Attachment, Familiarity & Face Perception

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Abstractions about attachment, attraction, kin recognition, self-image, facial perception, familiarity, and developmental or phonological effects.

9 abstractions in this family — domain-specific abstractions that sit near one another in structural-signature space (k-means over structural-signature embeddings). Each is shown with its short description.

• Attachment — A behavioral-motivational system that regulates proximity between a vulnerable individual and a protective figure — a safe haven sought under threat and a secure base enabling exploration — whose learned expectations form an internal working model that classifies into stable attachment styles.
• Birthday-Number Effect — The small implicit preference for numbers in one's own birth date over neutral ones — a valence-transfer effect from the implicit-egotism family, real only in the residual that survives controls for a number's baseline pleasantness and cohort base rates.
• Coolidge Effect — The finding that a sexually satiated male mammal, refractory with a familiar partner, resumes copulation when given a novel one — revealing the apparent satiety as partner-specific habituation of the reward response, not a generic exhaustion of reproductive capacity.
• Face Superiority Effect — A facial feature is recognized faster and more accurately embedded in a complete upright face than in isolation — a counter-featural advantage whose direction proves that a configural, whole-based processing system, not part-by-part analysis, mediates recognition.
• Kewpie doll effect — The pattern in which a configural set of juvenile features — big cranium, large low-set eyes, small nose and chin — pre-consciously cues the caregiving system, even in non-living entities, so response magnitude tracks how far the configuration exceeds any real infant rather than what the object is.
• Narcissistic Elation — In Grunbergerian psychoanalytic theory, model a state of blissful completeness, self-sufficiency, and omnipotence sought through withdrawal, triumph, or fusion with an idealized other.
• Phonological Process — Read a child's scattered speech errors as the output of a small number of rule-governed transformations that apply productively across whole natural classes and drop on a predictable developmental schedule.
• Thatcher Effect — A face with locally inverted eyes and mouth looks grotesque upright but unremarkable upside down, because the holistic configural system that reads inter-feature relations fires only near canonical upright orientation — a switch that lets the effect probe whether that system is engaged and intact.
• Westermarck Effect — The evolved incest-avoidance mechanism in which people raised in close domestic proximity during the first six years develop a lasting adult sexual aversion to one another — tracking early co-residence as a proxy for kinship, not biological relatedness itself.