In one of the earliest contributions to attachment theory, Bowlby [1, 2] observed that attachment relationships are processes guided by emotional exchanges, and they affect how informational processing of emotional messages is regulated [3-5]. In particular, research has shown that the ability of an individual to decode emotions in others—a skill developed during the first 6-7 months of life [6, 7]—is influenced by their attachment style, which, in turn, influences one’s comprehension of emotions later in life [8, 9].

Previous works have examined factors believed to be responsible for adults’ ability to recognize emotions, including age [10], specific personality dimensions [11], relationship well-being [12], alexithymia, and repressive coping style [13]; several of their findings suggest that securely attached adults can recognize and label emotional facial expressions better than insecurely attached adults [14-17]. Nevertheless, no consensus has been reached on how insecure attachment affects the ability to recognize facial emotional expressions [15, 18-20]. While some literature on emotional competence development has shown that children with disorganized attachment are disadvantaged in emotion regulation strategies [21, 22], and results on their ability to discriminate among emotions are mixed [23].

It should be noted that most research into the relationship between attachment style and ability to recognize emotional expressions (including those mentioned above) have relied solely on facial emotional stimuli. Consequently, how individuals with different attachment styles differ in perceiving emotions conveyed by vocal stimuli is a topic that remains unexplored. Still, as evidence suggests [24], inferences about emotional states depend on the communication mode (e.g., audio only, video only, combined audio and video) through which emotional states are conveyed. In this regard, detection of affect from audiovisual stimuli (composite face-voice stimuli) has been described as emerging earlier than the ability to perceive emotions from faces alone [25]. As with physical facial features, combinations of various vocal characteristics (e.g., pitch, speech intensity) allow individuals to infer others’ emotional processes [26]. In addition, emotion recognition in voices alone was found to continuously improve from early childhood to mid-adolescence [27] and to differ from emotion recognition in facial expressions because the brain processes auditory signals more quickly [28]. In terms of accuracy in affect detection, facial (versus vocal) cues were described as easier to recognize both by children and adults [29, 30], especially the basic emotions [31].

An understanding of how attachment and personality styles influence the recognition of emotions can benefit from the conceptualizations of personality outlined by the post-rationalist approach, developed by Vittorio Guidano within the theoretical context of cognitive constructivism [32-35]. According to Guidano’s model of personality styles, each individual is characterized by a pattern of self-coherence, or Personal Meaning Organization (PMO). PMOs represent arrangements of processes by which individuals form personal meaning-i.e., the subjectivity in self-referring experiences and the development of adaptive behavioral strategies [36, 37]-and thus wholeness and historical continuity through their lifetimes [33-35, 38, 39]. From that perspective, psychopathological disorders and symptoms reflect a disruption of self-organization processes; thus, a psychotherapeutic approach focusing on PMOs aims to improve the skills needed to control disordered emotions and develop new, more adaptive behavioral strategies [36, 37].

Attachment relationships are involved in the development of PMOs because the behavioral attachment system drives an individual’s adaptive ability toward developing the most useful PMO for achieving or maintaining close proximity to one’s caregiver [36, 40, 41]. The adaptive stabilization of a child’s PMO depends on how easily they learn to predict the caregiver’s behaviors and to perceive the caregiver as being available or not, willing to help or not, and emotionally close or not [42]. When the caregiver’s behaviors are stable and predictable, the child learns to easily decode the caregiver’s and their own basic feelings of fear, anger, sadness, and happiness. The stability and predictability of the caregiver’s emotional conduct equip the child with a strong ability to decode their own internal emotional activations and to interpret, through these emotions, what is happening in the environment (inward experience focus) [43].

When caregivers’ behaviors and expressions are more complex, variable, and/or perceived as dependent on external situations and environmental rules, it becomes more challenging for the child to clearly discriminate, decode, and predict caregivers’ emotions. Consequently, due to the inconsistency and ambiguity of caregiver response, the child learns to be constantly centered on the external world, to read the environmental signals, and to continuously check the caregiver’s emotional attitude in order to decode the situation and to discriminate between rejection and acceptance. Being constantly focused on the environment’s signals makes it more difficult for the child to discriminate among internal emotional states, which can only be interpreted with the aid of the external context and by continuously referring to the outside world. As a result, the child’s emotional activations move through a preliminary evaluation of environmental messages and requests that consequentially orient recognition of internal states and self-perception and that become essential to perceiving and recognizing internal emotional states (outward experience focus) [32, 42].

Accordingly, inwardly-disposed individuals can process emotional stimuli faster than outwardly-disposed ones, since they primarily use bodily reactions and their own internal activations to read the environment, and do not need to cognitively process such stimuli [43,44] or rely on the aid of specific circumstances and the external context to interpret these stimuli [32].

Additionally, the caregiver’s ability to provide a strong sense of protection, reassurance, and approval instills in the child the concept of high reciprocity as opposed to low reciprocity, in which the caregiver is distant and imposes rules and principles.

The two primary developmental axes-i.e., caregiver predictability and reciprocity-establish the four main PMOs: the eating disorder organization (outward focus/low predictability, high reciprocity), the obsessive organization (outward focus/low predictability, low reciprocity), the phobic organization (inward focus/high predictability, high reciprocity), and the depressive organization (inward focus/high predictability, low reciprocity) [42].

Individuals with the eating disorder organization display a blurry sense of self due to a propensity to act both on the basis of their internal states and on opinions built on external factors (either persons or situations). Accordingly, their ability to decode basic emotions is cognitively mediated through what is called reflective appraisal [45]. Individuals with the obsessive organization present awareness, conscious behavior, sense of responsibility, order, and coherence. Their behavior and thinking are expected to match abstract principles, and they usually control emotional situations on the basis of analytical and logical skills [40, 46]. Phobic-organized individuals display an automatic appraisal (i.e., immediacy in perception without awareness) of basic emotions-particularly fear-that dominates their personality styles and emotional living [32, 34, 44, 45, 47]. Lastly, individuals with depressive organization display typical depressive behaviors, affective incompetence, sense of loss, a denial of the importance of the support of others, and a strong sense of self-sufficiency prevails [32].

Evidence supporting the validity of PMO constructs, as operationalized in instruments developed for their assessment (e.g., the Personality Meaning Organization Questionnaire), has been provided through comparisons of inward and outward styles with Cloninger’s model of personality and Big Five personality factors [48].

Inward and outward orientations are described as being connected with a putative genetic pattern/basis [49] and associated with variability in the processing of basic emotions, which shows different patterns of emotional activation [22, 44, 50]. For example, neural activations during the cognitive labeling of threatening facial expressions differ significantly between phobic- and eating disorder-organized individuals [50].

In light of the above considerations, this study sought to investigate how attachment and inward and outward personality styles affect individuals’ ability to interpret emotions. Since PMO styles (particularly phobic and eating disorder PMOs) and attachment orientations differ in terms of the immediacy with which basic emotions are processed [15, 18, 44], this study also assessed Reaction Times (RT) in decoding emotions. Lastly, given the little attention to the recognition of emotional voices by the literature, this study adopted vocal emotional stimuli. Two experiments were conducted that involved emotional voice recognition: one assessing perceivers’ accuracy, the other assessing their RT.

It is hypothesized that individuals with different attachment styles and with inward versus outward orientations will show significant differences in their ability and their time needed to decode vocal emotional stimuli. Specifically, securely attached individuals are expected to perform better than insecurely attached ones, and inwardly-disposed individuals are expected to perform better than outwardly-disposed ones.

Adults were selected to participate in the experiments because validated measures of inward or outward orientations in the literature are for adults only. In light of evidence indicating women’s general superiority in recognizing emotions [22, 51], possible gender effects were also investigated.

In a laboratory setting free of distractions, participants completed and signed consent forms, followed by the ECRQ and PMQ. Next, they were asked to listen to all 20 utterances and assign each utterance one of the five mentioned emotions by checking the corresponding box on the answer grid. Utterances were presented randomly via headphones attached to a personal computer, the screen of which centrally displayed a neutral background with various sound icons that participants were asked to click no more than three times each in order to access the sound.

The variables of interest were attachment style (secure, insecure-dismissive, insecure-preoccupied, and insecure-fearful, according to ECRQ scores), personality style (inward/outward orientation, according to PMQ scores), emotion recognition ability (decoding accuracy, decoding reaction time), and gender. To assess the homogeneity of the scales, Cronbach’s alpha (α) was computed. Differences among groups in categorical variables—gender and attachment style, as well as gender and personality organizations—were assessed with the χ² test, and differences in mean values between genders were evaluated with an independent sample t test. To gauge the significance of the effect of attachment style and inward or outward personality on the accuracy of emotion recognition, a factorial Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) was performed for each of the five emotions in terms of attachment styles and inward or outward personality organizations as between-participant variables. By contrast, the mean of correct answers to the vocal emotion recognition task served as within-participant variables. To ensure balanced frequencies of attachment groups, the attachment was treated as a two-level factor (secure; insecure = preoccupied + dismissive + fearful). In the case of significant differences between secure and insecure individuals, ANOVA was conducted to distinguish among types of insecurity (i.e., preoccupied, dismissive, and fearful).

Effect sizes (d) of significant changes were calculated.

The study presented here aimed to extend previous findings on the ability to decode vocal emotional stimuli as a function of attachment style and inward or outward personality dimensions [65-67].

From a theoretical perspective, the results support, within the theoretical background of cognitive constructivism, the role of concepts such as inward and outward and PMO as able to explain individual differences in processing basic emotions. Since the recognition of emotion falls within the basic skills upon which typical social interactions are based, the findings can be useful to enhance the comprehension of personality-related factors involved in the context of daily social interactions and in patient-psychotherapist interactions.

The obtained results partially supported the hypotheses. Despite no differences in the emotion recognition accuracy between securely and insecurely attached participants and inward/ outward focused individuals in Study 1, both securely attached and inward-focused individuals showed different emotion recognition RT compared to individuals in the other groups. Findings from Study 2 suggest that secure attachment reduces the time an individual needs to interpret an emotional vocal stimulus conveying joy (i.e., securely attached individuals answered significantly faster than fearful ones) and anger (i.e., securely attached individuals answered significantly faster than fearful and preoccupied ones) compared to the time needed by insecure attached ones. Similarly, inwardly disposed individuals more quickly responded to joyful vocal stimuli than outwardly disposed ones.

Secondary analyses performed on data representing individuals who provided correct answers in emotion recognition labeling revealed that securely attached individuals, especially if inward-focused, are faster than insecure ones in correctly identifying vocal stimuli conveying anger.

Such results provide evidence that secure attachment styles and inward personality organizations facilitate an individual’s understanding of emotions by shortening the time necessary to assign anger and joy to vocal stimuli, as well as to correctly assign anger to vocal stimuli. As research has shown, how caregivers and parents respond to children affects both the attachment style that children will develop and their emotional competencies as adults [1, 2, 8, 9]. In line with an attachment theory perspective, secure individuals are thought to be confident with their own and others’ emotional behaviors (i.e., are socially advantaged individuals). Joy and anger, as strongly socially situated emotions, require a faster adaptive response to challenging social situations [68]. Therefore, it is hypothesized here that secure individuals are equipped to more quickly detect social emotions, such as joy and anger, from vocal emotional stimuli. Such would not be the case for sadness, fear, and disgust, however, they do not need social competences.

Securely attached individuals were also faster in correctly decoding anger. As an explanation, it is plausible to assume that children with secure attachment, given the confidence that they develop due to their caregivers’ ability to support them in any circumstances, might not experience anger as threatening. Anger is a functional response to another’s negative attachment behaviors, and securely attached children learn to keenly process anger as a temporary, reversible negative behavior and are confident in having “suitable responses for successfully dealing with these behaviors” [69]. Such might not be the case for sadness and fear, which are less temporary and reversible behaviors than anger, and even secure individuals may not have suitable responses for successfully dealing with them. In support of that assumption, evidence suggests that securely attached individuals can easily recognize angry facial expressions as well as those with any negative valence [70, 71]. Nonetheless, and in contrast to the present results, other studies have described insecure maltreated children as being more likely to identify blended expressions as angry [72] and better at scrutinizing angry signals of rejection and disapproval [73]. Those inconsistencies can be attributed to differences in stimuli adopted, being mainly visual in the mentioned studies and auditory in the study reported here. Nevertheless, empirical research on the role that insecure attachment plays in individuals’ ability to interpret emotional facial and vocal expressions has not yet produced conclusive results [15, 18-20, 65-67].

Regarding the role of inward personality, the findings of the study were consistent with the post-rationalist assumption that basic emotions are usually perceived with immediacy by inwardly disposed individuals, yet tend to be cognitively mediated by outwardly disposed ones [35, 44]. The absence of differences between personality styles and the ability to interpret emotional vocal expressions of fear, sadness, and surprise could suggest that individual characteristics play a different, not fully evaluated, role in such tasks.

A theoretical and practical implication of the present study is the improved comprehension of the role that personality dimensions play in individuals’ ability to recognize emotions. Outward and inward PMOs, to our knowledge, have never been investigated in relation to individuals’ attachment styles in order to identify matching abilities, including similar attitudes or differences in ways of decoding emotional expressions, if not both. In that sense, the study reported here presents an original attempt to move beyond traditional schemes that relate emotional intelligence to attachment styles and visual stimuli only. In particular, researchers have neglected the subjectivity involved in the self-referring experience and developing adaptive behavioral strategies (e.g., inward and outward PMOs) and vocal emotional expressions, as well as failed to define appropriate relationships among them.

These results suggest that the human ability to decode emotions is shaped by individual characteristics, which raises the need for further investigations that also account for the effects of communication modes.

The study posed some limitations. For one, because its sample was small, replication in a larger sample is advised. Second, selection bias might have occurred in the sample recruitment process: participants were university students recruited on a voluntary basis, and all of them were from the same geographic area. It would be useful to compare the present results with different classes of the general population. In addition, a self-report instrument (i.e., the ECRQ) was used to assess attachment orientation among healthy adults, which limits the generalizability of the findings. The study did not examine other significant variables that could affect attachment style (e.g., abuse, neglect, loss, and other personality traits) and that, in turn, could affect individuals’ ability to recognize emotions and might partly explain individual differences (or lack thereof) in the analysis of the variables of interest.

Additional data and investigations on the topic are, therefore, recommended.