The cued activation of attachment relational schemas

People's interaction expectancies and views of self are shaped by accessible relational schemas, knowledge structures representing regularities in interpersonal experience. Recent research using classical conditioning paradigms has examined the possibility of creating associations between neutral cues and specific relational schemas so that presentation of the cue serves to activate the relational expectancies. In the current study, a lexical decision task was employed to assess the cued activation of acceptance and rejection expectations as a function of chron ic attachment orientation. Participants visualized relationships in which they felt noncontingently versus contingently accepted by another person; while doing so they were given repeated computer presentations of distinctive tone sequences. Later, these conditioned tones were played again while participants performed lexical decisions on stimuli that represented if-then contingencies of interpersonal acceptance and rejection. Results indicated that the conditioning procedure had different effects, depending on participants' chronic attachment orientations. Specifically, when presented with a cue that had been conditioned to a contingent relationship, people high on the preoccupied orientation showed the activation of rejection contingencies, whereas people high on the secure orientation showed the activation of acceptance contingencies.