Attachment Promotion Hypothesis

670 Words2 Pages

A set of image recognition tasks was used to investigate the gender differences in the distinguishing of expressed emotions. Evolutionary theory suggests that women would be superior to males in identifying expressed emotion, due to their predisposition as mothers to respond to the non-verbal cues from children which helps to produce securely attached infants (“Attachment promotion” hypothesis). Therefore the hypothesis was used there would be a significant difference between the performance of males and females at identifying the difference between real and fake smiles. The participants were made up of an opportunistic sample and the sample size was made up of 32 individuals. The age range was between 18 years old and 52 years old. Each participant …show more content…

Assuming the result of this study is accurate, there are wider implications in terms of the validity of the “attachment promotion hypothesis” in the context of it being more relevant for subtle emotions and expressed emotion using less apparent cues as smiling. The limitations of this research is most notable in the sampling used, an opportunistic sample has a higher possibility of the sample being biased as it is more likely that people volunteering to participate in studies will have similar characteristics such as in this case being available for around 20 minutes in the local area where the research was conducted. Opportunistic samples tent to produce unrepresentative samples. There was also the confounding variable of the researcher being in the same room as the participant as the study was taking place, this may have had an effect on the results of the study as the participants may have facilitated or inhibited the performance of the

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