From the Handbook Of Attachment: Theory, Research, And Clinical Implications
Entire article 2nd Edition, Pages 241 – 265, 2008, The Guilford Press, NY
Jude Cassidy and Philip R. Shaver, Eds.
Excerpts:
The likely mechanism underlying the well-known link between
social contact and health is the social regulation of emotion, particularly the social regulation of threat responding. …For example, supportive social behaviors are known to attenuate stress-related activity in the autonomic nervous system (ANS) and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. …
Any robust conception of attachment will include multiple, distributed subsystems including (but probably not limited to) those devoted to emotion, motivation, emotion regulation, and social affiliation. …
[Coan’s] social baseline model uses a neuroscientific framework to integrate models of attachment with a neuroscientific principle, economy of action, in the management of metabolic resources devoted to emotional and social behavior.
Almost any interpretation of the attachment behavioral system reveals it to be a higher order construct comprised of constituent behaviors about which a great deal is known, even at the neural level. …For example, many studies have addressed the neurobiology of social behaviors such as recognition and familiarity, proximity seeking, separation distress, soothing behaviors, and maternal caregiving….
Because so many neural structures are involved one way or another in attachment behavior, it is possible to think of the entire human brain as a neural attachment system. …
Social influences on the regulation of affect are sufficiently powerful and unconditioned to suggest that the brain’s first and most powerful approach to affect regulation is via social proximity and interaction. What I will call the social baseline model suggests that social affect regulation was long ago adopted as an efficient and cost- effective means of regulating affect. It draws on the principle of economy of action, which states that organisms must, over time, consume more energy than they expend if they are to survive to reproduce. …
The social brain is designed in part to distribute affect regulation activities to attachment figures. As with the metabolic benefits of risk distribution, this should produce major metabolic resource savings. …
Over time, individuals in attachment relationships literally become part of each other’s emotion regulation strategy. This is not metaphorical, but literal, even at the neural level. For example, an individual who has been alone for a long period of time may have
learned to exercise his prefrontal cortex in the service of regulating his threat responses. The social baseline model predicts that upon establishing an attachment relationship, the individual’s perception of the degree to which his environment is threatening or dangerous will change, decreasing the frequency with which he exercises his prefrontal cortex in the service of emotion regulation. Note that this is because his brain assumes a decrease in the need for emotion regulation. With sufficient experience in the relationship, the level of interdependence associated with emotion-regulation needs can become strong. …It is important to emphasize that social affect regulation appears to be a relatively bottom-up process, as opposed to one’s solo affect regulation, which is more top down. When engaging in self-regulation, a person is likely to need to engage in costly, effortful cognitive and attentional strategies in the service of inhibiting either somatic responses or structures supporting the identification of threat cues. This effortful regulation of affect relies to a great degree the prefrontal cortex. … By contrast, social affect regulation may often affect the perception of threat in the first place, thereby decreasing the need for threat responding and leaving the prefrontal cortex with relatively little or nothing to regulate. Thus, social affect regulation could be said to be more efficient, or less costly, than self-regulation strategies, such as the suppression of emotional responses, the cognitive reappraisal of threatening situations, and even popular strategies such as meditation.