Biomedical subjects

Omri Gillath

Publications and source records attributed to Omri Gillath.

8 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

The siren's call: terror management and the threat of men's sexual attraction to women.

Why do sexually appealing women often attract derogation and aggression? According to terror management theory, women's sexual allure threatens to increase men's awareness of their corporeality and thus mortality. Accordingly, in Study 1 a subliminal mortality prime decreased men's but not women's attractiveness ratings of alluring women. In Study 2, mortality salience (MS) led men to downplay their sexual intent toward a sexy woman. In Study 3, MS decreased men's interest in a seductive but not a wholesome woman. In Study 4, MS decreased men's but not women's attraction to a sexy opposite-sex target. In Study 5, MS and a corporeal lust prime increased men's tolerance of aggression toward women. Discussion focuses on mortality concerns and male sexual ambivalence.

Adult↗

PubMed2006

When sex is more than just sex: attachment orientations, sexual experience, and relationship quality.

The authors explored the contribution of individual differences in attachment orientations to the experience of sexual intercourse and its association with relationship quality. In Study 1, 500 participants completed self-report scales of attachment orientations and sexual experience. The findings indicated that whereas attachment anxiety was associated with an ambivalent construal of sexual experience, attachment avoidance was associated with more aversive sexual feelings and cognitions. In Study 2, 41 couples reported on their attachment orientations and provided daily diary measures of sexual experiences and relationship interactions for a period of 42 days. Results showed that attachment anxiety amplified the effects of positive and negative sexual experiences on relationship interactions. In contrast, attachment avoidance inhibited the positive relational effect of having sex and the detrimental relational effects of negative sexual interactions. The authors discuss the possibility that attachment orientations are associated with different sex-related strategies and goals within romantic relationships.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2006

Automatic activation of attachment-related goals.

When people encounter threats, their attachment systems are activated and they become motivated to seek protection and support through proximity to their attachment figures. Theoretically, therefore, mental representations of attachment figures should be associated with goals related to attaining proximity and safety. The present studies explore this idea by examining the effects of a person's chronic attachment style and exposure to a particular attachment figure's name on the automatic activation of attachment-related goals. Studies 1 and 2 examine effects of exposure to the name of a security-providing attachment figure on willingness to self-disclose and seek support (two behaviors related to gaining proximity). Study 3 examines how exposure to names of different relationship partners (with whom a participant has felt secure, anxious, or avoidant) affects the mental accessibility of attachment-related goal words. Taken together, the studies support the idea that mental representations of attachment figures are associated with attachment-related goals.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2006

Self-reported attachment, interpersonal aggression, and personality disorder in a prospective community sample of adolescents and adults.

Anxious and avoidant attachment were assessed in the Children in the Community (CIC) Study during adolescence and adulthood using self-report scales developed for this prospective study. The convergent and discriminant validity of the new CIC attachment scales were evaluated and their stability was assessed across a 17-year interval. Attachment scales predicted DSM-IV personality disorders in theoretically coherent and clinically meaningful ways, especially when supplemented with a separate measure of interpersonal aggression. Cluster B and C personality disorder symptoms were associated with elevated anxious attachment. Avoidant attachment was positively associated with Cluster A symptoms and inversely associated with Cluster B and C symptoms. Interpersonal aggression was higher in Cluster B symptoms and lower in Cluster C symptoms, thus differentiating between these symptom clusters.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2005

Attachment-style differences in the ability to suppress negative thoughts: exploring the neural correlates.

Beginning in infancy, people can be characterized in terms of two dimensions of attachment insecurity: attachment anxiety (i.e., fear of rejection and abandonment) and attachment avoidance (distancing oneself from close others, shunning dependency; Bowlby, J., 1969/1982. Attachment and loss: Vol. 1. Attachment, 2nd ed., Basic Books, New York). The capacity for emotion regulation varies with attachment style, such that attachment-anxious individuals become highly emotional when threatened with social rejection or relationship loss, whereas avoidant individuals tend to distance themselves or disengage from emotional situations. In the present study, 20 women participated in an fMRI experiment in which they thought about--and were asked to stop thinking about--various relationship scenarios. When they thought about negative ones (conflict, breakup, death of partner), their level of attachment anxiety was positively correlated with activation in emotion-related areas of the brain (e.g., the anterior temporal pole, implicated in sadness) and inversely correlated with activation in a region associated with emotion regulation (orbitofrontal cortex). This suggests that anxious people react more strongly than non-anxious people to thoughts of loss while under-recruiting brain regions normally used to down-regulate negative emotions. Participants high on avoidance failed to show as much deactivation as less avoidant participants in two brain regions (subcallosal cingulate cortex; lateral prefrontal cortex). This suggests that the avoidant peoples' suppression was less complete or less efficient, in line with results from previous behavioral experiments. These are among the first findings to identify some of the neural processes underlying adult attachment orientations and emotion regulation.

Adult↗

PubMed2005

Attachment, caregiving, and altruism: boosting attachment security increases compassion and helping.

Recent studies based on J. Bowlby's (1969/1982) attachment theory reveal that both dispositional and experimentally enhanced attachment security facilitate cognitive openness and empathy, strengthen self-transcendent values, and foster tolerance of out-group members. Moreover, dispositional attachment security is associated with volunteering to help others in everyday life and to unselfish motives for volunteering. The present article reports 5 experiments, replicated in 2 countries (Israel and the United States), testing the hypothesis that increases in security (accomplished through both implicit and explicit priming techniques) foster compassion and altruistic behavior. The hypothesized effects were consistently obtained, and various alternative explanations were explored and ruled out. Dispositional attachment-related anxiety and avoidance adversely influenced compassion, personal distress, and altruistic behavior in theoretically predictable ways. As expected, attachment security provides a foundation for care-oriented feelings and caregiving behaviors, whereas various forms of insecurity suppress or interfere with compassionate caregiving.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2004

The multidimensional driving style inventory--scale construct and validation.

Two studies were conducted in order to develop a multidimensional instrument of driving style. In Study 1, we developed a self-report scale assessing four broad domains of driving style-the multidimensional driving style inventory (MDSI). A factor analysis revealed eight main factors, each one representing a specific driving style--dissociative, anxious, risky, angry, high-velocity, distress reduction, patient, and careful. In addition, significant associations were found between the eight factors, on the one hand, and gender, age, driving history, and personality measures of self-esteem, need for control, impulsive sensation seeking, and extraversion, on the other. In Study 2, further associations were found between the eight driving style factors and measures of trait anxiety and neuroticism. The discussion focused on the validity and utility of a multidimensional conceptualization of driving style.

Adult↗

PubMed2002

Activation of the attachment system in adulthood: threat-related primes increase the accessibility of mental representations of attachment figures.

Three studies explored the effects of subliminal threat on the activation of representations of attachment figures. This accessibility was measured in a lexical decision task and a Stroop task following threat- or neutral-word primes, and was compared with the accessibility of representations of other close persons, known but not close persons, and unknown persons. Participants also reported on their attachment style. Threat primes led to increased accessibility of representations of attachment figures. This effect was specific to attachment figures and was replicated across tasks and experiments. Attachment anxiety heightened accessibility of representations of attachment figures even in neutral contexts, whereas attachment avoidance inhibited this activation when the threat prime was the word separation. These effects were not, explained by trait anxiety. The discussion focuses on the dynamics of attachment-system activation in adulthood.

Adult↗