# The cognitive compass of attachment: how primed security and insecurity navigate mental representations

## TL;DR

This study shows how priming attachment security or insecurity affects how quickly people process words related to closeness or distance, depending on their level of attachment anxiety.

## Contribution

It reveals that attachment-related cognitive accessibility is influenced by priming and anxiety levels, offering new insights into attachment system dynamics.

## Key findings

- Insecurity priming led to faster reaction times for proximity- and distance-related words compared to the control condition.
- Security priming only increased reaction times for proximity-related words at low anxiety levels.
- Bayesian analysis confirmed no priming effects for positive, negative, or neutral words.

## Abstract

This study examined the domain-specific patterns associated with supraliminal attachment priming on the cognitive accessibility of attachment-related mental representations.

Seventy participants were randomly assigned to one of three experimental conditions: attachment-insecurity priming, attachment-security priming, or a non-attachment control (non-primed reference) condition. Participants underwent supraliminal priming via a guided imagery task specific to their condition, followed by a lexical decision task measuring reaction times for five word categories: proximity-related, distance-related, positive, negative, and neutral words.

Relative differences between priming conditions emerged exclusively for attachment-related word categories. Participants in the attachment-insecurity priming condition showed faster reaction times to both proximity- and distance-related words relative to the non-primed reference condition. In contrast, participants in the attachment-security priming condition showed faster reaction times to proximity-related words than the non-primed reference condition only at low levels of attachment anxiety; no such differences were observed at higher levels of anxiety. Reaction times to distance-related words did not differ between the security priming and non-primed reference conditions. Attachment avoidance did not moderate any effects. Bayesian analyses provided affirmative evidence for the absence of priming effects in positive, negative, and neutral word categories. Given the observed effect sizes, moderation trend-level patterns should be interpreted as exploratory.

These findings advance understanding of attachment system dynamics by showing that differences between insecurity and security priming in attachment-related processing depend on attachment anxiety.