To Örebro University

One of the key functions of attachment relationships is to shape the way individuals perceive and respond to potential threats. From this perspective, developmentally early markers of later attachment security vs. insecurity may be detected in infants’ responses to social cues signaling threat. Utilizing established paradigms from developmental emotion research, we measured attentional biases and neural responses to emotional faces in 7-month-old infants and particularly investigated whether early sensitivity to fearful vs. nonfearful faces is related to attachment security to the caregiver at 14 months of age. Infants (N = 73) were tested at 7 months with an eye-tracking paradigm assessing attentiondis engagement from faces (neutral, happy, fearful) and control stimuli towards peripheral distractors. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs), indexing cortical differentiation of facial expression stimuli, were simultaneously recorded with high-density EEG. Fear bias scores were computed, reflecting differences in a) the probability of disengaging attention from fearful vs. non-fearful faces and b) posterior ERP responses (N290 and P400 components) to fearful vs. non-fearful faces. Infant-mother attachment was assessed with an observational paradigm (Strange Situation Procedure) at 14 months, with 46 infants classified as securely and 27 infants as insecurely attached to their mother. In the eye-tracking paradigm, attention to fearful faces at 7 months predicted attachment security to the mother at 14 months, with a smaller attentional bias to fearful expressions associated with insecure attachment. The ERP data complemented the attentional bias data in showing reduced cortical differentiation of fearful and nonfearful expressions in insecurely attached infants. Exploratory analyses indicated that an absence of an agetypical fear bias in both measures (eye-tracking and ERP) was almost exclusively associated with insecure attachment. Together, these data provide the first evidence linking infants’ sensitivity to social cues signaling threat (reflected in attentional biases and cortical encoding) with attachment formation to the caregiver.