2001, for similar findings with respect to ado-
lescents’ self-reported attachment styles).
Attachment and adolescents’ secure base scripts. One
study has examined links between attachment and adolescents’ use
of a secure base script when processing social information. Using
the Adolescent Script Assessment (Steiner, Arjomand, & Waters,
2003; based on the standard assessment used to examine secure
base scripts in adults by H. S. Waters & Rodrigues-Doolabh,
2001), Dykas, Woodhouse, Cassidy, and Waters (2006) asked
adolescents to use six word sets (two mother-related sets, two
father-related sets, and two sets about unfamiliar adults) to gener-
ate six stories (i.e., one story with each word set). Evidence of
schematic information processing emerged such that as adoles-
29
ATTACHMENT AND INFORMATION PROCESSING

cents’ AAI coherence of mind scores increased, adolescents
showed greater use of a secure base script when creating a narra-
tive related to mothers, fathers, and unfamiliar adults (i.e., a greater
tendency to create stories in which the protagonist sought prox-
imity to another person, received comfort and support from that
person, and successfully reengaged in exploration). Moreover, an
additional analysis indicated that it was only adolescents’ abilities
to create mother-related narratives that uniquely predicted adoles-
cents’ AAI coherence of mind scores (i.e., the quality of mother-
related narratives accounted for variance in coherence of mind that
could not be explained by the quality of the other two narratives
when all three were considered simultaneously). In addition to
these AAI-related findings, analyses conducted with the ECR
measure of attachment style indicated that lower scores on attach-
ment avoidance were associated with more positive secure base
script narratives related to mothers and lower scores on attachment
anxiety were associated with more positive secure base script
narratives related to unfamiliar adults.
Attachment and the Processing of Social
Information in Adulthood
Attachment and adults’ attention to social information.
Many studies have examined links between attachment and adults’
attention to social information. In AAI studies, insecure adults
have attended to negative and threatening social information in a
schematically biased manner (e.g., Atkinson et al., 2009; Maier,
Bernier, Pekrun, Zimmermann, & Grossmann, 2004; Maier et al.,
2005). Using the AAI (and the AAI Q-Sort) and a multitrial
attention task, Maier et al. (2005) reported that increases in AAI
dismissiveness and preoccupation were linked to quicker attention
to images that contained negative affective and/or relational infor-
mation (i.e., images of human facial expressions or interpersonal
interactions). In another recent study, Atkinson et al. (2009) ex-
amined mothers’ attention to social information using a Stroop
task (Stroop, 1935) and reported that compared with other moth-
ers, insecure-unresolved mothers showed greater attention to neg-
ative words than to neutral words. These findings, which suggest
that insecure-unresolved mothers had more difficulty disengaging
their attention from negative social stimuli, can be viewed as
reflecting not suppression but rather schematic processing. (The
Atkinson et al. study is particularly noteworthy because it is one of
the few studies to examine the attachment-relevant information
processing of individuals classified as insecure-unresolved; in
many of the AAI studies reviewed here, these individuals are
grouped with individuals from other insecure groups because of
their low sample frequencies).
Researchers using the AAI and the Stroop task have also shown
that some adults may suppress their attention to emotional stimuli
in supraliminal but not in subliminal situations as a function of
both their AAI classifications and diagnosis of an anxiety disorder
(Zeijlmans van Emmichoven, van IJzendoorn, de Ruiter, &
Brosschot, 2003). More precisely, insecure adults with anxiety
disorders demonstrated shorter latencies in naming the colors of
threatening (but not positive or neutral) words than did secure
adults. This finding suggests that these insecure adults suppressed
their attention to such threatening information (which allowed
them to complete the Stroop task more quickly) and that secure
adults were more open to processing emotionally difficult infor-
mation. These findings, however, should be interpreted with cau-
tion because similar results did not emerge in nonclinical partici-
pants. Interestingly, experimental data collected by Maier et al.
(2004) also indicated that when adults were primed with negative
attachment-related stimuli, they showed greater difficulties than
did nonprimed adults providing positive evaluations of the self and
others as their degree of AAI attachment security (coded with the
AAI Q-Sort) decreased and their degree of dismissiveness (but not
preoccupation) increased.
In addition to using the AAI, researchers have examined
whether attachment style measures are linked to adults’ attention
to social information. In a series of experimental studies, Dewitte
and colleagues (Dewitte & De Houwer, 2008; Dewitte, Koster, De
Houwer, & Buysse, 2007) examined how adults’ ECR scores were
linked to their selective attention to different types of social
information. In one study, evidence of cognitive suppression
emerged such that increases in both attachment anxiety and avoid-
ance were linked to participants diverting attention away from
negative attachment-related words (Dewitte, Koster, et al., 2007).
In another study examining adults’ selective attention to positive
and negative facial expression (as assessed with an exogenous
cueing task; Posner, 1980), a combination of high scores on both
ECR avoidance and anxiety was associated with greater diverting
of attention away from negative and threatening facial displays
(Dewitte & De Houwer, 2008).
Other data indicate that more insecure attachment styles are
linked to poorer attention to emotionally significant information
(Fraley, Garner, & Shaver, 2000) and to greater difficulties with
integrating new information into existing cognitive structures
(Mikulincer, 1997; see also Green-Hennessy & Reis, 1998). More-
over, in a line of work similar to that of Dewitte and colleagues
(Dewitte & De Houwer, 2008; Dewitte, Koster, et al., 2007),
Edelstein and Gillath (2008) reported data consistent with the
notion that attachment avoidance is linked to the cognitive sup-
pression of attachment and non–attachment-related social informa-
tion. Using an emotional Stroop task (Williams, Mathews, &
MacLeod, 1996), these researchers reported that avoidant individ-
uals tended to inhibit their attention to negative and positive
attachment-related information but not to non–attachment-related
information (see also Mikulincer, Gillath, & Shaver, 2002, for
experimental data indicating that avoidant adults were likely to
divert their attention away from information related to attachment
figures when threatened). Interestingly, this link only emerged in
individuals who were currently in romantic relationships, which
may indicate that being in such a relationship predisposes an
avoidant person to engage in defensive information processing
strategies (see also Mikulincer, 1998a, for evidence linking inse-
cure attachment styles to adults’ selective attention away from
words describing romantic partner behavior). Furthermore, data
indicated that avoidant individuals’ propensity to divert their at-
tention away from attachment-relevant social information is a
relatively effortful process and that increasing an individual’s
cognitive load may impede the capacity of the internal working
model to protect an avoidant individual from processing such
information.
Although the data described above are generally consistent with
the notion that adults with insecure attachment styles (particularly
avoidant attachment styles) often suppress their attention to emo-
tional information, other data indicate that such suppression may
30 DYKAS AND CASSIDY

not always emerge. Anxious adults, for example, have shown
heightened attention to basic types of attachment-related informa-
tion. More precisely, adults reporting higher ECR anxiety scores
have been shown to selectively attend to the names of attachment
figures (Dewitte, De Houwer, Koster, & Buysse, 2007; Miku-
lincer, Gillath, & Shaver, 2002). Moreover, insecure-ambivalent
adults (classified using a modified version of Hazan and Shaver’s
attachment style measure) have been shown to attend relatively
quickly to attachment-related words under stressful and nonstress-
ful conditions (whereas secure adults only showed heightened
attention to these words under stressful conditions; Mikulincer,
Birnbaum, Woddis, & Nachmias, 2000). These data indicate that
insecure-anxious individuals were biased in attending to basic
forms of attachment-related information, but their attention to this
sort of information does not provide a window into whether it was
negatively or positively biased.
However, in some cases where avoidant adults have been shown
to suppress attachment-relevant information (in regard to feedback
seeking in romantic relationships), insecure-anxious adults have
been shown to process such information in a negatively biased
schematic manner. In two experimental studies, Rholes and col-
leagues (Rholes, Simpson, Tran, Martin, & Friedman, 2007) exam-
ined the extent to which the ECR predicted adults’ desires to explicitly
seek information about the self and romantic partners. Adults report-
ing greater attachment-related avoidance were more likely to use
information-seeking strategies that suppressed receiving
attachment-relevant social information about partners (e.g., highly
avoidant adults sought to limit the amount of information they
could gather about their romantic partners). Moreover, when the
researchers manipulated the participants’ psychological distress
(i.e., by having participants read an unsupportive note, ostensibly
from their romantic partner), highly avoidant individuals preferred
seeking more nonintimate relationship information (e.g., informa-
tion about the partner’s career choices) than intimate relationship
information. Conversely, adults reporting greater attachment-
related anxiety were more likely to seek out negative information
about their own relationship behaviors and characteristics in both
high- and low-stress conditions.
Similarly, Brennan and colleagues (Brennan & Bosson, 1998;
Carnelley, Israel, & Brennan, 2007) reported findings demonstrat-
ing evidence of suppression in avoidant adults and schematically
biased processing in anxious adults with regard to feedback seek-
ing in romantic relationships. More precisely, adults with higher
ECR avoidance reported less openness and greater indifference to
romantic partner feedback, whereas adults with higher ECR anx-
iety sought greater positive feedback about their romantic relation-
ships yet responded more negatively to such feedback (leading to
feelings of estrangement from romantic partners). Carnelley et al.
also provided experimental evidence indicating that attachment
anxiety plays an especially prominent role in feedback seeking
such that more anxious adults are more affected by partner feed-
back (and are more willing to incorporate negative feedback into
their self-views) and more likely to be negatively emotionally
affected by such feedback.
Attachment and adults’ memory for social information.
Several studies have examined links between attachment and
adults’ memory for social information. In studies conducted with
the AAI, experimental data (consistent with the notion of suppres-
sion) have emerged, indicating that insecure adults recalled fewer
emotionally laden words than did secure adults in a free-recall task
(Zeijlmans van Emmichoven et al., 2003). Other studies, however,
have shown that the AAI is not linked to non–attachment-related
autobiographical memories (Bakermans-Kranenburg & van IJzen-
doorn, 1993; Sagi et al., 1994). Studies examining adults’ attach-
ment styles and memory have been plentiful and have indicated
that attachment insecurity is linked to defensive suppression. In a
series of four studies, for example, Fraley and colleagues (Fraley
& Brumbaugh, 2007; Fraley et al., 2000) asked adults to listen to
a tape-recorded clinical interview of a woman describing her
family relationships that contained many attachment-related
themes. After hearing this story, participants completed a cued-
recall test or an implicit memory test. In all four studies, avoidant
individuals showed the greatest difficulties remembering informa-
tion from the interview, even when there was a monetary incentive
to remember such information (Fraley & Brumbaugh, 2007). Re-
latedly, Edelstein (2006) reported an association between attach-
ment avoidance and working memory deficits for both positive and
negative attachment-related information.
Links between adults’ attachment styles and their memory for
personal events have also been examined in a variety of studies.
Using the Hazan and Shaver (1987) method to assess attachment
and an experimental memory paradigm, Mikulincer and Orbach
(1995) asked adults to recall four emotional memories from child-
hood (in which they were happy, sad, angry, and anxious) and to
rate how they had remembered feeling during these experiences.
Evidence of cognitive suppression emerged such that with respect
to general recall, insecure-avoidant adults required the greatest
amount of time to recall sad and anxious memories and provided
the least intense emotional ratings of these memories. They were
also the least likely to recall memories from early in their child-
hood (e.g., their memories typically were more recent in time.) Of
interest, within-group analyses further indicated that the emotional
content of memories influenced adults’ abilities to recall such
memories as a function of attachment. More precisely, whereas
insecure-avoidant adults recalled each of the four memories in
roughly the same amount of time, insecure-ambivalent adults
recalled sad, angry, and anxious memories more quickly than
happy memories, and secure adults recalled happy and anxious
memories more quickly than angry or sad memories. In a related
study, Sutin and Gillath (2009) reported that increases in ECR
avoidance were linked to less coherent memories for experiences
with romantic partners (as assessed by the ease with which these
memories could be recalled and/or envisioned). Edelstein et al.
(2005) also found that childhood sexual abuse survivors had more
profound deficits in memory for their abusive experiences as their
degree of attachment avoidance increased. However, Qin, Ogle,
and Goodman (2008) reported that adults’ attachment styles were
not linked to their memory for childhood experiences (not neces-
sarily attachment-related experiences), as assessed with parents’
reports of childhood events that these adults had (or had not)
experienced.
Data on links between attachment styles and schematic memory
biases have also emerged. Attachment insecurity, for example, has
been linked to less positive and/or less accurate memories for other
adults (Mikulincer, 1998b; Mikulincer & Horesh, 1999; Rom &
Mikulincer, 2003), including those involving romantic partners
(e.g., Pietromonaco & Barrett, 1997; see also Mikulincer & Arad,
1999). Similarly, in a recent study using daily diaries, Gentzler and
31
ATTACHMENT AND INFORMATION PROCESSING

Kerns (2006) reported links between attachment and memory for
negative and positive social daily events such that increases in
ECR anxiety and avoidance were linked to participants’ remem-
bering daily social events less positively than they had originally
perceived them 1 week earlier. Adults’ attachment-related memory
biases also appear to have important functional ramifications when
adults are experiencing a negative emotional state. Pereg and
Mikulincer (2004), for example, reported that secure adults were
likely to recall positive information when they were experiencing
a negative affective state, whereas insecure-anxious adults were
likely to recall less positive information. These schematically
biased information processing patterns might help secure adults
more readily repair their mood (by encoding and recalling infor-
mation of a positive nature) and contribute to insecure-anxious
adults maintaining their negative mood (by encoding and recalling
negative information.)
In a recent study, Simpson, Rholes, and Winterheld (2010) used
the procedure devised by Feeney and Cassidy (2003) and Dykas et
al. (2010) to examine links between attachment and reconstructive
memory (described above) and reported similar findings with
romantic couples. This study is notable because the data suggest
that attachment alters adults’ view of the self in a schematically
biased way over time such that insecure-avoidant adults draw on
the unsupportive character of their internal working models of self
when attempting to recall memories of interpersonal stress,
whereas insecure-anxious adults draw on an internal working
model of self as socially dependent (i.e., nonautonomous) during
interpersonal stress.
Of note, data from one recent investigation suggests that adults
may at first process attachment-relevant social information sche-
matically but then suppress it as a function of their attachment
styles (Haggerty, Siefert, & Weinberger, 2010). In this study,
adults were instructed to freely recall childhood experiences before
the age of 14 years. (Although this task was similar to the one used
by Mikulincer & Orbach, 1995, participants in this study were not
instructed to remember a particular emotionally laden childhood
memory). Results indicated that although increases in attachment-
related anxiety and avoidance were linked to remembering a
greater number of negative childhood memories, only increases in
avoidance were linked to remembering a greater number of neg-
ative memories involving caregivers. However, once these mem-
ories were recalled, adults reported these memories as less intense
as their ECR avoidance increased, a finding similar to that reported
by Mikulincer and Orbach (1995). These data suggest that the
nature of the task used to elicit the processing of attachment-
relevant social information may be a key factor in whether indi-
viduals suppress information or process it schematically.
Finally, researchers who have experimentally primed adults’
attachment security have reported data in support of attachment-
related suppression or schematically biased information process-
ing. Sutin and Gillath (2009), for example, reported that adults
who were exposed to a secure prime (i.e., thinking about a sensi-
tive real-life person) demonstrated more coherent memory for
experiences with romantic partners than adults exposed to an
insecure prime (i.e., thinking about an insensitive real-life person).
Other studies that have primed immediate feelings of attachment
security have reported data consistent with the notion that insecu-
rity is linked to schematically biased memory processes. In one
study, Miller and Noirot (1999; see also Miller, 1999) primed
adults to have either negative or positive attachment-related ex-
pectations and then asked them (a) to read an attachment-related
story about close friendships and (b) to complete a cued-recall
task. Compared with all other participants, insecure-fearful adults
(as assessed with the Relationship Questionnaire) were the most
likely to recall negative events in the friendship story regardless of
whether they were primed to have negative or positive attachment-
related expectations. Miller (1999) also reported data indicating
that whereas insecure-fearful adults showed better memory for
separation between friends in these stories, secure adults showed
better memory for friends engaging in joint activities. Intriguing
evidence also indicates that experimentally primed security en-
hances memory for emotionally salient stimuli and personal expe-
riences (Mikulincer, Gillath, et al., 2001; Rowe & Carnelley,
2003). Mikulincer, Gillath, et al. (2001), for example, found that
promoting greater security (i.e., through the presentation of
attachment-related pictures showing a distressed person being
helped and physically comforted by an opposite-sex partner)—as
opposed to priming with affectively positive or neutral materials—
enabled adults to have better memory for experiences in which
they responded empathetically to another person’s distress.
Attachment and adults’ perceptions, expectations, and attri-
butions. A wealth of data lends considerable support to the
notion that adults perceive other persons in a schematically biased
way as a function of attachment. AAI attachment insecurity, for
example, has been linked to perceptions of others as less trustwor-
thy (Larose & Bernier, 2001), to more negative perceptions of
romantic partners (Crowell, Treboux, Gao, et al., 2002; Crowell,
Treboux, & Waters, 2002; Eiden, Teti, Corns, 1995), and to more
negative perceptions of one’s own children (e.g., Benoit, Zeanah,
Parker, Nicholson, & Coolbear, 1997; Slade, Belsky, Aber, &
Phelps, 1999). Data also indicate that adults’ attachment styles are
linked to schematic perceptional biases, expectations, and attribu-
tions. For example, research has shown that adults with insecure
attachment styles (as assessed with the ECR, the Relationship
Questionnaire, and similar measures) are less likely than their
counterparts to view attachment figures as emotionally and instru-
mentally supportive (Florian, Mikulincer, & Bucholtz, 1995), to
perceive romantic relationships and the behavior of romantic part-
ners in a positive light (Collins & Feeney, 2004; Collins & Read,
1990), to see others persons as worthy of help, to perceive other
persons’ needs, and to believe they are able to help others effec-
tively (Reizer & Mikulincer, 2007). Collins and Feeney (2004), for
example, reported that increases in attachment anxiety and avoid-
ance were associated with a greater likelihood that adults would
perceive ambiguous forms of social support from real-life roman-
tic partners as less helpful and less well intended. Insecure adults
have also shown less positive expectations of interpersonal close-
ness, dependency, and trust (e.g., Baldwin, Fehr, Keedian, Seidel,
& Thomson, 1993; Rowe & Carnelley, 2003), more negative
attributions of the causes of infants’ emotional states (Leerkes &
Siepak, 2006), and more hostile attributions of others’ behaviors
(Mikulincer, 1998a; Pereg & Mikulincer, 2004). Interestingly,
recent experimental data indicate that the explicit and implicit
negative views of romantic partners that insecure-ambivalent in-
dividuals experience may dampen any positive views these indi-
viduals also have of their partners (Mikulincer, Shaver, Bar-On, &
Ein-Dor, 2010).
32 DYKAS AND CASSIDY

Similarly, romantic attachment style differences have emerged
in the way in which adults modify their perceptions of others
(Mikulincer & Arad, 1999; Mikulincer, Orbach, & Iavnieli, 1998;
Zhang & Hazan, 2002). Mikulincer et al. (1998), for example,
provided experimental evidence, consistent with the notion of
schematic information processing, that when emotionally dis-
tressed, insecure-avoidant adults (as assessed with the Hazan and
Shaver attachment style measure) were more likely than secure
adults to view other persons as less similar to the self in order to
distance themselves cognitively and/or emotionally from other
persons. Interestingly, however, when under emotional distress,
insecure-ambivalent adults viewed others as more similar to the
self (in order, perhaps, to foster greater closeness to others).
In an intriguing study, Mikulincer (1998a) reported that adults’
expectations of their romantic partners in anger-related contexts
(assessed experimentally with a lexical decision task) were sche-
matically biased as a function of their attachment styles (assessed
with the Hazan and Shaver measure). In this task, participants were
repeatedly presented with four incomplete sentences (i.e., two
anger-relevant sentences and two anger-irrelevant sentences) over
the course of 96 trials and were instructed to indicate whether the
word completing each sentence was a word or a nonword (the
words described the partner responding either positively or nega-
tively to the participant in the anger and nonanger episodes or were
neutral in nature). Significant results emerged for the anger-
relevant sentences only: compared with insecure-avoidant and
insecure-ambivalent adults, secure adults completed this task more
quickly when positive words completed the anger-relevant sen-
tences; in contrast, compared with secure adults, insecure adults
completed the task more quickly when negative words completed
the sentences. Within-group analyses further indicated that secure
adults responded more quickly to positive than to negative re-
sponse words, whereas avoidant and anxious–ambivalent adults
responded more quickly to negative than to positive response
words in anger-relevant contexts.
Finally, experimental studies have shown that priming attach-
ment security causes adults to have more positive perceptions of
others (for a recent comprehensive review of these studies, see
Gillath, Selcuk, & Shaver, 2008; Mikulincer & Shaver, 2007b,
2007c). Such priming has been linked to more positive expecta-
tions of others (including romantic partners; Carnelley & Rowe,
2007; Pierce & Lydon, 1998; Rowe & Carnelley, 2003) and to
more positive group-related perceptions (Rom & Mikulincer,
2003). In a notable set of five studies, Mikulincer and Shaver
(2001) reported that adults who were primed to feel a sense of
security (to feel loved and surrounded by supporting others) were
generally more likely than adults in positive affect or neutral
priming conditions to attenuate their negative perceptions of out-
group targets.
Attachment and adults’ secure base scripts. When writing
about internal working models and information processing,
Bowlby (1980) quoted Goethe’s well known claim that “we see
only what we know” (p. 44). Nowhere is this idea more evident
than in the research related to attachment scripts of adults (as it
was in research with children and adolescents, presented earlier).
As described earlier, the most commonly used paradigm for ex-
amining attachment scripts consists of asking participants to use
word sets (containing 12 word prompts each) to create a brief
narrative (H. S. Waters & Rodrigues-Doolabh, 2001). In this
section, we review findings with adults indicating that when par-
ticipants look at these word sets, order and organize them, and
embed them within other words to create a narrative, the narrative
that they “see” is indeed the one that they know (i.e., their
knowledge of attachment as assessed with the AAI and the ECR).
Four studies, for example, have examined links between the
AAI and the quality of mothers’ secure base scripts (Coppola,
Vaughn, Cassibba, & Costantini, 2006; Dykas et al., 2007;
Guttmann-Steinmetz, Elliot, Steiner, & Waters, 2003; H. S. Waters
& Rodrigues-Doolabh, 2001). H. S. Waters and Rodrigues-
Doolabh reported that greater AAI coherence of mind was linked
to a greater propensity to create stories from word prompts (in-
volving children and their parents, as well as adults) that followed
a secure base script. Guttmann-Steinmetz et al. also reported that
mothers who demonstrated the greatest AAI coherence were the
most capable of helping their 4- to 5-year-old children coconstruct
stories that followed a secure base script. In addition, evidence
indicated that AAI coherence of mind (assessed 3 months prior to
marriage) was linked longitudinally to women’s capacities to
generate stories about romantic partners that followed a secure
base script 8–10 years later (Wais & Treboux, 2003).
Finally, data from eight studies indicate that adults’ attachment
styles were linked to abilities to create and complete stories (and
interpret intrapersonal events, that is, dreams) that follow a secure
base script (Mikulincer, Shaver, Sapir-Lavid, & Avihou-Kanza,
2009). Results generally indicated that adults lower in ECR anx-
iety or avoidance created and completed stories that followed a
secure base script in a more automatic and open manner. More-
over, increases in attachment avoidance were linked to the creation
of stories characterized by not seeking care from another person,
whereas increases in attachment anxiety were linked to the cre-
ation of stories characterized by not being comforted by caregiving
received from another person.
Attachment and the Processing of Social Information
Across Generations
Several studies have examined pieces of a larger theoretical
component of attachment theory (e.g., Bowlby, 1973) stating that
parents’ attachment security and their corresponding ways of pro-
cessing social information contribute to their children’s quality of
attachment to them and ultimately to the manner in which children
learn how to process social information. According to this model,
insecure (but not secure) parents will process attachment-relevant
social information about their children in a defensive and nega-
tively biased manner, and this type of information processing will
likely contribute (through insensitive parenting behaviors) to their
children becoming insecurely attached to them and to the devel-
opment of these children’s defensive and negatively biased sche-
matic information processing strategies. Main et al. (1985) were
the first to find empirical evidence for distortions or suppression in
information processing and their endurance across generations (see
also Bowlby, 1973, 1988; Bretherton & Munholland, 2008;
Fraiberg, Adelson, & Shapiro, 1975; George & Solomon, 2008;
Hesse & Main, 1999; A. Lieberman, Silverman, & Pawl, 1999; van
IJzendoorn, 1995). In this section, we examine data on these
intergenerational links by reviewing studies that have examined (a)
whether parents’ attachment security is linked to their children’s
social information processing and, conversely, (b) whether chil-
33
ATTACHMENT AND INFORMATION PROCESSING

dren’s attachment security is linked to their parents’ social infor-
mation processing.
Parents’ attachment and children’s social information pro-
cessing.
Parents’ attachment and children’s memory. Several studies
have reported links between parents’ attachment styles and chil-
dren’s memory for social information (Alexander et al., 2002;
Goodman, Quas, Batterman-Faunce, Riddlesberger, & Kuhn,
1997; Qin et al., 2008; Reese, 2008). Considered as a whole, these
studies indicate that children engage in defensive suppression of
emotional autobiographical memories as a function of their par-
ents’ attachment insecurity. In one study, for example, Goodman et
al. (1997) found that compared with children of secure parents (as
assessed with Hazan and Shaver’s attachment style measure),
children of insecure parents often had inaccurate memories for
stressful medical treatments (e.g., these children would agree with
false statements regarding the treatments and disagree with true
statements). In a similar study, Alexander et al. (2002) reported
additional evidence that insecure attachment styles in parents (as
assessed with the ECR) were linked to their children’s poorer
memory for stressful events. For example, greater parental attach-
ment anxiety was linked to less accurate and more inaccurate child
memory for these events. Of interest, children of highly avoidant
parents also showed poorer memory as the degree of stress they
had experienced during these procedures increased, but children of
low-avoidant parents showed greater memory as the degree of
stress they experienced increased. These latter findings are intrigu-
ing because they suggest that children of avoidant parents may
have difficulties in encoding and/or recalling emotionally and
physically painful memories, whereas children of more secure
parents remain open to painful experiences and can accurately
recall these experiences. In a related study, Qin et al. (2008)
reported that parents’ attachment styles (assessed with the Rela-
tionship Questionnaire) were linked to their adult children’s false
memory (but not true memory) for specific positive and negative
childhood events (e.g., greater fearful avoidance and preoccupa-
tion in parents was linked to a greater propensity in their adult
children to show false memories for specific childhood events).
Mothers’ attachment and children’s emotional understanding.
One longitudinal study reported that mothers’ AAI attachment
classifications during pregnancy predicted their children’s under-
standing of hypothetical negative social events at age 11 years (M.
Steele et al., 2002). Children whose mothers’ AAI classifications
had been insecure were more likely than other children to show
suppression of negative emotions. For example, these children
were less likely than other children to understand that certain
negative life events, such as child–parent separation, were typi-
cally distressing for children. These children were also less likely
to elaborate on why such negative events were distressing and how
a child’s distress might be resolved.
Children’s attachment and parents’ social information pro-
cessing.
Children’s attachment and parents’ attention. At the most
fundamental level, children’s attachment can be viewed as linked
to parental attention to children’s own behavior. For instance,
Bowlby (1988) noted that when a parent selectively attends to
some aspects of the child’s emotional signals and “turns a blind
eye” (p. 132) to others (a practice that may constitute either
schematic processing or maternal suppression), infant–parent in-
teraction patterns develop that contribute to insecure attachment.
Empirical support for a link between infant attachment and ma-
ternal selective attention to infant emotions comes from a study of
mother–infant free play (K. E. Grossmann, Scheuerer-Englisch, &
Loher, 1991; see also K. Grossmann, Grossmann, Kindler, &
Zimmermann, 2008). Mothers of avoidant infants were found to be
more likely to attend to and join in play with their infant when the
infant was content but withdrew attention and interaction when the
infant expressed negative affect; the pattern was reversed among
mothers of securely attached infants, who were likely to attend
when the infant expressed negative emotions and needed soothing.
Main (1999) too has described maternal insensitivity as a reflec-
tion of maternal selective attention—guided, in turn, by her wish
to maintain her own state of mind with respect to attachment.
Moreover, to the extent that AAI transcripts can be viewed as
reflecting selective parental attention during the construction of an
attachment-related narrative, the considerable body of research
revealing links between parental AAIs and infant and child attach-
ment are relevant here (see van IJzendoorn, 1995, for a meta-
analysis).
In addition to these observational studies, one experimental
study (Atkinson et al., 2009; described earlier) examined sche-
matic links between children’s attachment (assessed with the
Strange Situation) and parents’ attention to social information (i.e.,
negative and neutral words presented during a Stroop task). Com-
pared with mothers of organized infants, mothers of disorganized
infants completed the Stroop task more slowly when processing
negative words, suggesting that mothers of disorganized infants
were having difficulties disengaging their attention from these
words.
Adolescents’ attachment and parents’ memory. To our
knowledge, no published study has examined whether children’s
attachment is associated with parents’ memory for attachment-
relevant social information, but one study has examined this as-
sociation in adolescents and their parents (Dykas et al., 2010). In
this study (described earlier), adolescents engaged in a 10-min
conflict discussion with each parent. Parents rated their percep-
tions of this conflict both immediately following the discussion
and again 6 weeks later. Evidence of schematically biased pro-
cessing emerged such that mothers of secure adolescents (as as-
sessed with the AAI) viewed the interactions more favorably over
time, whereas mothers of insecure adolescents viewed them less
favorably. No significant results emerged with respect to fathers.
Children’s attachment and mothers’ secure base scripts.
Several studies (conducted across a variety of cultures) have
reported links between child attachment and mothers’ ability to
create stories schematically following a secure base script. Moth-
ers of securely attached infants (assessed with the Strange Situa-
tion) and children (assessed using the observer-rated Attachment
Q-Sort) were more likely than other mothers to create stories about
child–mother and adult–adult interactions that followed a secure
base script (Bost et al., 2006; Tini, Corcoran, Rodrigues-Doolabh,
& Waters, 2003; Vaughn et al., 2007; Verı´ssimo & Salvaterra,
2006).
Infants’ attachment and parental mind-mindedness, insight-
fulness, and reflective functioning. Several studies have inves-
tigated whether infant attachment is associated with a mother’s
capacity to understand her infant’s mental states. Ainsworth (1969)
initially referred to this capacity in terms of a mother being able to
34 DYKAS AND CASSIDY

see things from the baby’s point of view and created a sensitivity
scale to tap this maternal behavior. In addition to being used
repeatedly in attachment research, this scale has contributed to
more recent theory about the importance of considering maternal
attention to infant mental states. In particular, Meins (1997, 1999)
termed this capacity maternal mind-mindedness, which she con-
ceptualized as mothers’ ability to use “information from their
children’s outward behavior in making accurate inferences about
the mental states governing that behavior” (Meins, Fernyhough,
Fradley, & Tuckey, 2001, p. 638). Mind-minded mothers possess
a capacity to attend to their infants’ dynamic and complex mental
states and can easily shift and refocus their attention from one state
to another as states emerge. Moreover, these mothers demonstrate
a capacity to “read” their infants’ minds and to understand how
their infants’ mental states reflect their infants’ day-to-day expe-
riences, possibly reflecting an ability to store the infants’ experi-
ences in memory and/or to recall these memories when necessary.
Several studies have reported an association between insecure
child attachment (as assessed with the Strange Situation) and less
competent parental mind-mindedness, which may indicate that
parents of insecure children suppress the processing of information
related to their children to some degree or at least fail to make
connections between their children’s behavior and internal states.
In a 2-year longitudinal study, for example, infant attachment at
12 months predicted mothers’ mind-mindedness when infants
were 3 year of age; compared with mothers of children who had
been secure, mothers of children who had been insecure were
less likely to describe their children in terms of their mental
characteristics, less likely to incorporate child-related informa-
tion into behavioral caregiving responses, and more likely to
describe them in terms of their physical appearance and/or
behavioral tendencies (Meins et al., 1998; see also Arnott &
Meins, 2007, for longitudinal links between both maternal and
paternal mind-mindedness and earlier infant attachment; see
Meins et al., 2001, 2002, for similar data linking maternal
mindedness longitudinally to subsequent child attachment qual-
ity at 12 months of age).
In addition to the construct of maternal mind-mindedness,
related aspects of mothers’ abilities to understand their chil-
dren’s mental states have been examined as potential links to
children’s attachment security assessed in the Strange Situation.
Oppenheim and Koren-Karie (2002), for example, have used
the term maternal insightfulness to refer to a mother’s ability to
see things from her infant’s point of view (i.e., the ability to
understand the motives of her child’s behavior, to possess an
emotionally complex view of the child, and to demonstrate
openness to new information regarding the child). As expected,
mothers who have shown more insightfulness regarding their
children were more likely than other mothers to have securely
attached children (Koren-Karie, Oppenheim, Dolev, Sher, &
Etzion-Carasso, 2002; Oppenheim, Koren-Karie, & Sagi,
2001). Other researchers (Slade, Grienenberger, Bernbach,
Levy, & Locker, 2005) have reported that mothers who have
secure infants are more likely than other mothers to score higher
on measures of reflective functioning, which is a mother’s
ability to hold her baby and his or her mental state in mind
(Fonagy et al., 2002; see also Slade, 2005).
Conclusions and Future Research Directions
Researchers have used Bowlby’s attachment theory—and prin-
cipally the notion of internal working models of attachment—to
understand the nature of human social information processing.
However, as Bretherton and Munholland (2008) noted, Bowlby’s
internal working model construct can be viewed “not [as] a fully
worked-out theory, but [as] a promising conceptual framework to
be filled in by others” (p. 103). This review is intended to con-
tribute to Bowlby’s framework by examining the empirical liter-
ature on how internal working models of attachment are linked to
human social information processing phenomena, a literature un-
available to Bowlby. We now draw some general conclusions and
add greater specificity to Bowlby’s original theorizing. We also
provide some directions for future research.
Social Information Processing as a Function of
Information Type and Attachment Quality
Existing data reveal a pattern, evident across development and
across generations, wherein secure individuals process attachment-
relevant social information relatively fully and flexibly. They do
not routinely exclude or suppress attachment-relevant social infor-
mation to avoid experiencing psychological pain but instead pro-
cess a variety of positively and negatively laden information
openly. These individuals also process information in a positively
biased schematic fashion by drawing on the positive knowledge
that is thought to be incorporated into their internal working
models of attachment.
Insecure individuals, in contrast, exclude or suppress
attachment-relevant social information that is linked (a) to attach-
ment figures, either directly or tangentially, and (b) to specific
mental knowledge of attachment-related childhood events that, if
brought to conscious awareness, could cause psychological pain.
We propose that these defensive cognitive strategies are revealed
empirically when experimental and nonexperimental methodolo-
gies make individuals either relatively passive or, alternatively,
highly active processors of potentially psychologically painful
social information concerning attachment figures. We discuss
these contexts below.
When individuals are required to passively process (i.e., auto-
matically, with no effortful conscious mental control) attachment-
relevant social information in inconspicuous attention and memory
tasks (e.g., when individuals simply view information and are not
required, through any direct instruction, to consciously respond to
the information), insecure internal working models typically ap-
pear to function to instigate implicit/nonconscious mental strate-
gies that limit an individual’s attention to, or memory for, such
information. These deficiencies in insecure individuals’ attention
and memory are not easily observable and are only detected when
methodologies allow researchers to examine precisely subtle indi-
cators of attention and memory that do not appear to be entirely
under the conscious control of the individual. For example, as
described earlier, data have emerged indicating that insecure chil-
dren suppress their attention to and memory for attachment-
relevant social information when asked to simply view attachment-
related drawings (where eye movements are recorded to assess
attention and incidental recall tasks are used to assess memory;
e.g., Kirsh & Cassidy, 1997; Main et al., 1985). Studies have also
35
ATTACHMENT AND INFORMATION PROCESSING

indicated that insecure adults suppress their attention and/or mem-
ory when simply instructed to view attachment-related words, and
similar measures are used to assess attention and memory, such as
the Stroop task (e.g., Dewitte, Koster, et al., 2007; Edelstein, 2006;
Edelstein & Gillath, 2008; Fraley & Brumbaugh, 2007; Zeijlmans
van Emmichoven et al., 2003). The one study reviewed here that
could be perceived as not supporting this phenomenon (i.e., At-
kinson et al., 2009), in fact, examined a rarely studied AAI
attachment group, finding that mothers classified as insecure-
unresolved demonstrated greater attention to negative words than
to neutral words in the Stroop task. Although the Stroop task is
typically regarded as measuring implicit information processing,
insecure-unresolved mothers may be so vigilant to negative infor-
mation that they may actively process and be aware of the negative
information presented in this task.
A variety of methodological paradigms have also revealed strik-
ing evidence that insecure individuals engage in exclusion when
processing social information pertaining to attachment figures in a
highly active, conscious, and mentally effortful way (i.e., when
asked specifically to think about such information, and when such
thinking required a considerable amount of conscious effortful
control involving a variety of mental resources). In the introduc-
tion to this article, we described how insecure individuals show
varying degrees of suppression or exclusion during the AAI when
they are asked repeatedly to attend to, recall from memory, and/or
construct mental responses to positive and negative attachment-
related events that happened long ago in childhood, which are
stored in long-term memory and are not readily accessible (see
also Hesse, 1999, 2008). In our literature review, we have provided
additional evidence that insecure adolescents and adults (at least
insecure-avoidant individuals) exclude or suppress attachment-
relevant social information related to parents in memory tasks
dealing with remembering childhood experiences (Dykas &
Cassidy, 2010; Mikulincer & Orbach, 1995). Indeed, in these
situations, the implementation of highly effortful mental processes
may serve as a trigger for insecure individuals’ internal working
models of attachment to function in a way that prevents such
information from being processed, in the service of protecting
these individuals from becoming aware of attachment knowledge
that would be psychologically painful to process.
Notably, insecure individuals appear to process information
about attachment figures, attachment-related events, and other
persons in a negatively biased schematic manner in cases in which
they are consciously aware of the information yet do not have to
expend much conscious effortful control processing such informa-
tion. In these cases, insecure individuals likely draw on the neg-
ative attachment-related knowledge that is thought to be incorpo-
rated into their internal working models of attachment and process
information in a conscious, yet relatively noneffortful and cursory
manner. Moreover, because this schematic cognitive processing
pathway does not involve a high degree of mental effort, it is
relatively unlikely that individuals will associate this information
with potentially painful attachment-related knowledge; therefore,
there is no trigger for insecure individuals’ internal working mod-
els to function to exclude or suppress the information from being
processed. The large research literatures on children’s, adoles-
cents’, and adults’ perceptions, expectations, and attributions about
other persons lends support to this notion (e.g., when asked to
simply describe, but not provide considerable detail about, expe-
riences with other persons, insecure individuals across the life span
typically generate negative descriptions; Larose & Bernier, 2001;
Seuss et al., 1992; Zimmermann, 2004).
Future Directions
Although a wealth of data exists about links between attachment
and the processing of attachment-relevant social information, in
future work, researchers could contribute to current knowledge of
these links in several important ways. First, additional research is
needed to understand the conditions under which insecure individ-
uals sometimes exclude attachment-relevant social information
and sometimes process it with a negative schematic bias. Although
the majority of the existing studies have not examined such con-
ditions, the intriguing data reported by Haggerty et al. (2010) on
adults’ attachment-related memory processes demonstrate that in-
secure individuals may switch from processing information sche-
matically to suppressing it if it involves thinking effortfully about
the information’s emotional components (recall that avoidant
adults’ memory for childhood attachment-related experiences
seemed to be suppressed only when these individuals were con-
fronted with the need to process the emotional nature of the
memories.) Thus, although we follow Bowlby (1980) in proposing
that insecure individuals at times exclude social information in
order to avoid experiencing psychological pain, we note that little
is known about whether, how, and for whom avoidance of pain
occurs (or how much pain is tolerable). It might also be interesting
to examine other types of pain, perhaps physical pain (see Mac-
Donald & Leary, 2005). Although we have speculated about the
ways in which the nature of the information processing tasks may
play a role, empirical examination of these propositions is needed
(especially in regard to children’s theory of mind and emotional
understanding, where the issue of whether insecure children ex-
clude and/or process information schematically is particularly
complex).
Second, more insights are needed into how different aspects of
internal working models of attachment (e.g., attachment patterns,
state of mind with respect to attachment, attachment styles,
attachment-related representations of parents) link to specific as-
pects of information processing. We are hesitant to draw conclu-
sions regarding whether some aspects of internal working models
are linked more or less strongly (or not linked at all) to different
types of information processing because almost all studies we
reviewed used a single observational, interview, or self-report
methodology to assess the quality of participants’ internal working
models of attachment. In future work, investigators should aim to
examine how different measures of attachment link to different
types of information processing. For example, when examining
attention to attachment figures, is the “attachment effect” greater
for AAI-derived attachment variables (e.g., AAI coherence of
mind) or for ECR-derived variables (e.g., attachment-related anx-
iety and avoidance)? Moreover, experimental studies in which
attachment quality is manipulated allow researchers to conclude
whether individual differences in attachment cause corresponding
differences in social information processing, whereas nonexperi-
mental studies cannot. Although we are aware of the conceptual
and empirical difficulties (and potential ethical dilemmas) associ-
ated with manipulating attachment security, researchers should
consider ways in which attachment could be manipulated to test
36 DYKAS AND CASSIDY

experimentally the conceptual causal model presented in this arti-
cle (e.g., the relatively new adult security priming methodologies
are promising in this regard; see Over & Carpenter, 2009, for
experimental priming of prosocial behavior in 18-month-old in-
fants).
In a similar vein, when conducting longitudinal studies that
examine whether early attachment predicts later information pro-
cessing, a second attachment assessment could be included con-
temporaneously with the information processing measures. Such a
design allows examination of whether links between earlier attach-
ment and later information processing are attributable simply to
(stable) concurrent attachment or whether these links persist in the
face of a change in attachment. Moreover, although being secure in
infancy places a person on a trajectory toward a variety of positive
outcomes later in life (e.g., E. Waters et al., 2000), this trajectory
is not deterministic and may be redirected toward problematic
outcomes through a wide range of negative life experiences (e.g.,
subsequent maternal depression; see Weinfield, Sroufe, & Ege-
land, 2000). Relatedly, little is known, about the information
processing patterns of individuals whose AAI profiles are charac-
terized by lack of resolution when discussing trauma or death (i.e.,
insecure-unresolved individuals); future studies could provide im-
portant insights. It would also be interesting to examine whether
expected positively biased schematic information processing pat-
terns in secure individuals do not emerge when these individuals
have experienced some sort of negative life experience that has
changed their perceptions of self and others (e.g., outgroup exclu-
sion such as racism). In short, studies considering concurrent
attachment and attachment-altering life events could provide a
window into lawful discontinuity between attachment and social
information processing (i.e., by identifying the circumstances un-
der which the expected links between attachment and social infor-
mation processing do not emerge).
Future research also could examine issues of discriminant va-
lidity by incorporating non–attachment-related psychological vari-
ables into various methodological designs to determine whether
attachment but not other variables (such as those assessing per-
sonality structures and psychosocial functioning) predict informa-
tion processing (e.g., a third variable such as non–attachment-
related depression could explain a potentially spurious link
between insecure attachment and negative information processing
patterns). (In experimental priming studies, researchers have ex-
amined whether non–attachment-related primes are as effective as
attachment-related primes in promoting positive social and/or
emotional functioning; see Mikulincer & Shaver, 2001; see also
Mikulincer, Hirschberger, Nachmias, & Gillath, 2001). Further,
such examinations could provide additional information about the
extent to which the internal working model construct is a distinct
psychological concept. For example, some researchers have sug-
gested that insecurity of attachment (especially attachment preoc-
cupation) be considered a proxy for more general types of neurot-
icism (see Noftle & Shaver, 2006). One straightforward test of this
hypothesis would be to determine whether indices of attachment,
but not neuroticism, are linked to core social information process-
ing features.
Data on adolescents’ attachment-relevant social information
processing are also currently lacking. Although the early work of
attachment theorists set the stage for examining adolescent attach-
ment processes (e.g., Allen & Land, 1999; Bretherton, 1990;
Kobak & Sceery, 1988), and more recent theoretical and empirical
inroads have been made to understanding attachment and infor-
mation processing in adolescence (Dykas & Cassidy, 2007), sub-
stantially less research has been conducted with adolescents than
with children and adults. Considering that adolescence is marked
by (a) significant qualitative changes in the structure of adoles-
cents’ internal working models of attachment, (b) significant be-
havioral changes in the adolescent–parent attachment relationship,
and (c) the creation of new attachment relationships (e.g., romantic
relationships; Allen, 2008; Scharf & Mayseless, 2007), adoles-
cence is a particularly important developmental stage within which
to study linkages between attachment and information processing.
Longitudinal studies, for example, could shed light on how
changes in the nature of adolescent attachment processes affect
adolescents’ information processing related to parents and others.
On a different note, future researchers could examine more
systematically complex relations among attachment, social infor-
mation processing, and various social and emotional outcomes.
Insecure attachment and deficiencies in social information pro-
cessing both have been linked separately to a variety of social–
behavioral and emotional problems in children and adolescents
(for reviews, see Crick & Dodge, 1994; DeKlyen & Greenberg,
2008; Dodge & Pettit, 2003; Dozier, Stovall-McClough, & Albus,
2008). Yet, with a few notable exceptions (e.g., Cassidy et al.,
1996, and Sutin & Gillath, 2009), little work has examined the
interplay between attachment and social information processing in
predicting these outcomes. Using mediation models, researchers
could examine whether social information processing mediates the
association between attachment and social and emotional adaptation
as Bowlby (1973) proposed (see also Dweck & London, 2004).
Moreover, considering the great emphasis that psychologists place
on understanding how individuals contribute actively and dynam-
ically to their own development (e.g., Scarr & McCartney, 1983),
examining real-time and online attachment-related information
processing patterns could yield insights into how such patterns
affect behavior in actual social–interactional processes with other
persons (see, for example, Feeney’s, 2007, study that used instant
messenger computer technology to examine participants’ real-time
attention to romantic partner support). From an intergenerational
perspective, researchers could also examine models whereby, for
example, a parent’s insecure attachment leads to his or her nega-
tively biased information processing patterns. These patterns, in
turn, potentially result in poor parenting and poor developmental
outcomes (including insecure attachment) in the parent’s child (see
van IJzendoorn, 1995). Using moderator models, researchers could
examine whether links between attachment and socioemotional
outcomes are moderated by information processing (cf. data have
indicated that maltreated children exhibited externalizing behav-
iors only when they had maladaptive information processing; Toth,
Cicchetti, & Kim, 2002).
From a physiological perspective, researchers could also exam-
ine the underlying physiological processes associated with links
between attachment and social information processing. Social in-
formation processing is—at its core—governed by a variety of
different neural mechanisms that relate to both cognition and affect
(Insel & Fernald, 2004), and considerable advances have been
made in understanding the neuroscience of social cognition (M. D.
Lieberman, 2007; Taylor, Eisenberger, Saxbe, Lehman, & Lieber-
man, 2006). Although neurophysiological explanations for links
37
ATTACHMENT AND INFORMATION PROCESSING

between attachment and information processing have yet to be
well developed, the literature on maltreated children has demon-
strated that children who have experienced strained, abusive, or
neglectful attachment relationships are likely to have impaired
psychophysiological functioning when processing social informa-
tion (see Howe, Goodman, & Cicchetti, 2008, for a review; see
also Schore, 2010). In adults, the social information processing of
individuals who reported having had childhoods that were stressful
in attachment-related ways (e.g., not feeling loved and cared for)
has been found to be accompanied by unusual patterns of brain
activation (Taylor et al., 2006). By identifying neural mechanisms,
data could be collected on how the brain processes attachment-
relevant social information and what factors contribute to stability
or changes in processing over time. How does brain activity vary
as a function of an individual’s attachment organization and of the
type of social information that is being processed? This question is
especially pertinent in light of recent evidence showing that in-
fants’ neural responses to mother-related information are linked to
infants’ behavioral responses to separation from mother (Swingler,
Sweet, & Carver, 2010; see also Suslow et al., 2009, for related
adult data). Moreover, behavioral genetic studies (e.g., twin stud-
ies) could prove useful in elucidating whether links between at-
tachment and information processing are genetically mediated or
rather result primarily from environmental and contextual factors,
as attachment theorists suggest (see Roisman & Fraley, 2008, for
an example of how twin studies have been used in attachment
research).
Finally, research on links between attachment and social infor-
mation processing could have promising implications for interven-
tion programs designed to enhance parental sensitivity and reduce
the risk of insecure attachment in children. Although there is some
debate regarding whether parental mental processes can be—or
even need to be—targeted and modified in such programs (as
opposed to a sole focus on modifying behavior; see Berlin, Ziv,
Amaya-Jackson, & Greenberg, 2005), emerging data indicate that
relationship-related social cognitions can be effectively targeted
and modified in ways that promote more positive behavior, per-
sonal well-being, and enhanced relationship functioning. For ex-
ample, data from Bugental and colleagues (Bugental et al., 2002;
Bugental & Schwartz, 2009) indicated that mothers’ attributions
about their children’s behaviors could be reframed to promote
more positive caregiving behaviors. Several attachment interven-
tion programs include components that address mothers’ cogni-
tions about their children (e.g., Cooper, Hoffman, Powell, &
Marvin, 2005; Dozier, Lindhiem, & Ackerman, 2005; Slade, Sa-
dler, & Mayes, 2005). It is reasonable to believe that the efficacy
of these intervention programs could be further enhanced through
greater understanding of attachment-related differences in social
information processing, especially when the intervention goals are
hindered by insecure parents’ negative views of their children (and
perhaps of others, including the intervention staff) or by a tendency
to exclude potentially painful information.
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Received December 23, 2009
Revision received August 13, 2010
Accepted August 17, 2010 䡲
46 DYKAS AND CASSIDY