The influence of attachment on implicit affective opinions towards caregivers

Sammanfattning: The influence of attachment quality and style on implicit emotional opinions towards caregivers was measured using an affective priming task very similar to a lexical decision task. The reaction time in milliseconds for each prime and target word combination was recorded and used and indication of associative strength between the two. Two attachment tests was administered, the ASQ-Sw questionnaire, a self-report questionnaire with 40 questions measuring attachment style on five different dimensions and an electronic version of the SBST test, which is a narrative-based test measuring the presence of an secure-base script. The priming task had four different primes, mother and father and two control primes and a total of 128 different negative and positive target words. A total of 33 participants completed all of the tests and results show that one of the attachment styles indicating an insecure attachment had an influence on the participants implicit emotional opinions towards their caregivers, the other attachment styles did not, the two attachment tests was positively linked to each other and showed similar results, gender differences in regard to attachment was also found. The priming task reveled that participants in general had more positive than negative emotional opinions towards their caregivers, especially towards mothers. The participants also had more positive than negative emotional opinions towards the control prime Gandhi but no difference was found for Hitler.