Abstract
Childhood adversity has been suggested to affect the vulnerability for developmental psychopathology, including both externalizing and internalizing symptoms. This study examines spontaneous attention biases for negative and positive emotional facial expressions as potential intermediate phenotypes. In detail, typically developing boys (6–13 years) underwent an eye-tracking paradigm displaying happy, angry, sad and fearful faces. An approach bias towards positive emotional facial expressions with increasing childhood adversity levels was found. In addition, an attention bias away from negative facial expressions was observed with increasing childhood adversity levels, especially for sad facial expressions. The results might be interpreted in terms of emotional regulation strategies in boys at risk for reactive aggression and depressive behaviour.
Highlights
Over the past decades, conduct and emotional problems have increased in youth of the western industrialized world (Collishaw et al 2004) and have been associated with severe problems at school, difficulties with integration into work life, chronic health problems, substance abuse and delinquency.the associated costs for society are tremendous (Bonin et al 2011) indicating the need to investigate the underlying neurocognitive mechanisms that facilitate the emergence of emotional problem behaviour in children.One model of aggressive behaviour can be derived from the social information processing theory by Crick and Dodge (1994)
When excluding one outlier, the interaction remained, which accounted for 8% of the total variance, while the monoamine oxidase (MAOA) genotype did not survive significance (Fig. 2A)
The significant genotype (MAOA) × environment interaction emerged from an association between the attention bias ratio score for the negative emotional component and childhood adversity of MAOA-L carriers (r = −0.6; p < 0.01), while no relation was found for MAOA-H carriers (r = 0.01; p = 0.58; Fig. 2B)
Summary
One model of aggressive behaviour can be derived from the social information processing theory by Crick and Dodge (1994). Aggressive children are assumed to interpret ambiguous information in a more hostile manner and to attend more frequently to hostile cues (Crick and Dodge 1996). Whereas the hostile attribution bias has been investigated extensively (Orobio de Castro et al 2002), the hostile attention bias has been observed in a few studies investigating undergraduates and violent offenders who scored high on trait anger (Honk et al 2001a, b; Smith and Waterman 2003, 2004). In experimental designs a hostile attention bias has been detected in adults only when anger was induced (Eckhardt and Cohen 1997; Cohen et al 1998), which is early evidence that the so-called hostile attention bias could be a precursor and a consequence of anger
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