Anxiety and visual-spatial memory updating in young children: An investigation using emotional facial expressions

Cognitive processing features of elementary school children with mathematical anxiety: Attentional control theory-based explanation

A growing body of research suggests that mathematical anxiety (MA) seriously affects an individual's math achievement. However, few studies have focused on the cognitive mechanisms of MA in elementary school children. Based on attention control theory (ACT), this research aimed to explore the cognitive mechanism of MA in elementary school children using two studies. In Study 1, the dual-task paradigm of number memory and computation span was used to investigate the difference in processing efficiency between the high-mathematical anxiety (HMA) group and the low-mathematical anxiety (LMA) group. In total, 59 students with HMA and 54 students with LMA participated in Study 1. The results showed that students with HMA had lower processing efficiency in dealing with high-load math tasks. To further investigate the underlying mechanism of low processing efficiency for students with HMA, Study 2 explored the attention bias toward math-related stimuli of students with HMA using the Posner paradigm. In total, 48 students with HMA and 49 students with LMA participated in Study 2. The results showed that math trials put children with HMA in a state of heightened vigilance in general, which might be related to the low processing efficiency in dealing with high-load math tasks. These findings support the ACT and further reveal the mechanism of MA in elementary school children from a cognitive perspective.

Back to the future: relating the development of episodic future thinking to cognitive and affective individual differences and to motivational relevance in preschoolers

Episodic future thinking (EFT) represents the ability to mentally simulate scenarios that will occur in our personal future. In the current study, we used the item choice paradigm, which puts chidren in a problematic situation and requires them to envision a solution by selecting one of various items. This ability was assessed in a sample of 92 preschoolers (3-6 years old), taking into account individual differences in age, gender, cognitive (verbal abilities, EFT memory) and affective (anxiety) factors, as well as contextual factors (motivational relevance). Findings indicate developmental progress in preschoolers' foresight and in their retrospective memory for the item choice problems. The motivational valence of the EFT task played a significant role, as children performed better in the motivationally positive condition, as compared to the neutral and negative ones. However, older children had better performance than younger ones on the motivationally aversive tasks, becoming comparable to their performance in the motivationally appetitive condition. Finally, higher social anxiety was negatively related to children's EFT performance in the aversive condition, when they anticipated negative social exposure. In conclusion, EFT was explained by age-related improvements, the motivational valence of the situation and by individual differences in social anxiety, which is highly relevant for educational and therapeutic practices.

Cognitive factors associated with depression and anxiety in adolescents: A two-year longitudinal study

Background/Objective: To examine the roles of anxiety sensitivity and attentional bias in the development of anxiety and depression symptoms among adolescents. Method: 214 grade 7 to grade 10 Hong Kong Chinese students completed a package of psychometric inventories to measure levels of anxiety sensitivity, selective attentional processing, and anxiety and depressive symptoms in 2016 and then again in 2017. Results: Girls, when compared with boys, exhibited more anxiety symptoms and anxiety sensitivity in 2016. They also reported a significant increase in mean depression level from 2016 to 2017. Regression analyses revealed that the physical-concerns dimension of anxiety sensitivity, positive attentional bias, and to a lesser extent negative attentional bias were related to the development of both anxiety and depression symptoms one year later. Fear of mental incapacity could predict depression one year later but not anxiety symptoms. Conclusions: Intervention through anxiety sensitivity training to reduce somatic concerns and attentional bias modification to increase habitual attention to positive stimuli and to disengage from negative stimuli can reduce anxiety and depression symptoms among high school students.

An Investigation of Executive Functioning in Pediatric Anxiety

Although science's understanding (e.g., etiology, maintaining factors, etc.) of pediatric anxiety and related problems has grown substantially over recent years, several aspects to anxiety in youths remain elusive, particularly with relation to executive functioning. To this end, the current study sought to examine several facets to executive functioning (i.e., cognitive flexibility, inhibition, planning, working memory) within a transdiagnostic sample of youths exhibiting varying degrees of anxiety symptoms. One hundred six youths completed a comprehensive battery, including several self-report measures (e.g., Multidimensional Anxiety Scale for Children [MASC] or MASC-2) and an automated neurocognitive battery of several executive functioning tasks (Intradimensional/Extradimensional [IDED], Stop Signal [SST], Spatial Span [SSP], Stockings of Cambridge [SOC] tasks). Regression analyses indicated that youths exhibiting marked anxiety symptoms demonstrated increased planning time and probability of inhibition compared with youths with minimal or no anxiety symptoms. Youths with marked anxiety symptoms similarly demonstrated better cognitive flexibility (i.e., set shifting) compared with youths with minimal anxiety. In addition, analyses indicated a trend such that youths exhibiting marked anxiety symptoms demonstrated poorer working memory compared with youths with no anxiety symptoms. Group classification did not predict remaining outcomes. Limitations and future areas of research are discussed.

Evidence for the triadic model of adolescent brain development: Cognitive load and task-relevance of emotion differentially affect adolescents and adults

In adults, cognitive control is supported by several brain regions including the limbic system and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) when processing emotional information. However, in adolescents, some theories hypothesize a neurobiological imbalance proposing heightened sensitivity to affective material in the amygdala and striatum within a cognitive control context. Yet, direct neurobiological evidence is scarce. Twenty-four adolescents (12-16) and 28 adults (25-35) completed an emotional n-back working memory task in response to happy, angry, and neutral faces during fMRI. Importantly, participants either paid attention to the emotion (task-relevant condition) or judged the gender (task-irrelevant condition). Behaviorally, for both groups, when happy faces were task-relevant, performance improved relative to when they were task-irrelevant, while performance decrements were seen for angry faces. In the dlPFC, angry faces elicited more activation in adults during low relative to high cognitive load (2-back vs. 0-back). By contrast, happy faces elicited more activation in the amygdala in adolescents when they were task-relevant. Happy faces also generally increased nucleus accumbens activity (regardless of relevance) in adolescents relative to adults. Together, the findings are consistent with neurobiological models of adolescent brain development and identify neurodevelopmental differences in cognitive control emotion interactions.

A FISTful of Emotion: Individual Differences in Trait Anxiety and Cognitive-Affective Flexibility During Preadolescence

Cognitive-affective flexibility represents the ability to switch between alternative ways of processing emotional stimuli according to situational demands and individual goals. Although reduced flexibility has been implicated as a mechanism for the development of anxiety, there is very limited data on this relationship in children and adolescents. The aim of the current study was to investigate cognitive-affective flexibility in preadolescents (N = 112, 50 girls, 11-12 and 13-14 years old) and to examine if this ability is related to individual differences in trait anxiety. Their interplay was assessed using the modified version of the Flexible Item Selection Task (FIST; Jacques and Zelazo 2001) with non-emotional stimuli (geometrical shapes) and the Emotional FIST (EM-FIST) with emotional stimuli (emotional facial expressions). Performance on the EM-FIST indicated that across the whole age range, trials requiring greater cognitive flexibility were more demanding than nonflexible ones, as revealed by both response time and accuracy performance. Moreover, flexibility demands were higher for younger children than for older ones but only in terms of response speed. Individual differences in trait anxiety moderated the impact of flexibility only on the EM-FIST. Being flexible on the EM-FIST was more demanding for high trait anxious children than for their low trait anxious peers. Lastly, overall girls responded faster than boys, but only in the EM-FIST. These findings extend the presently limited literature concerning variability in cognitive-affective flexibility during this sensitive developmental window.

The interaction effect of attentional bias and attentional control on dispositional anxiety among adolescents

Research has shown that children and adolescents with attentional control deficits tend to have high anxiety and exhibit threat-related selective attentional bias. This study aimed to investigate how positive and negative attentional biases would interact with attentional control on dispositional anxiety. One hundred and twenty participants aged 18 years of age or younger participated in a visual dot-probe task to measure their attentional bias and completed psychological questionnaires to measure their trait anxiety, and attentional control. Mean reaction times to the probe in milliseconds were used to measure attentional bias. Overall, our participants showed a bigger tendency towards attending to positive emotional stimuli than to negative emotional stimuli. Adolescents with high dispositional anxiety showed poorer attentional control. Regression analyses showed that attentional control interact with negative attentional bias to affect anxiety. For participants with high attentional control, higher negative attentional bias was associated with lower trait anxiety. Trait anxiety was not related to negative attentional bias for participants with low attentional control. Positive attentional bias showed no significant relationship with dispositional anxiety, either alone or in interaction with attentional control. Theoretical and clinical implications of the findings are also discussed.

The power of a smile: Stronger working memory effects for happy faces in adolescents compared to adults

Theories of adolescent behaviour attribute increases in risk-taking and sensation-seeking in this age group to a heightened sensitivity to emotional stimuli on the one hand and a relatively immature cognitive control system on the other hand. However, little research has outlined to what extent relevant and irrelevant emotional stimuli bias the imbalance between affective processing and cognitive control. Thirty-three adolescents (19 females, aged 12-14) and 37 adults (18 females, aged 18-29) completed two attentional conditions of an emotional face working memory (WM) 0-back/2-back task. Participants were asked to attend to the emotional facial expression in the "relevant" emotion condition, and to the gender of the face in the "irrelevant" condition. The results revealed a WM improvement for happy faces in the relevant condition in both age groups, and an impairment for irrelevant happy faces in adolescents, but not adults. Furthermore, the difference between both attentional conditions for happy faces was larger in adolescents than adults. Results are discussed within the framework of theories of adolescent behaviour.

Childhood abuse is related to working memory impairment for positive emotion in female university students

Childhood abuse is an important risk factor for depression, anxiety disorders, and substance use later in life. One possible mechanism underlying this association could be deficits in cognitive processing of emotional information. This study tested the impact of distracting emotional information on working memory performance in 21 young women with a history of sexual and physical abuse during childhood/adolescence (mean age = 20.0), and compared their performance to 17 individuals reporting nonabuse-related childhood stress (mean age = 19.6) and a control group of 17 women without a history of childhood stress (mean age = 20.0). During the most difficult distractor condition, working memory accuracy for positive versus neutral incidental emotional stimuli was reduced in women reporting a history of abuse relative to both control groups (with and without nonabuse-related childhood stress). The current results reveal aberrant responses to positive stimuli and are consistent with the notion of persistent influence of childhood abuse on processes critical for emotional well-being and emotion control.

Patterns and predictors of anxiety among siblings of children with autism spectrum disorders

The purpose of this study was to examine patterns of anxiety among siblings of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), and determine the characteristics of the child with ASD and their parents that predicted anxiety. Data was collected from 1,755 siblings of children with ASD whose families participated in the Simons Simplex Collection; siblings ranged in age from 3 to 18 years (M = 9 years). Male siblings were at increased risk for sub-clinical anxiety problems during middle childhood. Parental history of anxiety disorders, higher maternal pragmatic language, and more proband behavior problems predicted higher anxiety. While siblings overall did not show elevated anxiety symptoms, higher rates of sub-clinical anxiety problems among males and siblings in middle childhood are cause for concern.

Relating Individual Differences in Trait-Anxiety to Memory Functioning in Young Children

There is extensive evidence indicating cognitive biases at several stages of information processing in high-anxious children. Little research, however, has investigated a potential memory bias toward negative information in high-anxious young children. We studied immediate and delayed verbal recall as well as delayed visual recognition in a sample of high-trait-anxious (HA) and low-trait-anxious (LA) preschoolers (N = 76, mean age = 65 months), using stimuli containing task-irrelevant emotional valence (positive, negative, neutral). The findings revealed that, compared to their LA counterparts, HA preschoolers displayed (1) a tendency to be less accurate in the immediate verbal recall task, (2) poorer recall of negative words in the immediate condition and poorer recall of neutral words in the delayed condition, (3) impaired delayed recognition of identities with happy facial expressions and a tendency to better recognize identities expressing anger. Results are discussed considering the dynamic interplay between personality, emotion and cognitive factors during early development.

Effects of anxiety on memory storage and updating in young children

The relationship between trait anxiety and memory functioning in young children was investigated. Two studies were conducted, using tasks tapping verbal and visual-spatial short-term memory (Study 1) and working memory (Study 2) in preschoolers. On the verbal storage tasks, there was a detrimental effect of anxiety on processing efficiency (duration of preparatory intervals) on Word Span. Performance effectiveness (memory span) did not differ between high-anxious and low-anxious children. In the second study, evaluating memory updating in a dual-task context, high-anxious children performed worse than low-anxious children on two verbal working memory tasks. Therefore, when simple verbal storage is required, high-anxious children show only efficiency deficits; when executive demands are higher (i.e., verbal updating) both accuracy and efficiency are impaired. However, on the visual-spatial storage and updating measures, performance did not differ between the two anxiety groups. The results are discussed in the context of the attentional control theory (Eysenck, Derakshan, Santos, & Calvo, 2007).