Abstract Recent studies based on J. Bowlby's (1969 Bowlby's ( /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. There is a large literature on altruistic helping (i.e., helping with the goal of benefiting the other person; see Post, Underwood, Schloss, & Hurlbut, 2002 , for a collection of reviews), much of it examining whether there really is such a thing as unselfish altruism, especially directed toward strangers and nonkin familiars (e.g., Batson, 2002) . More recently, researchers have focused on the possibility that there are identifiable and measurable motives or reasons for helping strangers (e.g., Penner, 2002) . Of special interest are the mental mechanisms, some learned and some potentially innate, that account for helpful behavior (e.g., Batson, Chang, Orr, & Rowland, 2002; Losoya & Eisenberg, 2001 ). To date, however, there have been relatively few attempts to link altruistic helping to broad psychological theories of personality, motivation, and social behavior. Even when existing theories have been called upon for explanations, few experimental studies have been conducted to test these theories. The purpose of the present article is to conceptualize altruistic helping with regard to Bowlby and Ainsworth's attachment theories (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978; Bowlby, 1969 Bowlby, / 1982 Bowlby, , 1973 Bowlby, , 1980 . When considered from the standpoint of attachment theory, altruistic behavior is viewed in terms of what Bowlby called the "caregiving behavioral system"-an innate behavioral system that responds to the needs of dependent others, especially (but not only) children. This behavioral system is thought to have evolved mainly to complement the "attachment behavioral system," which governs people's, especially young children's, emotional attachments to their caregivers, and its functioning is expected to be influenced by a person's sense of attachment security. Attachment theory has already proven useful in explaining empathy and philanthropic volunteerism (e.g., ) and has received support from several experimental studies. Attachment Theory and Research According to attachment theory (Bowlby, 1969 (Bowlby, /1982 , human beings are innately equipped with attachment and caregiving behavioral systems, among other important behavioral systems (e.g., exploration, sexuality) because during evolution becoming emotionally attached to caregivers (e.g., parents) and providing care for dependent or injured individuals (e.g., infants, children, injured family members) enhanced the chances of survival, reproduction, and successful parenting (i.e., genetic success or inclusive fitness). According to Bowlby (1969 Bowlby ( /1982 , the function of the attachment system is to protect a person from danger by assuring that he or she maintains proximity to caring and supportive others (attachment figures) who provide protection, support, and relief in times of adversity. The attachment system is most evident during infancy and childhood but continues to be important across the life span. Its innate parameters are gradually shaped and altered by social experiences with attachment figures, resulting eventually in fairly stable individual differences in attachment style-a systematic pattern of relational expectations, emotions, and behaviors that results from a particular attachment history (Fraley & Shaver, 2000; Hazan & Shaver, 1987) . Attachment Theory and Research Research, beginning with Ainsworth et al. (1978) and continuing through recent studies by social and personality psychologists (reviewed by Mikulincer & Shaver, 2003) , indicates that major individual differences in attachment style can be measured along two orthogonal dimensions, attachment-related avoidance and attachment-related anxiety (Brennan, Clark, & Shaver, 1998) . A person's position on the avoidance (or avoidant-attachment) dimension indicates the extent to which he or she distrusts relationship partners' goodwill and strives to maintain behavioral independence and emotional distance from partners. A person's position on the anxiety (or anxious-attachment) dimension indicates the degree to which he or she worries that a partner will not be available and responsive in times of need. People who score low on these two dimensions are said to be securely attached or to have a secure attachment style. Attachment Theory and Research Since the mid-1980s, scores of studies have shown that a person's attachment style, assessed with fairly simple, twodimensional self-report measures, is a powerful predictor of various psychological phenomena including self-and social schemas, self-regulation of stress and emotion, the quality of relationships with romantic or marital partners, sexual motivation, and reactions to relationship breakup or loss (see Mikulincer & Shaver, 2003; Shaver & Clark, 1994; Shaver & Hazan, 1993 , for extensive reviews). Attachment security (i.e., relatively low scores on the avoidance and anxiety dimensions) is related to positive conceptions of self and others, curiosity and interest in exploration, cognitive openness and information-processing flexibility, relationship commitment, and relationship satisfaction (e.g., Bartholomew & Horowitz, 1991; Collins & Read, 1990; J. A. Feeney, 2002; Mikulincer, 1997) . The Caregiving System and Its Interplay With the Attachment System According to Bowlby (1969 Bowlby ( /1982 , the caregiving system is designed to provide protection and support to others who are either chronically dependent or temporarily in need. It is inherently altruistic in nature, being aimed at the alleviation of others' distress, although the system itself presumably evolved because it increased the inclusive fitness of individuals by making it more likely that children and tribe members with whom the individual shared genes would survive and reproduce (Hamilton, 1964) . Within attachment theory, the caregiving system provides an entrée to the study of compassion and altruism; moreover, understanding this system provides a foundation for devising ways of increasing people's compassion and effective altruism. The Caregiving System and Its Interplay With the Attachment System Caregiving refers to a broad array of behaviors that complement a relationship partner's attachment behaviors or signals of need. The set goal of such behaviors is reduction of the partner's suffering (which Bowlby, 1969 Bowlby, /1982 , called providing a "safe haven") or fostering the partner's growth and development (which Bowlby called providing a "secure base" for exploration). The key mechanism for achieving these goals is the adoption of what Batson (1991) called an empathic stance toward others' suffering-taking the perspective of the distressed person to sensitively and effectively help him or her reduce suffering and distress. That is, the caregiving system is focused on the other's welfare and therefore directs attention to the other's distress rather than to one's own emotional state. In its prototypical form-that is, in the parent-child relationship-the set goal of the child's attachment system (proximity that fosters protection, reduces distress, increases safety, and establishes a secure base) is also the aim of the parent's caregiving system. Extending this conceptualization to the broader realm of compassion and altruism, one can view the caregiving system as being activated by the presence of a distressed person, even a stranger in need, and its aim as being to alter the needy person's condition until signs of increased safety, wellbeing, and security are evident. The Caregiving System and Its Interplay With the Attachment System Beyond explaining this complementarity between the support seeker's attachment system and the support provider's caregiving system, Bowlby (1969 Bowlby ( /1982 also conceptualized the interplay between these two systems within the mind of a potential support provider. Just as Ainsworth et al. (1978) argued that a child's exploration system is inhibited or distorted by an urgent need for attachment security in strange or threatening situations, we (Gillath, and others (e.g., B. C. Feeney & Collins, 2001 ) have argued that the altruistic, innate tendency to attend empathically to others' distress and provide care when needed can be interfered with, suppressed, or overridden by attachment insecurity. Under conditions of threat, adults often think first of turning to others for support and comfort rather than providing support to others. At such times they are likely to be so focused on their own needs that they lack the mental resources necessary to attend empathically to others' distress and to engage in altruistic behavior. Only when relief is attained and a sense of security is restored can many people easily direct attention and energy to other behavioral systems, such as caregiving. Only a relatively secure person can easily perceive others not only as sources of security and support, but also as suffering human beings who have important needs and therefore deserve support. The Caregiving System and Its Interplay With the Attachment System In short, the aim of the caregiving system is more likely to become salient and be realized in behavior when a person is secure enough to allow for an empathic focus on someone else's needs. This ability to help others is a consequence of having witnessed and benefited from good care provided by one's own attachment figures, which both increases one's sense of security and provides models of good caregiving (Collins & Feeney, 2000; Kunce & Shaver, 1994) . Furthermore, the sense of attachment security reduces needs for self-protection and self-enhancement and allows a person to shift resources to other behavioral systems, including caregiving, and to take the other's perspective (Mikulincer et al., 2002) -the key mechanism underlying altruistic helping (Batson, 1991 (Batson, , 2002 . According to our current understanding of the process, attachment security does not activate the caregiving system directly but rather provides a solid and stable psychological foundation for a form of empathy that is not overwhelmed by others' suffering or threatened by the interdependence entailed by caregiving. In other words, attachment security facilitates helping behavior that is truly aimed at benefiting another person even when there is no egoistic reason for helping. The Caregiving System and Its Interplay With the Attachment System Attachment theory can also explain cases in which people fail to behave truly altruistically. Theoretically, we expect attachmentrelated insecurities to interfere with altruistic helping. Attachmentanxious individuals tend to focus more on their own distress and need for greater attachment security (Collins & Read, 1994) . These concerns may draw mental resources away from taking the perspective of a distressed person and engaging in altruistic behavior. Attachment-avoidant individuals tend to be uncomfortable with closeness and interdependence and more cynical and disapproving in response to other people's signals of vulnerability, weakness, and need (Collins & Read, 1994) . Obviously, these dispositions might well interfere with compassion and altruism. The Caregiving System and Its Interplay With the Attachment System This does not mean, however, that anxious and avoidant people, although both are conceptualized in attachment theory as insecure, will react in the same way to another person's distress. In a number of studies, Batson (1991) found that lack of helpful, altruistic behavior can be due either to lack of empathy and a prosocial orientation toward other people or to what he called "personal distress," a form of self-focused worry and discomfort that is not easily translated into effective helping. On the basis of attachment theory and previous research (e.g., , we expected people who score high on attachment avoidance to distance themselves from others' suffering, resulting in decreased empathy and altruistic helping. In contrast, we expected people who score high on attachment anxiety to worry about their own personal distress and desire for social acceptance, which might sometimes cause them to seem upset about others' suffering without their distress resulting in effective caregiving. The Caregiving System and Its Interplay With the Attachment System Attachment theory is also a useful framework for explaining cases in which people endorse egoistic motives for helping or not helping. There is clear evidence that helping behavior is not always guided by other-oriented, altruistic motives but can also be governed by egoistic motives such as enhancing one's own mood, relieving one's own distress, and protecting one's personally valuable close relationships (Cialdini et al., 1987 (Cialdini et al., , 1997 Smith, Keating, & Stotland, 1982) . Theoretically, we expected attachment insecurities, mainly along the attachment-avoidance dimension, to favor the endorsement of egoistic motives for helping. For avoidant persons, who are not able to deal directly or symbolically with pain or distress and tend to engage in defensive maneuvers aimed at maintaining positive mood and protecting or enhancing their fragile self-esteem (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2003) , helping others could be viewed as one possible route to feeling better about themselves. Therefore, when such a payoff is salient, they would be eager to help with the ultimate goal of benefiting themselves. When no egoistic payoff is salient, avoidant persons would not have a reason to help and would distance themselves from others' suffering. The Caregiving System and Its Interplay With the Attachment System There is extensive evidence that attachment security is associated with responsive and sensitive care for relationship partners. For example, secure mothers are more caring and supportive in interactions with their children than insecure mothers (e.g., Crowell & Feldman, 1991; Rholes, Simpson, & Blakely, 1995) . Secure individuals are also more sensitive to romantic partners' needs and describe themselves as more likely to provide emotional support to their distressed partners (e.g., J. A. Feeney, 1996; J. A. Feeney & Hohaus, 2001; Kunce & Shaver, 1994) . Their self-reports are corroborated by partners' reports. Moreover, self-report findings have been bolstered by observational studies in which dating couples were videotaped while one partner waited to undergo a stressful experience (e.g., B. C. Feeney & Collins, 2001; Simpson, Rholes, & Nelligan, 1992; Simpson, Rholes, Orina, & Grich, 2002) . More secure participants in those studies spontaneously offered more support to their distressed partners. Similar findings outside the romantic domain were reported by Soerensen, Webster, and Roggman (2002) , who found that attachment security predicted preparation to care for older relatives. The Caregiving System and Its Interplay With the Attachment System Research also indicates that attachment security is associated with compassionate responses to needy strangers. In a study of preschoolers, for example, Kestenbaum, Farber, and Sroufe (1989) found a positive association between secure attachment to mother and empathic responses to other children who were suffering. In a conceptually similar study of adults, Westmaas and Silver (2001) found that adults who scored high on attachment avoidance behaved less supportively toward a person with cancer than participants who scored low on this dimension. In addition, participants who scored high on attachment anxiety reported greater discomfort while interacting with the person with cancer than participants who scored low on this dimension. Recently, examined associations between attachment style and volunteerism (long-term, planned, pro-social behavior, especially behavior intended to benefit strangers; Penner, 2002) . In two studies conducted in three countries (Israel, the Netherlands, and the United States), we found that attachment insecurities were negatively correlated with volunteer activities and positively correlated with egoistic motives for volunteering. The Caregiving System and Its Interplay With the Attachment System There is also evidence that contextual, laboratory-induced augmentation of a person's sense of attachment security increases empathy and prosocial attitudes. For example, Mikulincer and Shaver (2001) reported that subliminal or supraliminal activation of attachment-security representations (thoughts of feeling comforted and reassured by attachment figures during times of stress) increased people's willingness to interact with out-group members. In another set of studies , an experimentally boosted sense of security increased the endorsement of values that encourage caring for others, including strangers. The Caregiving System and Its Interplay With the Attachment System In a direct experimental test of compassion, examined effects of dispositional and contextually augmented attachment security on compassionate responses to others' suffering. Across five experiments, a variety of methods for enhancing attachment security (asking participants to recall personal memories of supportive care, having them read a story about one person's provision of care for another, having them notice a picture of a supportive interaction, or subliminally exposing them to proximity-related words), but not simple enhancement of positive affect, strengthened reports of compassion in reaction to others' suffering. In addition, dispositional avoidance was inversely related to compassion. Attachment anxiety was associated with personal distress in response to another's suffering, but not with compassion. The Current Studies Despite the robust associations we have observed between attachment security and compassionate responses to others' distress, the studies we have conducted so far suffer from at least three limitations. First, assessed only selfreported reactions (compassion and personal distress), not actual helping behavior. This is an important gap in the evidence linking attachment security with altruistic helping, because a person may feel personally distressed or even compassionate without actually helping (e.g., Batson, 1991) . Second, experiments in were conducted only in Israel. We wanted to be sure our conclusions generalized to other societies. The Current Studies Third, although showed that experimentally induced attachment security increased compassionate responses and dispositional attachment avoidance was related inversely to compassion, these investigators failed to consider alternative, more egoistic explanations of what might only have looked like altruistic responses. This is important, given our theoretical analysis, because we expected attachment security to facilitate altruistic helping by allowing people to take the perspective of the distressed person-the main mechanism underlying altruism (Batson, 1991) . That is, we expected attachment security to promote helping even when there was no egoistic payoff such as enhancing one's own mood, experiencing empathic joy, or benefiting someone to whom one was allied or obligated (Cialdini et al., 1987 (Cialdini et al., , 1997 Smith, Keating, & Stotland, 1989) . These motives should be more salient in insecure individuals, whose worries and attitudes interfere with normal altruistic functioning of the caregiving system. The Current Studies In the five experiments reported here, we examined effects of experimentally enhanced attachment security on compassion and altruistic behavior in samples of Israeli and American participants. We also examined associations between dispositional attachment anxiety and avoidance, on the one hand, and measures of compassion, personal distress, and helping, on the other, and evaluated the egoistic explanations of helping proposed by Cialdini et al. (1987 Cialdini et al. ( , 1997 and Smith et al. (1989) . We expected that contextually heightened attachment security would facilitate compassion and helping, that dispositional attachment anxiety would be associated with high levels of personal distress in response to another person's suffering without promoting helpful behavior, and that dispositional attachment avoidance would be associated with relatively low levels of both compassion and helping. We further expected the effects of security enhancement to be attributable to genuinely empathic altruism and therefore to be observed even when there was no egoistic reason for helping. To the extent that egoistic motives played any role in helping at all, we expected them to occur mainly among insecure people. Finally, because we anticipated that critics, as in the case of Batson's research, would propose that the effects of attachment security were actually due to confounded variables such as self-esteem and neuroticism, we included measures of those variables in Studies 3-5. Study 1 In Study 1, we assessed participants' dispositional attachment style, manipulated the momentary mental availability of securityrelated representations, and assessed their effects on emotional reactions to a needy woman and on willingness to help her. To heighten the accessibility of mental representations of attachment security, we used a subliminal priming technique developed by . Participants were exposed for 20 ms to names of people they had previously nominated as securityenhancing attachment figures. We compared this condition with two control conditions: (a) subliminal priming with names of close relationship partners who did not serve a secure-base function in the attachment-theory sense and (b) subliminal priming with names of acquaintances who were not close and did not serve secure-base functions for the participant. Study 1 To assess emotional reactions to a needy person (empathy or compassion, as well as personal distress) and participants' actual decision to help or not to help this person, we created a laboratory situation in which participants watched another ostensible participant (a young woman confederate who was actually appearing on videotape) while she performed a series of aversive tasks in a nearby room. As the study progressed, the confederate became increasingly distressed by the aversive tasks, finally getting quite upset about the prospect of having to pet a large, live tarantula in an open-topped glass tank. After a short break in the procedure, supposedly to allow the confederate to calm down, participants rated their emotional reactions while watching this woman (compassion, personal distress) and their willingness to help by replacing her in the subsequent tasks. Then, after being told that she felt very uncomfortable with the remaining tasks, participants were given an opportunity to trade roles with her, which meant that the real participant would bear the distress associated with those tasks. Study 1 As with the other studies reported in this article, Study 1 was conducted simultaneously in the United States and Israel. It consisted of two sessions. In the first, participants completed the Experience in Close Relationships Scale (ECR; Brennan et al., 1998) . In the second, they were randomly divided into three experimental conditions according to the subliminal primes to which they were exposed immediately before the aversive-task scenario just described: priming with the name of a participant's security-providing attachment figure, priming with the name of a close person who did not function as an attachment figure, or priming with the name of a mere acquaintance. At the point of making a decision about replacing the distressed woman, all participants completed brief measures of compassion, personal distress, and willingness to take her place. Our predictions were as follows: Study 1 1. Participants in the security-priming condition would report higher levels of compassion and greater willingness to help the distressed woman and would actually be more likely to help her (i.e., trade roles with her) than would participants in the two control conditions. Study 1 2. Participants' scores on attachment avoidance would be inversely correlated with rated compassion, willingness to help the needy woman, and actual agreement to help her. Study 1 3. Participants' scores on attachment anxiety would be positively associated with ratings of personal distress while watching the distressed woman performing the aversive tasks. Study 1 We also explored possible interactions between security priming and scores on the two attachment-style dimensions. Although we did not make any prediction about these interactive effects, it seemed possible that the effects of security priming would be independent of the effects of attachment style, as they had been in previous studies (e.g., Mikulincer & Shaver, 2001) . Because all human beings are potentially responsive to an enhanced sense of security, they all may be susceptible to the effects of security priming regardless of variations in attachment style. Method Participants. Ninety American undergraduates at the University of California, Davis (68 women and 22 men, ranging in age from 19 to 30 years, Mdn ϭ 21), and 90 Israeli undergraduates from Bar-Ilan University (68 women and 22 men, ranging in age from 18 to 33 years, Mdn ϭ 22) participated in the study in exchange for credits toward a research participation requirement in one of their psychology courses. Method 1 Each of the two samples, American and Israeli, was randomly divided into three experimental conditions with 30 participants in each. Method Materials and procedure. The study was run in two sessions. 2 In the first session, participants completed the ECR scale. They rated the extent to which each item was descriptive of their feelings in close relationships on a 7-point scale ranging from not at all (1) to very much (7). Eighteen items tapped attachment anxiety (e.g., "I worry about being abandoned") and 18 items tapped attachment avoidance (e.g., "I prefer not to show a partner how I feel deep down"). The reliability and validity of the scales have been repeatedly demonstrated (e.g., Brennan et al., 1998; Mikulincer & Florian, 2000) . In the current study as well, Cronbach's alphas were high for the anxiety and avoidance scales (see Table 1 ). Higher scores indicated higher anxiety and avoidance; low scores on both dimensions indicated attachment security. 3 Three to four weeks later, a different experimenter of the same gender as the participant, blind to participants' attachment scores, contacted them by phone and invited them to take part in a study. Each person then came to the laboratory (one at a time) and was run through the experiment. After arriving at the laboratory, participants were informed that the study dealt with social abilities, reactions to unpleasant stimuli, and reactions to other people behaving in unpleasant situations. They were told that there was another participant in the next room, a female fellow student who had been randomly assigned to perform some unpleasant tasks while the participant receiving the instructions had been randomly assigned to watch the other person perform these tasks and evaluate her performance. Participants were then informed that, although none of the tasks was actually dangerous, some were sufficiently stressful that some people did not want to complete them. They then received the list of tasks the other person would perform: looking at gory photographs of people who had been severely injured or killed; petting a laboratory rat; immersing one hand in ice water for 30 s; petting a live tarantula; touching a preserved sheep's eye; petting a live snake; inserting one hand into a sealed, black bag; allowing cockroaches to crawl on one's hand and arm. Participants were also told there was a video camera in each room connected to TV monitors (the participant saw himself or herself on a TV monitor at first, to add to the credibility of this claim, but he or she was then told that the other person would not see them during the first phase of the experiment). They were told that they would see the other person after the camera in the other room was switched on, because this was necessary to allow the participant to watch her performance. Following these instructions, participants completed three measures designed to elicit names of attachment figures, other close persons, and acquaintances to be used in the priming task. The order of these three measures was randomized across participants. In one measure, participants received a list of 100 first names displayed in an Excel worksheet and marked the names of people they knew. They were instructed to press 3 after the name of a person they knew and 1 after the name of a person they did not know. In a second measure, participants were asked to type, in an Excel worksheet, the first names of their father, mother, brothers, sisters, best friends, current and previous romantic partners, grandfathers, and grandmothers. (No mention was made about the functions these people did or did not serve in the participant's life.) 3 The third measure was a computerized version of the six-item WHOTO scale developed by Fraley and Davis (1997; based on previous work by Hazan, Hutt, Sturgeon, & Bricker, 1991) . This scale asked participants to provide the first names of close relationship partners who serve attachment functions. Specifically, participants were asked to record in a separate Excel worksheet the first names of people with whom they sought proximity and who provided a safe haven or secure base for them or both. (These two concepts from attachment theory were explained in laypersons' terms.) Two items tapped the proximity-seeking aspect of attachment, with one of them focused on separation protest ("Who is the person you most like to spend time with?"; "Who is the person it is hardest to be away from?"). Two items tapped the safe-haven function ("Who is the person you want to talk to when you are worried about something?" "Who is the person you turn to when you are feeling down?"), and two items tapped the secure-base function ("Who is the person you know will always be there for you?"; "Who is the person you want to share your successes with?"). For each item, participants wrote the first name of the person who best served the targeted function and labeled that person's relational role (e.g., mother, father, friend). 3 Across all of the studies reported in this article, the average number of different attachment figures' names participants generated in the six-item WHOTO scale was 3.36 (SD ϭ 1.09). A close friend was nominated as an attachment figure in 43% of the cases (across all WHOTO items), a romantic partner was nominated in 18% of the cases, mother in 20% of the cases, father in 9% of the cases, and other family members in 10% of the cases. No significant association was found between participants' attachment scores and nomination of specific figures (mother, father, friends, romantic partner). These findings replicate previous results (e.g., Fraley & Davis, 1997; Mikulincer, Gillath, & Shaver, 2002) and indicate that most of the persons identified in the WHOTO by participants in our studies were extrafamilial figures. 3 Following these computerized questionnaires, participants completed a short delay filler questionnaire about life habits and were then asked to complete a 20-trial computerized lexical-decision task. This task was designed to prime a specific mental representation subliminally. In this task, participants read a string of letters and were asked to decide whether it constituted a word. The task was run on a Pentium IBM-PC, with an SVGA color monitor, and was programmed using Superlab software. The letter strings were displayed in black lettering on a white background in the middle of the monitor screen. Participants completed 20 trials. Each trial of the task consisted of a rapid subliminal presentation of the prime (for 20 ms) followed, after a pause of 500 ms, by the presentation of one of 20 target letter strings (for 1 s). Participants judged as quickly as possible whether the letter string was or was not a word by pressing 1 on the keyboard number pad if they thought the string was a word and 3 if they thought it was not a word. There were 10 words (e.g., lake, table) and 10 nonwords (e.g., aekl). 3 For each participant, the subliminal prime was one of three names, chosen on the basis of either the person's unique answers to the WHOTO questionnaire, the names of other close persons provided by the participant, or the names of people the participant knew but to whom he or she was not close. On each trial, the prime was presented for 20 ms, which was not long enough to allow it to be consciously seen. Participants were told that each trial would begin with an x in the middle of the screen, where they should keep their eyes fixed, followed by a mild flash, which they should ignore, and then, after a brief pause, the target letter string. It is important to mention that even when a prime is presented for as little as 20 ms, the afterimage may temporarily remain active in the peripheral parts of the visual system, allowing people to recognize the name and thereby interfering with the subliminal priming procedure. To avoid this problem, we masked each prime with an XXX pattern immediately following its presentation. 3 For purposes of this task, we randomly divided participants into three conditions according to the name to be subliminally presented in all 20 trials. In the security-priming condition, the prime was the name of the person most frequently mentioned as an attachment figure when the participant completed the WHOTO measure (in cases where the top two names appeared equally often, the computer program chose one of them at random). In the close-person-priming condition, the prime was the name of a close-relationship partner who was not nominated as serving any of the attachment functions mentioned in the WHOTO scale. The program was designed to pick the name of a participant's mother if she was not nominated in the WHOTO scale. In cases where she was nominated as an attachment figure, the computer picked the name of the participant's father as the prime. If father was not available, the program moved through the names of sisters, brothers, and close friends who were not nominated as attachment figures and chose one randomly to serve as the prime. In the acquaintance-priming condition, the prime was the name of a person known by the participant but not viewed as a close-relationship partner or an attachment figure. 3 Following the lexical-decision task, the experimenter said he or she would go to the next room to tell the other experimenter that his or her participant could now begin performing the tasks on the list. The experimenter also said the other experimenter would begin to display the other participant's performance on the actual participant's TV monitor. As part of the cover story, the experimenter reminded the participant to focus on the way the other participant performed the task. The experimenter then left the room for one minute, returned to the experimental room, and turned on the TV monitor, allowing participants to watch a prerecorded videotape, which they believed was a live performance. On the tape, a female fellow participant could be seen performing a series of tasks presented by a male experimenter. All of the tasks had been selected on the basis of pilot research. We located aversive tasks that had been used in previous studies and also asked Israeli and American undergraduates to generate lists of aversive tasks that might be used in laboratory studies. Another sample of undergraduates rated the averseness of each of these tasks. We used the eight tasks that received the highest averseness ratings. 3 In the videotaped segment, participants saw Liat, a female participant (actually a bilingual student from Israel who was studying at the University of California, Davis), with a male experimenter. The experimenter explained to Liat (in English for the version used in the United States and in Hebrew for the version used in Israel) that she would be asked to perform a variety of aversive tasks and that she was free to stop whenever she chose. She agreed to proceed and then began the first task, which was to look at three somewhat gory accident and death pictures. Liat acted as if she was moderately horrified by the three pictures (showing a burned hand, a burned man, and an injured face), but she did manage to brian46@example.net. She then rested while the experimenter prepared the next task, which involved holding a large gray lab rat. The experimenter took the rat out of its cage and put it in Liat's hands. She seemed to be dismayed by the rat but did hold it for a few seconds before almost dropping it, at which point the experimenter took it back. 3 Liat rested and then began the third task, which was to plunge her hand and forearm into ice water for 30 s. The experimenter took a large bucket from under the table and filled it with real ice. Liat then tried once to put her hand in it, but found it too cold and painful, and withdrew her hand. 3 The second time she succeeded but kept grumbling, "Ooh, it's painful and cold." After 20 s she said, "I'm not sure I can go on with it." The experimenter asked Liat if she wanted to quit, but she replied, "No, I had better finish the experiment." After finishing this task, Liat asked how many more tasks there were, and the experimenter said there were five more. Liat then approached the fourth task (which was actually scripted to be the last)-touching a live tarantula (a large, hairy spider). The tarantula, visible inside an open-topped glass aquarium, was placed in the middle of the table, and the experimenter touched it to show Liat that it was alive. He asked her to touch it. She tried but broke off quickly, saying with great distress that it was just too much for her. The experimenter asked her to try again, which she did, but again she broke off quickly and said, very upset, "I can't go on. Maybe the other person can do it." The experimenter then tried to calm Liat, but when he saw that she really could not go on, he said, "OK, I'll stop the camera and we'll try again later." 3 After the TV screen went blank in the actual participant's room, the experimenter asked the participant to complete a 24-item questionnaire while waiting for Liat to recover. (As we mentioned earlier, participants were initially instructed that they were assigned to watch the other person perform some tasks and to evaluate her performance, so the questionnaire did not seem surprising or out of place.) Among other questions, this instrument included the main dependent variables of the study: emotional reactions to the distressed participant (compassion, personal distress) and willingness to help her by performing the remaining tasks. 3 Participants were presented with 10 adjectives describing different emotional states and were asked to rate how much they had experienced each emotion while watching Liat. Ratings were made on a 7-point scale, ranging from not at all (1) to very much (7). The adjectives were chosen from lists created by Batson, Fultz, and Schoenrade (1987) to measure empathy, or compassion, and personal distress. The list included four compassion-related adjectives (sympathetic, warm, compassionate, and tender) and six personal distress adjectives (afraid, uncomfortable, troubled, distressed, disturbed, and worried). 3 A factor analysis using varimax rotation yielded two main factors (with eigenvalues greater than 1) that explained 64% of the variance in the English version of the scale and 76% of the variance in the Hebrew version and replicated the two-factor structure intended by Batson et al. (1987) . The first factor (accounting for 42% of the explained variance in the American sample and 46% in the Israeli sample) included the six personal distress adjectives (all with factor loadings above .60). The second factor (accounting for 22% of the variance in the American sample and 30% in the Israeli sample) included the four compassion adjectives (all with factor loadings above .60). Cronbach's alpha coefficients for unit-weighted scales composed of items loading highly on the two factors were high (see Table 1 ). Higher scores on the scales indicate higher compassion and personal distress. 4 In addition, participants rated the extent to which they were willing to replace Liat and perform the tasks she was supposed to perform. This rating was also done on a 7-point scale, ranging from not at all (1) to very much (7). Once these questions were answered, the experimenter said he would go to the next room and see if Liat was ready to continue with the tarantula task and the four remaining tasks. The experimenter left the room for 1 min, returned to the experimental room, and told the participant, "We have a difficult situation here. The other person is very uncomfortable with these tasks." The experimenter then asked the actual participant if he or she would agree to help Liat by replacing her in the tarantula task and the four remaining tasks. Participants were also told that Liat would be asked to continue if they felt they could not help. The participant's dichotomous response (yes ϭ 1, no ϭ 0) was used as an additional dependent variable. After deciding yes or no to this final question, each participant was fully debriefed about the goals and methods of the study and was interrogated for suspicions about the manipulations, goals, and hypotheses of the study. Across all of the studies reported in this article, only a few participants expressed suspicions and they were excluded from the statistical analyses. 3 In both the American and Israeli samples, Pearson correlations revealed that the decision to help the distressed person was strongly associated with reported willingness to help her (rs of .62 and .59, ps Ͻ .01) and moderately associated with ratings of compassion (rs of .26 and .29, ps Ͻ .01). Actually volunteering to help was not significantly associated with ratings of personal distress (rs of Ϫ.12 and Ϫ.06), indicating that distress did not lead to helping. Results and Discussion Effects of attachment-security priming. To test our predictions about the effects of attachment-security priming on compassionate and helping responses, we conducted two-way multivariate and univariate analyses of variance (ANOVAs) for priming condition (attachment security, close person, acquaintance) and nationality (American, Israeli). The dependent variables were participants' ratings of compassion, personal distress, and willingness to help the distressed woman, as well as their actual agreement to help her. 5 The multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) revealed significant main effects for priming condition, F(8, 342) ϭ 5.44, p Ͻ .01, and participant nationality, F(4, 171) ϭ 20.08, p Ͻ .01. The interaction term was not significant, F(8, 342) ϭ 0.09. Univariate ANOVAs revealed that the main effect of priming condition was significant for ratings of compassion, F(2, 174) ϭ 8.51, p Ͻ .01, 2 ϭ .10, rated willingness to help the distressed woman, F(2, 174) ϭ 11.60, p Ͻ .01, 2 ϭ .12, and actual agreement to help her, F(2, 174) ϭ 11.46, p Ͻ .01, 2 ϭ .12. The priming procedure had essentially no effect on ratings of personal distress, F(2, 174) ϭ 0.57. As can be seen in Table 2 , Scheffé post hoc tests revealed that American and Israeli participants who were subliminally primed with an attachment-security representation reported higher levels of compassion and more willingness to help the distressed woman and more often decided to replace her for the remaining aversive tasks, compared with participants in the closeperson and acquaintance-priming conditions. No significant difference was found between the close-person and acquaintancepriming conditions. ANOVAs also revealed significant differences between the two samples, American and Israeli, in compassion, F(1, 174) ϭ 11.61, p Ͻ .01, 2 ϭ .06, and personal distress, F(1, 174) ϭ 66.89, p Ͻ .01, 2 ϭ .28. As can be seen in Table 2 , American participants reported higher compassion and personal distress than did Israeli participants. None of the univariate interactions was significant, all Fs Ͻ 1. 5 The contribution of attachment-style dimensions. In examining the unique and interactive contributions of the two attachment dimensions, four-step hierarchical regression analyses were conducted on compassion, personal distress, willingness to help the distressed woman, and actual agreement to help her. In the first step, security priming (a dummy variable contrasting security priming with the combination of close-person and acquaintance priming), nationality (a dummy variable comparing American with Israeli participants), attachment anxiety, and attachment avoidance were introduced as predictors. The product terms representing all of the two-way interactions were introduced in the second step, the products representing all of the three-way interactions were entered in the third step, and the four-way interaction was added in the fourth step. 5 The regressions conducted on compassion, willingness to help the distressed woman, and actual agreement to help revealed similar patterns of effects. First, they yielded significant main effects of security priming, ␤s of .23, .28, and .29, ps Ͻ .01, even after controlling for the contributions of the attachment dimensions. Second, they yielded the already reported significant effect of nationality on compassion, ␤ ϭ .24, p Ͻ .01. Third, the unique main effect for attachment avoidance was also significant for compassion ratings and willingness and agreement to help the suffering woman, ␤s of Ϫ.31, Ϫ.22, and Ϫ.21, ps Ͻ .01. Supporting our predictions, higher scores on attachment avoidance were associated with lower levels of rated compassion toward Liat and less rated and actual willingness to help her. Neither the main effect of attachment anxiety nor any of the interactions were significant. 5 The regression conducted on the personal distress score yielded the already reported significant effect of nationality, ␤ ϭ .52, p Ͻ .01, and a significant main effect of attachment anxiety, ␤ ϭ .26, p Ͻ .01. Higher attachment-anxiety scores were associated with higher personal distress while watching Liat suffer. No other main effects or interactions were significant. 5 Overall, the findings supported our predictions. First, subliminal priming with names of security-providing attachment figures led participants to report higher levels of compassion toward a woman in distress and higher willingness to help her. More important, these participants were more likely actually to relieve her distress by taking over the remaining aversive tasks than participants in the two control conditions. Because this contextual activation was accomplished at a subliminal level, we inferred that the observed prosocial effects of attachment security did not require conscious mediation or deliberation. Rather, the attachment-caregiving link seems to be made at a preconscious, automatic level. Second, whereas avoidance scores were inversely associated with compassionate and helpful responses, attachment anxiety was associated with higher ratings of personal distress while watching a suffering woman. It is important to note that these effects were obtained in both the American and the Israeli samples, and there was no significant interaction between attachment-style dimensions and contextual activation of attachment security as determinants of participants' reactions to another person's distress. That is, the prosocial effects of heightened accessibility of attachment-security representations were observed regardless of variations in dispositional attachment orientation. 5 Testing an alternative interpretation. Despite the theoretical predictability and cogency of the findings, they might also have been explained in terms of modeling, because the priming proce- dure might directly arouse thoughts of helping without any mediation by attachment representations. Although modeling might also have been facilitated caregiving, we believed that the most direct effect of exposing a person to representations and reminders of a caring figure is the activation of feelings of being protected, supported, and comforted rather than the activation of wishes to assist others. Moreover, the primed thoughts and feelings related to attachment security were not assumed to activate caregiving representations automatically; rather, we believed they potentiated these representations in conjunction with encountering a person in need. In other words, in the presence of signals of need, heightened security promotes smooth activation and functioning of the caregiving system. The caregiving system is not directly activated by representations of a caring person but by exposure to other people's distress; representations of a familiar caregiver or attachment figure facilitates this activation by removing attachment-related worries and defensive (avoidant) tendencies. If this reasoning is correct, thinking about a caring attachment figure without the presence of another person in need or distress should activate representations of attachment security but not necessarily activate thoughts of helping others. 5 To explore this issue we ran two small additional studies. In the first one, a sample of 30 Israeli undergraduates (21 women, 9 men) completed the WHOTO task, which was designed to elicit the names of attachment figures, and also provided the names of people who were close to them without being attachment figures (see the preceding Method section). Participants were then randomly assigned to one of two conditions. Half (11 women, 4 men) were asked to visualize the face of the person they nominated most frequently in the WHOTO scale (the attachment-figure priming condition), and the others (10 women, 5 men) were asked to visualize the face of a close-relationship partner who was not nominated in the WHOTO scale (the close-person priming condition). In both conditions, participants were asked to bring the targeted person to mind and think about him or her for 2 min. This visualization procedure was identical to the one used by Baldwin et al. (1996) . Next, all participants completed a 15-item scale tapping feelings, thoughts, and motives elicited by the visualization task. Participants rated the extent to which each item was descriptive of their feelings, thoughts, and motives during the visualization task. Ratings were made using a 7-point scale, ranging from 1 ( not at all) to 7 ( very much). Embedded among other items, there were 4 tapping attachment security ("I felt a sense of safety," "I felt protected from danger," "I thought I'm loved by others," "I felt happy about having people who can support me in times of need"; Cronbach's alpha ϭ .91) and 4 tapping caregiving motives ("I felt a need to help another person," "I thought that I am a caring person," "I wanted to relieve other people's distress," and "I thought about the suffering of human beings"; Cronbach's alpha ϭ .88). Two average scores were computed for each participant, one for security and one for caregiving. 5 A two-way ANOVA for Visualization Condition ϫ Targeted Items (attachment, caregiving), with the second factor treated as a within-subject repeated measure, revealed a significant interaction, F(1, 28) ϭ 16.61, p Ͻ .01, 2 ϭ .16. Tests for simple main effects revealed that the visualization of an attachment figure led to stronger feelings of attachment security (M ϭ 4.37, SD ϭ 0.84) than the feelings that were aroused by visualizing a close person who was not nominated as an attachment figure (M ϭ 2.87, SD ϭ 0.81), F(1, 28) ϭ 29.08, p Ͻ .01. However, there was no significant difference in caregiving motives between the two visualization conditions (M ϭ 2.92, SD ϭ 0.77 for attachment figure visualization; M ϭ 3.02, SD ϭ 0.79 for close person visualization), F Ͻ 1. In addition, simple main effects tests indicated
{'paper_id': '2052603', 'title': 'Attachment, Caregiving, and Altruism: Boosting Attachment Security Increases Compassion and Helping.', 's2_url': 'https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:2052603', 'source': 'S2ORC'}