Security priming improves attentional processing to infant emotions among insecurely attached women: The different roles of supraliminal and subliminal priming

In two ERP experiments, we examined the attention-related mechanism involved in perceiving infant emotions following exposure to security priming. Specifically, we examined how security priming affected securely and insecurely attached women. We found that both supraliminal and subliminal security priming resulted in increased attention allocation in anxiously and avoidantly attached women but had no effect on securely attached women. Moreover, we also found that supraliminal and subliminal security priming differed in their effectiveness in increasing attention allocation among anxiously and avoidantly attached women. Supraliminal security priming were more effective for anxiously attached women, whereas subliminal security priming were more effective for avoidantly attached women. The implications of these findings and directions for future research are discussed. •Present research is a systematic study to directly explore the security priming effect in attachment system activation and its influence on the attention function in each attachment style. We think it contribute a lot to the research of attachment primes.•The present research is one of the first systematic attempts to directly explore the security priming effect in attachment system activation and its influence on the attention function in each attachment style.•Present study suggests that primes with a secure attachment schema can have very different effects on the attention function of insecure and secure attachment as well as emphasize the crucial contribution of dispositional attachment differences.•Supraliminal and subliminal security primes produced the boosting effect on attention function within insecure attachment, however, the effectiveness and applicability of each type of primes in the boosting effect are different.