Excerpts:

Individuals in an attachment relationship eventually become inextricable components of each other’s emotion regulation system. …

Adult attachment relationships are probably homologues of the  infant–caregiver bond, co-opted by natural selection to capitalize on the potential advantages of pair bonding. Thus, one should expect adults to experience negative affect attributable to activation of the  attachment system when isolated or threatened, as well as a restoration of relatively positive affect upon  the resumption of close proximity to, and soothing behavior by, the attachment figure.A wealth of evidence supports this prediction. …

Humans …cannot self-regulate for long periods of time without diminishing their self-regulation capabilities significantly. This decline in self-regulatory capabilities follows the depletion of metabolic resources in the PFC, a cost that impairs other important prefrontally mediated operations (e.g., working memory) as well. …

Individuals tend to invest less effort in regulating negative affect in the presence of their attachment figure. … The human brain utilizes social resources, especially attachment relationships, to economize its activity. …

It is likely that neural representations of adult attachment styles will be complex, involving, at the very least, individual differences in  prefrontal, amygdalar, hippocampal, dopaminergic, oxytocinergic, and possibly serotonergic systems.

Journal of Social and Personal Relationships

Vol. 27(2): 210–217. DOI: 10.1177/0265407509360900

James A. Coan

ABSTRACT

Individuals in adult attachment relationships regulate one another via overt emotional and social behavior. Attachment-related styles of utilizing social support moderate these regulatory effects. In recent years, the social and affective neurosciences have begun to clarify how these processes are instantiated in the brain, including the likely neural mechanisms of long-term felt security following past attachment experiences and the neural circuitry supporting the regulation of emotion by relational partners. In this brief review, I describe the neural systems involved in the formation and maintenance of adult attachment relationships and review the small amount of work to date on the neuroscience of adult attachment style. I then offer my own speculations about how adult attachment relationships conserve the brain’s metabolic resources, especially those of the prefrontal cortex.