Child temperamental reactivity and self-regulation effects on attentional biases.

Oana Benga,Irina Pitica,Mircea Miclea,Georgiana Susa

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00922

Abstract

This study examined the effects of individual differences in temperamental reactivity (fear) and self-regulation (attentional control) on attentional biases toward threat in a sample of school-aged children (age range was between 9 years 1 month and 13 years 10 months). Attentional biases were assessed with pictorial Dot-probe task, comparing attention allocation toward angry (threat-related) vs. neutral and happy faces. Children also completed self-report temperamental measures of fear and attentional control. We compared attentional bias scores in 4 groups of children: high/low fear and high/low attentional control. Results indicated that, in the case of children with high fear and low attentional control, attention was significantly biased toward angry faces compared with children who had low fear and low attentional control. Findings are discussed in terms of the moderating role of individual differences in attentional control in the context of threat, anxiety-related attentional biases in children.

Highlights

Cognitive theories have proposed that anxious individuals tend to direct their attention toward threatening information during early stages of processing (Beck and Clark, 1997)
The present study aimed to investigate the effects of individual differences in temperamental fear and temperamental attentional control on attention allocation toward threat
With regard to the main effects of both temperamental variables on attentional biases toward angry faces, neither fear nor attentional control was significantly related to attentional biases

Summary

Introduction

Cognitive theories have proposed that anxious individuals tend to direct their attention toward threatening information during early stages of processing (Beck and Clark, 1997). Childhood investigations have examined the association between attentional biases toward threat and anxiety, with different experimental paradigms, from reaction time (e.g., Dot-probe and emotional Stroop tasks) to eye-tracking (see In-Albon et al, 2010), but results are less straightforward. In non-clinical samples, some studies comparing children categorized as highly anxious vs non-anxious reported attentional biases characteristic of the first category, when using both the emotional Stroop task (Martin and Jones, 1995; Richards et al, 2000) and the Dot-probe task (Vasey et al, 1996). Authors reported enhanced processing bias for angry faces compared to neutral ones on the Stroop task as being characteristic of younger moderately anxious children, mean age 9 (Reinholdt-Dunne et al, 2012). Older moderately anxious children (mean age 11) had lessened anxiety-related threat bias, result interpreted as a consequence of heightened abilities of executive control which are growing with age

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