In Pursuit of Interpersonal Distance and Self-Reliance: Neural Substrates of Attachment System Deactivation in Avoidant Individuals

In his classic trilogy, Bowlby (1969, 1973, 1980) claimed that the attachment system is an innate, universal behavioral system that is activated by physical and psychological threats and operates toward the goal of maintaining proximity to attachment figures. Recent studies (Mikulincer et al. 2000; Mikulincer, Gillath, and Shaver 2002) have used implicit cognitive tasks to document that symbolic threat stimuli heightened the accessibility of attachment-related cognition in the minds of adults. Anxiously attached adults exhibited heightened accessibility to attachment themes in both threat and non-threat contexts, reflecting their chronically activated attachment system. Avoidantly attached adults, in contrast, demonstrated increased access to attachment-related themes in attachment-unrelated threat contexts in comparison to non-threat contexts, while displaying decreased accessibility in attachment threat contexts. This was interpreted as reflecting their defensive inhibition of the attachment system and avoidance of attachment-related