Threat-related Attention Bias in Socioemotional Development: A Critical Review and Methodological Considerations

Young Children of Mothers with a History of Depression Show Attention Bias to Sad Faces: An Eye-tracking Study

Maternal depression is a predictor of the emergence of depression in the offspring. Attention bias (AB) to negative emotional stimuli in children may serve as a risk factor for children of depressed parents. The present study aimed to examine the effect of maternal major depressive disorder (MDD) history on AB to emotional faces in children at age four, before the age of onset for full-blown psychiatric symptoms. The study also compared AB patterns between mothers and their offspring. Fifty-eight mothers and their four-year-old children participated in this study, of which 27 high-risk (HR) children had mothers with MDD during their children's lifetime. Attention to emotional faces was measured in both children and their mothers using an eye-tracking visual search task. HR children exhibited faster detection and longer dwell time toward the sad than happy target faces. The low-risk (LR) children also displayed a sad bias but to a lesser degree. Children across both groups showed AB towards angry target faces, likely reflecting a normative AB pattern. Our findings indicate that AB to sad faces may serve as an early marker of depression risk. However, we provided limited support for the mother-child association of AB. Future research is needed to examine the longitudinal intergenerational transmission of AB related to depression and possible mechanisms underlying the emergence of AB in offspring of depressed parents.

Social threat processing in adults and children: Faster orienting to, but shorter dwell time on, angry faces during visual search

Attention to emotional signals conveyed by others is critical for gleaning information about potential social partners and the larger social context. Children appear to detect social threats (e.g., angry faces) faster than non-threatening social signals (e.g., neutral faces). However, methods that rely on behavioral responses alone are limited in identifying different attentional processes involved in threat detection or responding. To address this question, we used a visual search paradigm to assess behavioral (i.e., reaction time to select a target image) and attentional (i.e., eye-tracking fixations, saccadic shifts, and dwell time) responses in children (ages 7-10 years old, N = 42) and adults (ages 18-23 years old, N = 46). In doing so, we compared behavioral responding and attentional detection and engagement with threatening (i.e., angry and fearful faces) and non-threatening (i.e., happy faces) social signals. Overall, children and adults were faster to detect social threats (i.e., angry faces), but spent a smaller proportion of time dwelling on them and had slower behavioral responses. Findings underscore the importance of combining different measures to parse differences between processing versus responding to social signals across development. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Children and adults are slower to select angry faces when measured by time to mouse-click but faster to detect angry faces when measured by time to first eye fixation. The use of eye-tracking addresses some limitations of prior visual search tasks with children that rely on behavioral responses alone. Results suggest shorter time to first fixation, but subsequently, shorter duration of dwell on social threat in children and adults.

Lower maternal emotional availability is related to increased attention toward fearful faces during infancy

It has been suggested that infants' age-typical attention biases for faces and facial expressions have an inherent connection with the parent-infant interaction. However, only a few previous studies have addressed this topic. To investigate the association between maternal caregiving behaviors and an infant's attention for emotional faces, 149 mother-infant dyads were assessed when the infants were 8 months. Caregiving behaviors were observed during free-play interactions and coded using the Emotional Availability Scales. The composite score of four parental dimensions, that are sensitivity, structuring, non-intrusiveness, and non-hostility, was used in the analyses. Attention disengagement from faces was measured using eye tracking and face-distractor paradigm with neutral, happy, and fearful faces and scrambled-face control pictures as stimuli. The main finding was that lower maternal emotional availability was related to an infant's higher attention to fearful faces (p = .042), when infant sex and maternal age, education, and concurrent depressive and anxiety symptoms were controlled. This finding indicates that low maternal emotional availability may sensitize infants' emotion processing system for the signals of fear at least during this specific age around 8 months. The significance of the increased attention toward fearful faces during infancy is an important topic for future research.

Differential effects of attachment security on visual fixation to facial expressions of emotion in 14-month-old infants: an eye-tracking study

Introduction

Models of attachment and information processing suggest that the attention infants allocate to social information might occur in a schema-driven processing manner according to their attachment pattern. A major source of social information for infants consists of facial expressions of emotion. We tested for differences in attention to facial expressions and emotional discrimination between infants classified as securely attached (B), insecure-avoidant (A), and insecure-resistant (C).

Methods

Sixty-one 14-month-old infants participated in the Strange Situation Procedure and an experimental task of Visual Habituation and Visual Paired-Comparison Task (VPC). In the Habituation phase, a Low-Arousal Happy face (habituation face) was presented followed by a VPC task of 6 trials composed of two contrasting emotional faces always involving the same actress: the one used in habituation (trial old face) and a new one (trial new face) portraying changes in valence (Low-Arousal Angry face), arousal (High-Arousal Happy face), or valence + arousal (High-Arousal Angry face). Measures of fixation time (FT) and number of fixations (FC) were obtained for the habituation face, the trial old face, the trial new face, and the difference between the trial old face and the trial new face using an eye-tracking system.

Results

We found a higher FT and FC for the trial new face when compared with the trial old face, regardless of the emotional condition (valence, arousal, valence + arousal contrasts), suggesting that 14-month-old infants were able to discriminate different emotional faces. However, this effect differed according to attachment pattern: resistant-attached infants (C) had significantly higher FT and FC for the new face than patterns B and A, indicating they may remain hypervigilant toward emotional change. On the contrary, avoidant infants (A) revealed significantly longer looking times to the trial old face, suggesting overall avoidance of novel expressions and thus less sensitivity to emotional change.

Discussion

Overall, these findings corroborate that attachment is associated with infants' social information processing.

Assessing Visual Avoidance of Faces During Real-Life Social Stress in Children with Social Anxiety Disorder: A Mobile Eye-Tracking Study

This study measured visual attention (fixation count, dwell time) during two real-life social stress tasks using mobile eye-tracking glasses in children (9-13 years) diagnosed with social anxiety disorder (SAD; n = 25) and a healthy control group (HC; n = 30). The influence of state anxiety on attention allocation and negative self-evaluation biases regarding gaze behavior were also examined. Compared to the HC group, children with SAD showed visual avoidance (i.e., fewer fixations) of the faces of interaction partners during the second social stress task. While visual avoidance in HC children decreased with declining state anxiety from the first to the second social stress task, no such effect was found in children with SAD. A negative self-evaluation bias regarding gaze behavior in children with SAD was not found. In sum, measuring visual attention during real-life social situations may help enhance our understanding of social attention in childhood SAD.

Maternal anxiety during pregnancy predicts infant attention to affective faces

BACKGROUND

Prenatal maternal anxiety is a known influence on offspring development. General anxiety and pregnancy-related anxiety (a distinct type of anxiety encompassing fears associated with pregnancy) are associated with offspring socioemotional development, with potential consequences for later emotional and behavioral problems. This study examines whether maternal pregnancy-related and general anxiety relate to infant attention to affective faces, a process which plays an integral role in early socioemotional development.

METHODS

Participants included 86 mothers and their 6-month-old infants (56.3 % female). Mothers completed measures of pregnancy-related and general anxiety three times through gestation. Infants' attention to affective faces was assessed with an eye-tracking task during which a series of face pairs were presented (happy, angry, or sad face paired with a neutral face). Overall attention measures included attention-holding (total looking time) and attention-orienting (latency to faces); affect-biased attention measures included proportion of total looking time to emotional faces and latency difference score.

RESULTS

Higher maternal pregnancy-related anxiety across gestation predicted decreased infant attention-holding to affective faces [F(1,80) = 7.232, p = .009, partial η2 = 0.083]. No differences were found in infant attention-orienting or affect-biased attention.

LIMITATIONS

Reliance on a correlational study design precludes the ability to make causal inferences.

CONCLUSIONS

Maternal pregnancy-related anxiety is an important predictor of child outcomes. We provide novel evidence that pregnancy-related anxiety predicts infant attention to emotional faces, behaviors which have important implications for socioemotional development. Providers may consider pregnancy-related anxiety as a target for screening and treatment that may benefit both pregnant individual and offspring.

An Integrative Model of Youth Anxiety: Cognitive-Affective Processes and Parenting in Developmental Context

Multiple theoretical frameworks have been proposed to provide a more comprehensive picture of the risk factors that influence anxiety-related developmental trajectories. Nonetheless, there remains a need for an integrative model that outlines: (1) which risk factors may be most pertinent at different points in development, and (2) how parenting may maintain, exacerbate, or attenuate an affective style that is characterized by high negative emotional reactivity to unfamiliar, uncertain, and threatening situations. A developmentally informed, integrative model has the potential to guide treatment development and delivery, which is critical to reducing the public health burden associated with these disorders. This paper outlines a model integrating research on many well-established risk mechanisms for anxiety disorders, focusing on (1) the developmental progression from emotional reactivity constructs early in life to those involving higher-level cognitive processes later in youth, and (2) potential pathways by which parenting may impact the stability of youth's cognitive-affective responses to threat-relevant information across development.

Attention Bias and Anxiety: The Moderating Effect of Sociocultural Variables in Rural Latinx Youth

Attention bias confers risk for anxiety development, however, the influence of sociodemographic variables on the relationship between attention bias and anxiety remains unclear. We examined the association between attention bias and anxiety among rural Latinx youth and investigated potential moderators of this relationship. Clinical symptoms, demographic characteristics, and a performance-based measure of attention bias were collected from 66 rural Latinx youth with clinical levels of anxiety (33.3% female; Mage = 11.74; 92.4% Latinx, 7.6% Mixed Latinx). No moderating effects for age or gender were found. Youth below the poverty line displayed an attention bias away from threat in comparison to youth above the poverty line, who displayed an attention bias towards threat. Among youth below the poverty line, this bias away from threat was associated with increased anxiety. Findings highlight the importance of economic adversity in understanding the relationship between attention bias and anxiety.

Affective language spreads between anxious children and their mothers during a challenging puzzle task

Humans influence each other's emotions. The spread of emotion is well documented across behavioral, psychophysiological, and neuroscientific levels of analysis, but might this influence also be evident in language (e.g., are people more likely to use emotion words after hearing someone else use them)? The current study tests whether mothers and children influence each other's use of affective language. From 2018 to 2020, children aged 6-12 who met diagnostic criteria for anxiety disorders and their mothers (N = 93 dyads) completed a challenging puzzle task while being video recorded. Analyses of transcriptions revealed that mothers and children indeed influenced each other's language. Bidirectional influence was observed for use of negative affect words: Mothers were more likely to use negative affect words if their child had just used negative affect words (over and above mothers' own language on their previous turn), and children were similarly influenced by mother affect word use. A similar bidirectional relation emerged for linguistic distance, a measure related to effective emotion regulation and mental health. However, the significance of the child-to-mother direction of influence for these two variables varied depending on correction threshold and should thus be verified in future research. Nonetheless, these findings extend understanding of emotional influence by showing turn-by-turn relations between the use of affective language. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Fearful temperament in middle childhood predicts adolescent attention bias and anxiety symptoms: The moderating role of frontal EEG asymmetry

The current study provided first analyses of the moderating effect of baseline-to-task frontal EEG asymmetry on the associations between 9-year fearful temperament and adolescent attention bias to threat as well as anxiety symptoms. Participants include a community sample of 122 children (60 boys, 62 girls; Mage = 14.66 years; Range = 11.82-18.13 years). Baseline-to-task frontal EEG asymmetry at age 9 moderated the relation between fearful temperament at age 9 and adolescent anxiety symptoms. Specifically, fearful temperament predicted adolescent anxiety symptoms when children showed greater right activation from baseline to an executive function task, but not greater left activation. Baseline-to-task frontal EEG asymmetry moderated the association between fearful temperament and sustained (i.e., stimulus onset asynchrony is 1250 ms) but not automatic attention bias (i.e., stimulus onset asynchrony is 500 ms). Children with greater left frontal activation from baseline to task more efficiently direct attention away from threat. Adolescent automatic attention bias to threat was related to concurrent anxiety symptoms. These findings illustrate the importance of considering frontal EEG asymmetry to shape how fearful children process threat and to influence their behavioral problems.

Self-control training supplementing inpatient multidisciplinary obesity treatment in children and adolescents

Research points to self-control as a possible mechanism for facilitating health behaviour and weight loss. The dual pathway model underpins the role of strong bottom-up reactivity towards food and weak top-down executive functions in obesity. Despite flourishing lab studies on attention bias modification or inhibition trainings, relatively few focused on training both processes to improve self-control in children and adolescents in inpatient multidisciplinary obesity treatment (MOT). Being part of the WELCOME project, this study investigated the effectiveness of Brain Fitness training (using the Dot Probe and Go/No-Go) as an adjunct to inpatient MOT in 131 Belgian children and adolescents. Changes in self-control (performance-based inhibitory control and attention bias as well as self-reported eating behaviour) in the experimental group were compared to sham training. Multiple Imputation was used to handle missing data. Inhibitory control and external eating improved over time (pre/post/follow-up), but we found no evidence for a significant interaction between time and condition. Future research should pay more attention to the role of individual variability in baseline self-control, sham training, and ecological validity of self-control training to improve real-life health behaviour and treatment perspectives for children and adolescents with weight problems.

Higher attention bias for fear at 8 months of age is associated with better socioemotional competencies during toddlerhood

BACKGROUND

In previous studies, an attention bias for signals of fear and threat has been related to socioemotional problems, such as anxiety symptoms, and socioemotional competencies, such as altruistic behaviors in children, adolescents and adults. However, previous studies lack evidence about these relations among infants and toddlers.

AIMS

Our aim was to study the association between the individual variance in attention bias for faces and, specifically, fearful faces during infancy and socioemotional problems and competencies during toddlerhood.

STUDY DESIGN AND SUBJECTS

The study sample was comprised of 245 children (112 girls). We explored attentional face and fear biases at the age of 8 months using eye tracking and the face-distractor paradigm with neutral, happy and fearful faces and a scrambled-face control stimulus. Socioemotional problems and competencies were reported by parents with the Brief Infant and Toddler Social Emotional Assessment (BITSEA) when children were 24 months old.

OUTCOME MEASURES AND RESULTS

A higher attentional fear bias at 8 months of age was related to higher levels of socioemotional competence at 24 months of age (β = .18, p = .008), when infants' sex and temperamental affectivity, maternal age, education and depressive symptoms were controlled. We found no significant association between attentional face or fear bias and socioemotional problems.

CONCLUSIONS

We found that the heightened attention bias for fearful faces was related to positive outcomes in early socioemotional development. Longitudinal study designs are needed to explore the changes in the relation between the attention bias for fear or threat and socioemotional development during early childhood.

Associations between attentional biases to fearful faces and social-emotional development in infants with and without an older sibling with autism

During the first year of life, infants become increasingly attuned to facial emotion, with heightened sensitivity to faces conveying threat observed by age seven months as illustrated through attentional biases (e.g., slower shifting away from fearful faces). Individual differences in these cognitive attentional biases have been discussed in relation to broader social-emotional functioning, and the current study examines these associations in infants with an older sibling with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a group with an elevated likelihood of a subsequent ASD diagnosis (ELA; n = 33), and a group of infants with no family history of ASD who are at low likelihood of ASD (LLA; n = 24). All infants completed a task measuring disengagement of attention from faces at 12 months (fearful, happy, neutral), and caregivers completed the Infant-Toddler Social and Emotional Assessment at 12, 18, and/or 24 months. For the full sample, greater fear bias in attention disengagement at 12 months related to more internalizing behaviors at 18 months, and this was driven by the LLA infants. When examining groups separately, findings revealed that LLA with a greater fear bias had more difficult behaviors at 12, 18, and 24 months; in contrast, ELA showed the opposite pattern, and this was most pronounced for ELA who later received an ASD diagnosis. These preliminary group-level findings suggest that heightened sensitivity to fearful faces might serve an adaptive function in children who later receive an ASD diagnosis, but in infants with no family history of ASD, increased biases might reflect a marker of social-emotional difficulties.

Infant negative affectivity and patterns of affect-biased attention

Biased attention toward affective cues often cooccurs with the emergence and maintenance of internalizing disorders. However, few studies have assessed whether affect-biased attention in infancy relates to early indicators of psychopathological risk, such as negative affectivity. The current study evaluates whether negative affectivity relates to affect-biased attention in 6-month-old infants. Affect-biased attention was assessed via a free-viewing eye-tracking task in which infants were presented with a series of face pairs (comprised of a happy, angry, or sad face and a neutral face). Attention was quantified with metrics of both attention orienting and attention holding. Overall, infants showed no differences in attention orienting (i.e., speed of looking) or attention holding (i.e., duration of looking) toward emotional faces in comparison to the neutral face pairs. Negative affectivity, assessed via parent report, did not relate to attention orienting but was associated with biased attention toward positive, happy faces and away from threat-cueing, angry faces in comparison to the neutral faces they were paired with. These findings suggest that negative affectivity is associated with differences in attention holding, but not initial orienting toward emotional faces; biases which have important implications for the trajectory of socioemotional development.

Same same, but different: A psychometric examination of three frequently used experimental tasks for cognitive bias assessment in a sample of healthy young adults

Cognitive bias research draws upon the notion that altered information processing is key for understanding psychological functioning and well-being. However, little attention has been paid to the question of whether the frequently used experimental paradigms hold adequate psychometric properties. The present study examined the psychometric properties of three widely used cognitive bias tasks: the Approach-Avoidance Task (AAT), the visual dot-probe-task, and the Implicit Association Test (IAT). Approach, attentional, and association biases towards valenced stimuli were repeatedly measured at five different time points in a sample of 79 healthy young adults. Two different devices were used for assessment: a personal computer (PC) and a touchscreen-based tablet. Reliability estimates included internal consistency and temporal stability. Validity was inferred from convergence across different behavioral tasks and correlations between bias scores and self-reported psychological traits. Reliability ranged widely amongst tasks, assessment devices, and measurement time points. While the dot-probe-task appeared to be completely unreliable, bias scores obtained from the PC-based version of the AAT and both (PC and touchscreen) versions of the IAT showed moderate reliability. Almost no associations were found across information processing tasks or between implicit and explicit measures. Cognitive bias research should adopt a standard practice to routinely estimate and report psychometric properties of experimental paradigms, investigate feasible ways to develop more reliable tools, and use tasks that are suitable to answer the precise research question asked.

Maternal anxiety and toddler depressive/anxiety behaviors: The direct and moderating role of children's focused attention

Attention mechanisms have a pertinent role in shaping developmental pathways to anxiety and depressive disorders. The current study examined the direct and interactive associations between maternal anxiety symptoms, children's focused attention, and children's anxiety and depression behaviors in early toddlerhood. Participants were 150 mother-child dyads (50 % female) that were assessed at two time points. At 12 months of child age, mothers reported about their anxiety symptoms and children's focused attention. Children's focused attention was also observed and rated from an individual play task. At 18 months of age, mothers reported about children's anxiety and depression behaviors. Focused attention predicted child anxiety and depressive behaviors, with different patterns of associations between observed and reported measures of attention. There was also a significant interaction between maternal anxiety symptoms and observed children's focused attention. A positive association between maternal anxiety symptoms and child anxiety and depression symptoms was evident only for children with above-average levels of observed focused attention during play. Results suggest that different aspects of focused attention play a role in maternal reported anxiety and depression behaviors in early development and may modulate the intergenerational transmission of anxiety.

Neuronal underpinnings of the attentional bias toward threat in the anxiety spectrum: Meta-analytical data on P3 and LPP event-related potentials

BACKGROUND

This systematic review analyzes brain responses at later stages of neuronal processing (P3 at 300-500 ms, and LPP at 300-700 ms). Both P3 and LPP are implicated in attentional threat bias in disorders grouped into fear and distress dimensions of the anxiety spectrum described by the Hierarchical Taxonomy Model of Psychopathology (HiTOP), but there are no consistent findings so far.

METHOD

Meta-analyses with between- (32 studies, n = 1631) and within-groups design (31 studies, n = 1699) were performed for assessing P3 and LPP modulation in negative, positive, and neutral stimuli, while also considering differences between controls and anxious individuals. Relevant moderators (e.g., age, sex, task) were controlled for and negative stimuli were further decomposed in terms of category (Relevant, Fear/Threat, or Unpleasant).

RESULTS

Increased P3 and LPP amplitudes were found for negative and positive stimuli, when compared to neutral stimuli (within-subjects analysis), confirming that both components are elicited by emotionally arousing information. Within-effects for negative and positive stimuli were higher for the anxious groups. Nonetheless, between-groups analyses showed that attentional threat bias occurs only in anxious groups when negative, personally relevant-threat information is presented. The HiTOP fear dimension moderated the findings.

LIMITATIONS

Potential missed studies; ERPs time windows' heterogeneity; adult sample only; the uneven number of computed effects; categorical analyses.

CONCLUSION

Attentional bias toward disorder-congruent threatening cues can be a transdiagnostic mechanism of HiTOP fear disorders, clustered within the anxiety spectrum.

Influences of Emotional Information on Response Inhibition in Gaming Disorder: Behavioral and ERP Evidence from Go/Nogo Task

BACKGROUND

Gaming disorder (GD) may impair executive functions such as response inhibition. According to the tripartite neurocognitive model, the interoceptive system generates a state of craving that exacerbates the dysfunction of GD. We speculate that emotional information may play an important role in the mechanism, which leads to impaired response inhibition in people with GD.

METHODS

A three-factor mixed experimental design was adopted in this go/nogo task. The between-subject factor was group (GD or control group), and the within-subject factors were two types of emotional information, task relevance (related or unrelated) and emotional valence (negative or positive).

RESULTS

The GD group had lower nogo accuracies than the control group in the task-unrelated condition and also in the negative condition. Parallelly, the GD group showed faster reactions and lower accuracy in the go trials than the control group under task-unrelated negative conditions. At the neural level, the GD group had smaller amplitudes of nogo-N2 and larger amplitudes of nogo-P3 than the control group in the task-unrelated condition.

CONCLUSIONS

The findings prove the hypothesis of this study that emotional information could be a factor leading to impaired response inhibition in GD individuals. The response inhibition abilities of GD are weakened when processing task-unrelated or negative information, which may be caused by failure of behavioral inhibition and weakened conflict control, resulting in more cognitive resources to complete response suppression under specific conditions. This study provides evidence for weaker response inhibition in GD individuals from the perspective of cognitive-emotional interaction and provides more detailed information for interventions for GD.

Cross-cultural applicability of eye-tracking in assessing attention to emotional faces in preschool-aged children

Humans show an attention bias toward emotional versus neutral information, which is considered an adaptive pattern of information processing. Deviations from this pattern have been observed in children with socially withdrawn behaviors, with most research being conducted in controlled settings among children from urban areas. The goal of the current study was to examine the cross-cultural applicability of two eye-tracking-based measures in assessing attention biases and their relations to children's symptoms of socially withdrawn behaviors in two independent and diverse samples of preschool children. The cross-cultural comparison was conducted between the Navajo Birth Cohort study (NBCS), an indigenous cohort with relatively low socioeconomic status (SES), and the Illinois Kids Development study (IKIDS), a primarily Non-Hispanic White and high SES cohort. Children in both cohorts completed eye-tracking tasks with pictures of emotional faces, and mothers reported on children's symptoms of socially withdrawn behaviors. Results showed that general patterns of attention biases were mostly the same across samples, reflecting heightened attention toward emotional versus neutral faces. The differences across two samples mostly involved the magnitude of attention biases. NBCS children were slower to disengage from happy faces when these emotional faces were paired with neutral faces. Additionally, socially withdrawn children in the NBCS sample showed a pattern of attentional avoidance for emotional faces. The comparability of overall patterns of attention biases provides initial support for the cross-cultural applicability of the eye-tracking measures and demonstrates the robustness of these methods across clinical and community settings. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Relationships between attention to emotion and anxiety among a community sample of adolescents

BACKGROUND

Attentional bias to threat has been implicated as a cognitive mechanism in anxiety disorders for youth. Yet, prior studies documenting this bias have largely relied on a method with questionable reliability (i.e. dot-probe task) and small samples, few of which included adolescents. The current study sought to address such limitations by examining relations between anxiety - both clinically diagnosed and dimensionally rated - and attentional bias to threat.

METHODS

The study included a community sample of adolescents and employed eye-tracking methodology intended to capture possible biases across the full range of both automatic (i.e. vigilance bias) and controlled attentional processes (i.e. avoidance bias, maintenance bias). We examined both dimensional anxiety (across the full sample; n = 215) and categorical anxiety in a subset case-control analysis (n = 100) as predictors of biases.

RESULTS

Findings indicated that participants with an anxiety disorder oriented more slowly to angry faces than matched controls. Results did not suggest a greater likelihood of initial orienting to angry faces among our participants with anxiety disorders or those with higher dimensional ratings of anxiety. Greater anxiety severity was associated with greater dwell time to neutral faces.

CONCLUSIONS

This is the largest study to date examining eye-tracking metrics of attention to threat among healthy and anxious youth. Findings did not support the notion that anxiety is characterized by heightened vigilance or avoidance/maintenance of attention to threat. All effects detected were extremely small. Links between attention to threat and anxiety among adolescents may be subtle and highly dependent on experimental task dimensions.

Parent-to-Child Anxiety Transmission Through Dyadic Social Dynamics: A Dynamic Developmental Model

The intergenerational transmission of psychopathology is one of the strongest known risk factors for childhood disorder and may be a malleable target for prevention and intervention. Anxious parents have distinct parenting profiles that impact socioemotional development, and these parenting effects may result in broad alterations to the biological and cognitive functioning of their children. Better understanding the functional mechanisms by which parental risk is passed on to children can provide (1) novel markers of risk for socioemotional difficulties, (2) specific targets for intervention, and (3) behavioral and biological indices of treatment response. We propose a developmental model in which dyadic social dynamics serve as a key conduit in parent-to-child transmission of anxiety. Dyadic social dynamics capture the moment-to-moment interactions between parent and child that occur on a daily basis. In shaping the developmental trajectory from familial risk to actual symptoms, dyadic processes act on mechanisms of risk that are evident prior to, and in the absence of, any eventual disorder onset. First, we discuss dyadic synchrony or the moment-to-moment coordination between parent and child within different levels of analysis, including neural, autonomic, behavioral, and emotional processes. Second, we discuss how overt emotion modeling of distress is observed and internalized by children and later reflected in their own behavior. Thus, unlike synchrony, this is a more sequential process that cuts across levels of analysis. We also discuss maladaptive cognitive and affective processing that is often evident with increases in child anxiety symptoms. Finally, we discuss additional moderators (e.g., parent sex, child fearful temperament) that may impact dyadic processes. Our model is proposed as a conceptual framework for testing hypotheses regarding dynamic processes that may ultimately guide novel treatment approaches aimed at intervening on dyadically linked biobehavioral mechanisms before symptom onset.

Attentional bias toward health-threat in health anxiety: a systematic review and three-level meta-analysis

Attentional bias toward health-threat may theoretically contribute to the development and maintenance of health anxiety, but the empirical findings have been controversial. This study aimed to synthesize and explore the heterogeneity in a health-threat related attentional bias of health-anxious individuals, and to determine the theoretical model that better represents the pattern of attentional bias in health anxiety. Four databases (Web of Science, PubMed, PsycINFO, and Scopus) were searched for relevant studies, with 17 articles (N = 1546) included for a qualitative review and 16 articles (18 studies) for a three-level meta-analysis (N = 1490). The meta-analytic results indicated that the health anxiety group, compared to the control group, showed significantly greater attentional bias toward health-threat (g = 0.256). Further analyses revealed that attentional bias type, paradigm, and stimuli type were significant moderators. Additionally, compared to the controls, health-anxious individuals displayed significantly greater attention maintenance (g = 0.327) but nonsignificant attention vigilance to health-threat (g = -0.116). Our results provide evidence for the attention maintenance model in health-anxious individuals. The implications for further research and treatment of elevated health anxiety in the context of coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) were also discussed.

Mother's engagement with infant linked to infant's responding to threat

The early development of threat perception in infancy might be dependent on caregiver context, but this link has not yet been studied in human infants. This study examined the emergence of the young infant's response to threat in the context of variations in caregiving behavior. Eighty infant-caregiver dyads (39 female infants, all of western European descent) visited the laboratory when the infant was 5 months old. Each dyad completed a free-play task, from which we coded for the mother's level of engagement: the amount of talking, close proximity, positive affect, and attention directed toward the infant. When the infant was 7 months old, they came back to the laboratory and we used functional near infrared spectroscopy and eye tracking to measure infants' neural and attentional responses to threatening angry faces. In response to threat, infants of more-engaged mothers showed increased brain responses in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex-a brain region associated with emotion regulation and cognitive control among adults-and reduced attentional avoidance. These results point to a role for caregiver behavioral context in the early development of brain systems involved in human threat responding.

The transdiagnostic origins of anxiety and depression during the pediatric period: Linking NIMH research domain criteria (RDoC) constructs to ecological systems

In the last decade, an abundance of research has utilized the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) research domain criteria (RDoC) framework to examine mechanisms underlying anxiety and depression in youth. However, relatively little work has examined how these mechanistic intrapersonal processes intersect with context during childhood and adolescence. The current paper covers reviews and meta-analyses that have linked RDoC-relevant constructs to ecological systems in internalizing problems in youth. Specifically, cognitive, biological, and affective factors within the RDoC framework were examined. Based on these reviews and some of the original empirical research they cover, we highlight the integral role of ecological factors to the RDoC framework in predicting onset and maintenance of internalizing problems in youth. Specific recommendations are provided for researchers using the RDoC framework to inform future research integrating ecological systems and development. We advocate for future research and research funding to focus on better integration of the environment and development into the RDoC framework.

Mobile Eye Tracking Captures Changes in Attention Over Time During a Naturalistic Threat Paradigm in Behaviorally Inhibited Children

Attentional biases to and away from threat are considered hallmarks of temperamental Behavioral Inhibition (BI), which is a documented risk factor for social anxiety disorder. However, most research on affective attentional biases has traditionally been constrained to computer screens, where stimuli often lack ecological validity. Moreover, prior research predominantly focuses on momentary presentations of stimuli, rather than examining how attention may change over the course of prolonged exposure to salient people and objects. Here, in a sample of children oversampled for BI, we used mobile eye-tracking to examine attention to an experimenter wearing a "scary" or novel gorilla mask, as well as attention to the experimenter after mask removal as a recovery from exposure. Conditional growth curve modeling was used to examine how level of BI related to attentional trajectories over the course of the exposure. We found a main effect of BI in the initial exposure to the mask, with a positive association between level of BI and proportion of gaze allocated to the stranger's masked face over time. Additionally, there was a main effect of BI on proportion of gaze allocated to the stranger's face plus their mask during the recovery period when the mask was removed.

The centrality of temperament to the research domain criteria (RDoC): The earliest building blocks of psychopathology

The research domain criteria (RDoC) is an innovative approach designed to explore dimensions of human behavior. The aim of this approach is to move beyond the limits of psychiatric categories in the hope of aligning the identification of psychological health and dysfunction with clinical neuroscience. Despite its contributions to adult psychopathology research, RDoC undervalues ontogenetic development, which circumscribes our understanding of the etiologies, trajectories, and maintaining mechanisms of psychopathology risk. In this paper, we argue that integrating temperament research into the RDoC framework will advance our understanding of the mechanistic origins of psychopathology beginning in infancy. In illustrating this approach, we propose the incorporation of core principles of temperament theories into a new "life span considerations" subsection as one option for infusing development into the RDoC matrix. In doing so, researchers and clinicians may ultimately have the tools necessary to support emotional development and reduce a young child's likelihood of psychological dysfunction beginning in the first years of life.

Expressions of positive and negative shyness in preschool-age children: Temperamental correlates and visual attention to emotions

Recent empirical evidence shows heterogeneity in the expression of shyness in children. Some children tend to express their shyness displaying positive affect along with gaze aversions (positive shyness), whereas others display more negative emotional reactions accompanied by gaze aversions (negative shyness). Temperamental differences in approach-avoidance tendencies are likely to explain these differences in shyness expression in children and influence their visual attention to social stimuli, yet little empirical attention has been devoted to these associations. Our study examined the temperamental profile (approach, fear, and inhibitory control) associated with positive and negative shyness and the relation between expression of shyness and attention to social stimuli in 47 children aged 3-6 years. Children's positive and negative expressions of shyness were assessed using a performance task. Visual attention to facial emotional expressions was measured with the dot - probe task, and temperament was measured with maternal reports. Positive shyness was found to be positively associated with temperamental dimensions of approach, inhibitory control, and fear. Positive shyness was significantly associated with attentional orientation to positive facial expressions and with less attentional avoidance of threatening facial expressions. Negative shyness was positively associated only with temperamental fear, and no associations were found with attention to social stimuli. Our study provides empirical support for the association between temperament and the multidimensional character of the expression of positive shyness and adds relevant evidence regarding the connection between the expression of shyness and attention to social stimuli.

Adults with higher social anxiety show avoidant gaze behaviour in a real-world social setting: A mobile eye tracking study

Attentional biases are a core characteristic of social anxiety (SA). However, research has yielded conflicting findings and failed to investigate these biases in real, face-to-face social situations. Therefore, this study examined attentional biases in SA by measuring participants’ eye gaze within a novel eye-tracking paradigm during a real-life social situation. Student participants (N = 30) took part in what they thought was a visual search study, when a confederate posing as another participant entered the room. Whilst all participants avoided looking at the confederate, those with higher SA fixated for a shorter duration during their first fixation on him, and executed fewer fixations and saccades overall as well as exhibiting a shorter scanpath. These findings are indicative of additional avoidance in the higher SA participants. In contrast to previous experimental work, we found no evidence of social hypervigilance or hyperscanning in high SA individuals. The results indicate that in unstructured social settings, avoidance rather than vigilance predominates, especially in those with higher SA.

Profiles of Naturalistic Attentional Trajectories Associated with Internalizing Behaviors in School-Age Children: A Mobile Eye Tracking Study

The temperament profile Behavioral Inhibition (BI) is a strong predictor of internalizing behaviors in childhood. Patterns of attention towards or away from threat are a commonality of both BI and internalizing behaviors. Attention biases are traditionally measured with computer tasks presenting affective stimuli, which can lack ecological validity. Recent studies suggest that naturalistic visual attention need not mirror findings from computer tasks, and, more specifically, children high in BI may attend less to threats in naturalistic tasks. Here, we characterized latent trajectories of naturalistic visual attention over time to a female stranger, measured with mobile eye tracking, among kindergarteners oversampled for BI. Group-based trajectory modeling (GBTM) revealed two latent trajectories: 1) high initial orienting to the stranger, gradual decay, and recovery, and 2) low initial orienting and continued avoidance. Higher probability of membership to the "avoidant" group was linked to greater report of internalizing behaviors. We demonstrate the efficacy of mobile eye tracking in quantifying naturalistic patterns of visual attention to social novelty, as well as the importance of naturalistic measures of attention in characterizing socioemotional risk factors.

Fearful Temperament and the Risk for Child and Adolescent Anxiety: The Role of Attention Biases and Effortful Control

Fearful temperament represents one of the most robust predictors of child and adolescent anxiety; however, not all children with fearful temperament unvaryingly develop anxiety. Diverse processes resulting from the interplay between automatic processing (i.e., attention bias) and controlled processing (i.e., effortful control) drive the trajectories toward more adaptive or maladaptive directions. In this review, we examine the associations between fearful temperament, attention bias, and anxiety, as well as the moderating effect of effortful control. Based on the reviewed literature, we propose a two-mechanism developmental model of attention bias that underlies the association between fearful temperament and anxiety. We propose that the sub-components of effortful control (i.e., attentional control and inhibitory control) play different roles depending on individuals' temperaments, initial automatic biases, and goal priorities. Our model may help resolve some of the mixed findings and conflicts in the current literature. It may also advance our knowledge regarding the cognitive mechanisms linking fearful temperament and anxiety, as well as facilitate the continuing efforts in identifying and intervening with children who are at risk. Finally, we conclude the review with a discussion on the existing limitations and then propose questions for future research.

Associations between brain and behavioral processing of facial expressions of emotion and sensory reactivity in young children

The ability to decode and accurately identify information from facial emotions may advantage young children socially. This capacity to decode emotional information may likewise be influenced by individual differences in children's temperament. This study investigated whether sensory reactivity and perceptual awareness, two dimensions of temperament, as well as children's ability to accurately label emotions relates to the neural processing of emotional content in faces. Event related potentials (ERPs) of 4 to 6 year-old children (N  = 119) were elicited from static displays of anger, happy, fearful, sad, and neutral emotion faces. Children, as a group, exhibited differential early (N290) and mid-latency (P400) event-related potentials (ERPs) in response to facial expressions of emotion. Individual differences in children's sensory reactivity were associated with enhanced P400 amplitudes to neutral, sad, and fearful faces. In a separate task, children were asked to provide an emotional label for the same images. Interestingly, children less accurately labeled the same neutral, sad, and fearful faces, suggesting that, contrary to previous work showing enhanced attentional processing to threatening cues (i.e., fear), children higher in sensory reactivity may deploy more attentional resources when decoding ambiguous emotional cues.

Developmental Variation in the Associations of Attention Bias to Emotion with Internalizing and Externalizing Psychopathology

Attention biases to emotion are associated with symptoms of internalizing and externalizing psychopathology in children and adolescents. It is unknown whether attention biases to emotion and their associations with different symptoms of psychopathology vary across development from early childhood through young adulthood. We examine this age-related variation in the current study. Participants (N = 190; ages: 4-25) completed survey-based psychopathology symptom measures and a dot-probe task to assess attention bias to happy, sad, and angry relative to neutral faces. We tested whether linear or non-linear (e.g., spline-based models) associations best characterized age-related variation in attention to emotion. We additionally examined whether attention biases were associated with depression, anxiety, and externalizing symptoms and whether these associations varied by age. No age-related differences in attention biases were found for any of the emotional faces. Attention biases were associated with psychopathology symptoms, but only when examining moderation by age. Biased attention to angry faces was associated with greater symptoms of anxiety and depression in adolescents and young adults, but not children. Similarly, biased attention to happy faces was associated with externalizing symptoms in adolescents and young adults, but not in children. In contrast, biased attention to happy faces was associated with greater anxiety symptoms in children, but not in adolescents or young adults. Biased attention toward social threat and reward becomes more strongly coupled with internalizing and externalizing symptoms, respectively, during the transition to adolescence. These findings could inform when interventions such as attention bias modification training may be most effective.

Implementation of the diffusion model on dot-probe task performance in children with behavioral inhibition

Attentional bias to threat, the process of preferentially attending to potentially threatening environmental stimuli over neutral stimuli, is positively associated with behavioral inhibition (BI) and trait anxiety. However, the most used measure of attentional bias to threat, the dot-probe task, has been criticized for demonstrating poor reliability. The present study aimed to assess whether utilizing a sequential sampling model to describe performance could detect adequate test-retest reliability for the dot-probe task, demonstrate stronger cueing effects, and improve the association with neural signals of early attention. One hundred and twenty children aged 9-12 years completed the dot-probe task twice. During the second administration, event-related potentials (ERPs) were obtained as time-sensitive neural markers of attention. BI was not associated with traditional or diffusion model measures of performance. Traditional and diffusion model measures of performance were also not associated with N1, P2, or N2 ERP amplitude. There were main effects of Visit, in which RTs were faster and standard deviation of RT smaller during the second administration due to an increase in drift rate and a decrease in non-decision time. The traditional RT bias score (r = 0.06) and bias scores formed via diffusion model parameters (all r's < 0.40) all demonstrated poor reliability. Results confirm recommendations to move away from using the dot-probe task as the primary or sole index of attentional bias.

Vigilant or avoidant? Children's temperamental shyness, patterns of gaze, and physiology during social threat

Temperamental shyness is characterized by fear, wariness, and the perception of threat in response to social novelty. Previous work has been inconsistent regarding attentional patterns to social threat among shy children, with evidence for both avoidance and vigilance. We examined relations between children's shyness and gaze aversion during the approach of a stranger (i.e., a context of social novelty), and tested whether these patterns of gaze moderated relations between shyness and autonomic reactivity and recovery. Participants included 152 typically-developing children (M_age  = 7.82 years, SD = 0.44 years) who had their respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) recorded during baseline, social novelty, and recovery. Children's shyness correlated with increases in self-reported nervousness from baseline to social novelty, providing support for perceived threat. Results revealed that children's proportion of gaze aversion from social novelty was related to shyness in a U-shape pattern such that both low levels of gaze aversion (i.e., attentional vigilance) and high levels of gaze aversion (i.e., attentional avoidance) were related to higher levels of shyness. Further, we found that children's shyness was directly related to decreases in RSA from baseline to social novelty, whereas quadratic gaze to social novelty moderated the relation between shyness and RSA recovery. Specifically, shyness was related to greater RSA recovery among children who exhibited attentional vigilance during the novel social interaction. Our findings provide support for both avoidance of, and vigilance to, social threat among different shy children, and these gaze strategies may be differentially related to physiological regulation during novel social encounters.

A Pictorial Dot Probe Task to Assess Food-Related Attentional Bias in Youth With and Without Obesity: Overview of Indices and Evaluation of Their Reliability

Several versions of the dot probe detection task are frequently used to assess maladaptive attentional processes associated with a broad range of psychopathology and health behavior, including eating behavior and weight. However, there are serious concerns about the reliability of the indices derived from the paradigm as measurement of attentional bias toward or away from salient stimuli. The present paper gives an overview of different attentional bias indices used in psychopathology research and scrutinizes three types of indices (the traditional attentional bias score, the dynamic trial-level base scores, and the probability index) calculated from a pictorial version of the dot probe task to assess food-related attentional biases in children and youngsters with and without obesity. Correlational analyses reveal that dynamic scores (but not the traditional and probability indices) are dependent on general response speed. Reliability estimates are low for the traditional and probability indices. The higher reliability for the dynamic indices is at least partially explained by general response speed. No significant group differences between youth with and without obesity are found, and correlations with weight are also non-significant. Taken together, results cast doubt on the applicability of this specific task for both experimental and individual differences research on food-related attentional biases in youth. However, researchers are encouraged to make and test adaptations to the procedure or computational algorithm in an effort to increase psychometric quality of the task and to report psychometric characteristics of their version of the task for their specific sample.

Voluntary pursuit of negatively valenced stimuli from childhood to early adulthood

Although common sense suggests that we are motivated to pursue positive and avoid negative experiences, previous research shows that people regularly seek out negative experiences. In the current study, we characterized this tendency from childhood to young adulthood. Due to the known increases in risky behavior and sensation seeking in adolescence, we hypothesized that adolescents would show an increased engagement with negatively valenced stimuli compared to children and adults. Participants aged 4-25 (N = 192) completed a behavioral task assessing motivation to engage with negative, positive, and neutral images. On each trial, participants viewed two small images and selected one to view at a larger size for up to 10s. Trials were organized into three valence conditions: negative versus positive images (matched on arousal), negative versus neutral images, and positive versus neutral images. Although participants chose positive images more than neutral or negative images, participants selected negative images frequently, even when given a positive (28% of trials) or neutral (42% of trials) alternative. Contrary to expectations, the tendency to choose negative images was highest in early childhood and decreased linearly with increasing age, and the tendency to choose positive images increased linearly with age. These results provide insight into how motivation to engage with emotional stimuli varies across age. It is possible that the novelty and rarity of negative experiences drives children to pursue these stimuli. Alternatively, children may find negative images less aversive, which would caution against assuming that these stimuli elicit the same motivational states in individuals of all ages.

Behavioral Regulatory Problems Are Associated With a Lower Attentional Bias to Fearful Faces During Infancy

To investigate the role of early regulatory problems (RP), such as problems in feeding, sleeping, and calming down during later development, the association between parent-reported RP at 3 months (no-RP, n = 110; RP, n = 66) and attention to emotional faces at 8 months was studied. Eight-month-old infants had a strong tendency to look at faces and to specifically fearful faces, and the individual variance in this tendency was assessed with eye tracking using a face-distractor paradigm. The early RPs were related to a lower attention bias to fearful faces compared to happy and neutral faces after controlling for temperamental negative affectivity. This suggests that early RPs are related to the processing of emotional information later during infancy.

Converging neural and behavioral evidence for a rapid, generalized response to threat-related facial expressions in 3-year-old children

Electrophysiological studies on adults suggest that humans are efficient at detecting threat from facial information and tend to grant these signals a priority in access to attention, awareness, and action. The developmental origins of this bias are poorly understood, partly because few studies have examined the emergence of a generalized neural and behavioral response to distinct categories of threat in early childhood. We used event-related potential (ERP) and eye-tracking measures to examine children's early visual responses and overt attentional biases towards multiple exemplars of angry and fearful vs. other (e.g., happy and neutral) faces. A large group of children was assessed longitudinally in infancy (5, 7, or 12 months) and at 3 years of age. The final ERP dataset included 148 infants and 132 3-year-old children; and the final eye-tracking dataset included 272 infants and 334 3-year-olds. We demonstrate that 1) neural and behavioral responses to facial expressions converge on an enhanced response to fearful and angry faces at 3 years of age, with no differentiation between or bias towards one or the other of these expressions, and 2) a support vector machine learning model using data on the early-stage neural responses to threat reliably predicts the duration of overt attentional dwell time for threat-related faces at 3 years. However, we found little within-subject correlation between threat-bias attention in infancy and at 3 years of age. These results provide unique evidence for the early development of a rapid, unified response to two distinct categories of facial expressions with different physical characteristics, but shared threat-related meaning.

Dyadic behavioral synchrony between behaviorally inhibited and non-inhibited peers is associated with concordance in EEG frontal Alpha asymmetry and Delta-Beta coupling

Behavioral synchrony during social interactions is foundational for the development of social relationships. Behavioral inhibition (BI), characterized by wariness to social novelty and increased anxiety, may influence how children engage in moment-to-moment behavioral synchrony. EEG-derived frontal Alpha asymmetry and Delta-Beta coupling reflect approach-avoidance behavior and emotion regulation, respectively. We examined the relation between intradyadic behavioral synchrony in energy levels and peer gaze, BI, and EEG measures (N = 136, 68 dyads, Mean_Age = 10.90 years) during unstructured and structured interactions. Energy levels were negatively synchronized when both children exhibited right Alpha asymmetry. If either child exhibited left Alpha asymmetry, the dyad exhibited more positive synchrony. Peer gaze was less synchronized during the unstructured task with left Alpha asymmetry. Greater positive Delta-Beta coupling in BI children was associated with more peer gaze synchrony. Peer gaze was asynchronous when BI children exhibited negative Delta-Beta coupling and their partner exhibited positive coupling.

Delayed gaze shifts away from others' eyes in children and adolescents with social anxiety disorder

BACKGROUND

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is linked to atypical attention to other's eyes. Empirical literature about this phenomenon in childhood and adolescence is scarce. Previous studies in adults have suggested that SAD may be characterized by either rapid avoidance of eye contact, or by impaired shifting of attention away from eyes once eye contact has been established. SAD has also been linked to quick orienting towards eyes, indicating vigilant monitoring of perceived threat.

METHODS

In the largest eye-tracking study of youth with SAD to date, 10 to 17 year-olds with SAD (n = 88) and healthy controls (n = 62) were primed to look at either the eyes or the mouth of human faces. The latency and likelihood of a first gaze shift from, or to the eyes, was measured.

RESULTS

Individuals with SAD were slower to shift their gaze away from the eye region of faces than controls, but did not differ in orienting toward eyes.

LIMITATIONS

Participants were assessed once after the onset of SAD symptoms, meaning that the longitudinal predictive value of delayed gaze shifts from others' eyes could not be examined.

CONCLUSIONS

Youth with SAD may be impaired in shifting attention from other's eyes. This could contribute to the experience of eye contact as aversive, and may be a maintaining factor of childhood SAD.

Learning in Infancy Is Active, Endogenously Motivated, and Depends on the Prefrontal Cortices

A common view of learning in infancy emphasizes the role of incidental sensory experiences from which increasingly abstract statistical regularities are extracted. In this view, infant brains initially support basic sensory and motor functions, followed by maturation of higher-level association cortex. Here, we critique this view and posit that, by contrast and more like adults, infants are active, endogenously motivated learners who structure their own learning through flexible selection of attentional targets and active interventions on their environment. We further argue that the infant brain, and particularly the prefrontal cortex (PFC), is well equipped to support these learning behaviors. We review recent progress in characterizing the function of the infant PFC, which suggests that, as in adults, the PFC is functionally specialized and highly connected. Together, we present an integrative account of infant minds and brains, in which the infant PFC represents multiple intrinsic motivations, which are leveraged for active learning.

Converging Multi-modal Evidence for Implicit Threat-Related Bias in Pediatric Anxiety Disorders

This report examines the relationship between pediatric anxiety disorders and implicit bias evoked by threats. To do so, the report uses two tasks that assess implicit bias to negative-valence faces, the first by eye-gaze and the second by measuring body-movement parameters. The report contrasts task performance in 51 treatment-seeking, medication-free pediatric patients with anxiety disorders and 36 healthy peers. Among these youth, 53 completed an eye-gaze task, 74 completed a body-movement task, and 40 completed both tasks. On the eye-gaze task, patients displayed longer gaze duration on negative relative to non-negative valence faces than healthy peers, F(1, 174) = 8.27, p = .005. In contrast, on the body-movement task, patients displayed a greater tendency to behaviorally avoid negative-valence faces than healthy peers, F(1, 72) = 4.68, p = .033. Finally, implicit bias measures on the two tasks were correlated, r(38) = .31, p = .049. In sum, we found an association between pediatric anxiety disorders and implicit threat bias on two tasks, one measuring eye-gaze and the other measuring whole-body movements. Converging evidence for implicit threat bias encourages future research using multiple tasks in anxiety.

Multi-method assessment of irritability and differential linkages to neurophysiological indicators of attention allocation to emotional faces in young children

Facilitated attention toward angry stimuli (attention bias) may contribute to anger proneness and temper outbursts exhibited by children with high irritability. However, most studies linking attention bias and irritability rely on behavioral measures with limited precision and no studies have explored these associations in young children. The present study explores irritability-related attention biases toward anger in young children (N = 128; ages 4-7 years) engaged in a dot-probe task with emotional faces, as assessed with event-related brain potential (ERP) indices of early selective attention and multi-method assessment of irritability. Irritability assessed via semi-structured clinical interview predicted larger anterior N1 amplitudes to all faces. In contrast, irritability assessed via a laboratory observation paradigm predicted reduced P1 amplitudes to angry relative to neutral faces. These findings suggest that altered early attentional processing occurs in young children with high irritability; however, the nature of these patterns may vary with methodological features of the irritability assessments. Future investigations using different assessment tools may provide greater clarity regarding the underlying neurocognitive correlates of irritability. Such studies may also contribute to the ongoing debates about how to best define and measure irritability across the developmental spectrum in a manner that is most informative for linkage to neural processes.

Mapping the Specific Pathways to Early-Onset Mental Health Disorders: The "Watch Me Grow for REAL" Study Protocol

BACKGROUND

From birth, the human propensity to selectively attend and respond to critical super-stimuli forms the basis of future socio-emotional development and health. In particular, the first super-stimuli to preferentially engage and elicit responses in the healthy newborn are the physical touch, voice and face/eyes of caregivers. From this grows selective attention and responsiveness to emotional expression, scaffolding the development of empathy, social cognition, and other higher human capacities. In this paper, the protocol for a longitudinal, prospective birth-cohort study is presented. The major aim of this study is to map the emergence of individual differences and disturbances in the system of social-Responsiveness, Emotional Attention, and Learning (REAL) through the first 3 years of life to predict the specific emergence of the major childhood mental health problems, as well as social adjustment and impairment more generally. A further aim of this study is to examine how the REAL variables interact with the quality of environment/caregiver interactions.

METHODS/DESIGN

A prospective, longitudinal birth-cohort study will be conducted. Data will be collected from four assessments and mothers' electronic medical records.

DISCUSSION

This study will be the first to test a clear developmental map of both the unique and specific causes of childhood psychopathology and will identify more precise early intervention targets for children with complex comorbid conditions.

Navigating through the experienced environment: Insights from mobile eye tracking

Researchers are acutely interested in how people engage in social interactions and navigate their environment. However, in striving for experimental or laboratory control, we often instead present individuals with representations of social and environmental constructs and infer how they would behave in more dynamic and contingent interactions. Mobile eye-tracking (MET) is one approach to connecting the laboratory to the experienced environment. MET superimposes gaze patterns captured through head or eye-glass mounted cameras pointed at the eyes onto a separate camera that captures the visual field. As a result, MET allows researchers to examine the world from the point of view of the individual in action. This review touches on the methods and questions that can be asked with this approach, illustrating how MET can provide new insight into social, behavioral, and cognitive processes from infancy through old age.

The importance of using multiple outcome measures in infant research

Collecting data with infants is notoriously difficult. As a result, many of our studies consist of small samples, with only a single measure, in a single age group, at a single time point. With renewed calls for greater academic rigor in data collection practices, using multiple outcome measures in infant research is one way to increase rigor, and, at the same time, enable us to more accurately interpret our data. Here, we illustrate the importance of using multiple measures in psychological research with examples from our own work on rapid threat detection and from the broader infancy literature. First, we describe our initial studies using a single outcome measure, and how this strategy caused us to nearly miss a rich and complex story about attention biases for threat and their development. We demonstrate how using converging measures can help researchers make inferences about infant behavior, and how using additional measures allows us to more deeply examine the mechanisms that drive developmental change. Finally, we provide practical and statistical recommendations for how researchers can use multiple measures in future work.

Temperament moderates developmental changes in vigilance to emotional faces in infants: Evidence from an eye-tracking study

Affect-biased attention reflects the prioritization of attention to stimuli that individuals deem to be motivationally and/or affectively salient. Normative affect-biased attention is early-emerging, providing an experience-expectant function for socioemotional development. Evidence is limited regarding how reactive and regulatory aspects of temperament may shape maturational changes in affect-biased attention that operate at the earliest stages of information processing. This study implemented a novel eye-tracking paradigm designed to capture attention vigilance in infants. We assessed temperamental negative affect (NA) and attention control (AC) using laboratory observations and parent-reports, respectively. Among infants (N = 161 in the final analysis) aged 4 to 24 months (Mean = 12.05, SD = 5.46; 86 males), there was a significant age effect on fixation latency to emotional versus neutral faces only in infants characterized with high NA and high AC. Specifically, in infants with these temperament traits, older infants showed shorter latency (i.e., greater vigilance) toward neutral faces, which are potentially novel and unfamiliar to infants. The age effect on vigilance toward emotional faces was not significant. The findings support the argument that the development of affect-biased attention is associated with multiple temperament processes that potentially interact over time.