• Korean Journal of Child Studies
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• v.33 no.2
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• pp.55-68
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• 2012

The goals of this study were to examine how children's recognition of various emotions, emotion expression, and social interactions among their peers differed according to their attachment styles. A total of 65 three to five years old children completed both attachment story-stem doll plays and a standard emotion recognition task. Trained observers documented children's valence of emotion expression and social interactions among their peers in the classroom. Consistent with attachment theory, children who were categorized as secure in the doll play were more likely to express positive emotions than children who were categorized as avoidant in the doll play. Children who were categorized as avoidant in the doll play were more likely to express neutral emotions among their peers than children who were categorized as secure and anxious in the doll play. The findings of this study contribute to the general attachment literature by documenting how attachment security plays a crucial role in having positive emotions in ordinary situations. It does so by also demonstrating how different attachment styles are associated with children's qualitatively different patterns of emotion processing, especially in terms of their expression of emotions.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.51-77
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• 2009

Using a modified Posner's cue-target paradigm, we investigated whether negative cues attract more attention than neutral cues in anxious people. Previous studies used commonly an unbalanced proportion of valid and invalid trials(75% vs. 25% respectively). But in the present study, an equivalent proportion of valid and invalids trials was used for measuring detection speed of cues without participant's expectancy caused by the unbalanced proportion. Emotional words(Experiment 1) and facial expressions(Experiment 2) were used as cues for target locations. The result of Experiment 1 and 2 showed that threatening cues facilitated target detection in valid trials and interfered with it in invalid trials in anxious participants and a, reverse response patterns were found in non-anxious participants. This indicates that threatening cues attract more attention to the cued location in anxious people and in contrast, non-anxious people avoid threatening stimuli. In Experiment 3, we investigated the difference of validity effect across anxiety levels. The results showed that anxious participants gave less attention to cued location when the cues were non-informative whereas non-anxious participants gave more attention to cued locations in the same condition. We discussed two kinds of cognitive bias caused by anxiety levels: attentional bias and proportion related bias.