Hostname: page-component-7dd5485656-wjfd9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-10-30T05:19:18.611Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A comparison of selective attention and facial processing biases in typically developing children who are high and low in self-reported trait anxiety

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 April 2007

ANNE RICHARDS ,
CHRISTOPHER C. FRENCH ,
GILLY NASH ,
JULIE A. HADWIN  and
NICK DONNELLY
ANNE RICHARDS
Affiliation:
University of London
CHRISTOPHER C. FRENCH
Affiliation:
University of London
GILLY NASH
Affiliation:
University of London
JULIE A. HADWIN
Affiliation:
University of Southampton
NICK DONNELLY
Affiliation:
University of Southampton
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The relationship between children's anxiety and cognitive biases was examined in two tasks. A group of 50 children aged 10 to 11 years (mean = 11 years, SD = 3.71 months) was given two tasks. The first tested children's selective attention (SA) to threat in an emotional Stroop task. The second explored facial processing biases using morphed angry-neutral and happy-neutral emotional expressions that varied in intensity. Faces with varying levels of emotion (25% emotion–75% neutral, 50% emotion–50% neutral, 100% emotion–0% neutral [prototype] and 150% emotion–0% neutral [caricature]) were judged as being angry or happy. Results support previous work highlighting a link between anxiety and SA to threat. In addition, increased anxiety in late childhood is associated with decreased ability to discriminate facial expression. Finally, lack of discrimination in the emotional expression task was related to lack of inhibition to threat in the Stroop task.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Development and Psychopathology , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , April 2007 , pp. 481 - 495
Copyright
© 2007 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

REFERENCES

Averill, J. R. (1982). Anger and aggression: An essay on emotion. New York: Springer–Verlag.
Barrera, M. E., & Maurer, D. (1981). Discrimination of strangers by the 3-month-old. Child Development, 52, 558–563.Google Scholar
Barrett, P. M., Rapee, R. M., Dadds, M. M., & Ryan, S. M. (1996). Family enhancement of cognitive style in anxious and aggressive children. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 24, 187–203.Google Scholar
Bedell, J. R., & Roitzsch, J. (1976). The effects of stress on state and trait anxiety in emotionally disturbed, normal, and delinquent children. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 4, 173–177.Google Scholar
Biscoe, M., Bradshaw, C., Clarke, S., Halliwell, M., Morgan, D., Nunn, T., et al. (1985). The London Reading Test. London: NFER-Nelson Publishing Co., Ltd.
Bradley, B. P, Mogg, K., & Millar, N. H. (2000). Covert and overt orienting of attention to emotional faces in anxiety. Cognition & Emotion, 14, 789–808.Google Scholar
Bruce, V., Campbell, R. N., Doherty-Sneddon, G., Import, A., Langton, S., McAuley, S., et al. (2000). Testing face processing skills in children. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 18, 319–333.Google Scholar
Butler, G., & Mathews, A. (1983). Cognitive processes in anxiety. Advances in Behaviour Research and Therapy, 5, 51–62.Google Scholar
Byrne, A., & Eysenck, M. W. (1995). Trait anxiety, anxious mood, and threat detection. Cognition & Emotion, 9, 549–562.Google Scholar
Calvo, M. G., & Castillo, M. D. (1997). Mood-congruent bias in interpretation of ambiguity: Strategic processes and temporary activation. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology A, 50, 163–182.Google Scholar
Calvo, M. G., & Castillo, M. D. (2001). Bias in predictive inferences during reading. Discourse Processes, 32, 43–71.Google Scholar
Calvo, M. G., Eysenck, M. W., & Castillo, M. D. (1997). Interpretation bias in test anxiety: The time course of predictive inferences. Cognition & Emotion, 11, 43–63.Google Scholar
Calvo, M. G., Eysenck, M. W., & Estevez, A. (1994). Ego-threat interpretive bias in test anxiety: On-line inferences. Cognition & Emotion, 8, 127–146.Google Scholar
Chorpita, B. F., Albano, A. M., & Barlow, D. H. (1996). Child anxiety sensitivity index: Considerations for children with anxiety disorders. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 25, 77–82.Google Scholar
Dalgleish, T., Taghavi, R., Neshat-Doost, H., Moradi, A., Canterbury, R., & Yule, W. (2003). Patterns of processing bias for emotional information across clinical disorders: A comparison of attention, memory, and prospective cognition in children and adolescents with depression, generalized anxiety and posttraumatic stress disorder. Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology, 32, 10–21.Google Scholar
Diamond, R., & Carey, S. (1986). Why faces are not special: An effect of expertise. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 115, 107–117.Google Scholar
Dineen, K., & Hadwin, J. A. (in press). Anxious and depressive symptoms and children's judgements of their own and others' interpretation of ambiguous social scenarios. Journal of Anxiety Disorders.
Ekman, P., & Friesen, W. V. (1976). Pictures of facial affect. Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press.
Eysenck, M. W. (1997). Anxiety and cognition. Hove: Psychology Press.
Eysenck, M. W., MacLeod, C., & Mathews, A. (1987). Cognitive functioning and anxiety. Psychological Research, 49, 189–195.Google Scholar
Eysenck, M. W., Mogg, K., May, J., Richards, A., & Mathews, A., (1991). Bias in interpretation of ambiguous sentences related to threat in anxiety. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 100, 144–150.Google Scholar
Farah, M. J., Rabinowitz, C., Quinn, G. E., & Lui, G. T. (2000). Early commitment of neural substrates for face recognition. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 17, 117–123.Google Scholar
Giedd, J. N., Blumenthal, J., Jeffries, N. O., Castellanos, F. X., Liu, H., Zijdenbos, A., et al. (1999). Brain development during childhood and adolescence: A longitudinal MRI study. Nature Neuroscience, 2, 861–863.Google Scholar
Gilboa-Schechtman, E., Foa, E. B., & Amir, N. (1999). Attentional biases for facial expressions in social phobia: The face-in-the-crowd paradigm. Cognition & Emotion, 13, 305–318.Google Scholar
Gilchrist, A., & McKone, E. (2003). Early maturity of face processing in children: Local and relational distinctiveness effects in 7-year-olds. Visual Cognition, 10, 769–793.Google Scholar
Hadwin, J. A., Donnelly, N., French, C. C., Richards, A., Watts, A., & Daley, D. (2003). The influence of children's self-report trait anxiety and depression on visual search for emotional faces. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 44, 432–444.Google Scholar
Hadwin, J., Frost, S., French, C. C., & Richards, A. (1997). Cognitive processing and anxiety in mainstream children: Trait anxiety and interpretation bias. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 106, 486–490.Google Scholar
Holdnack, J. A. (1999). Behavioral and cognitive correlates of face processing in children. Archives in Clinical Neuropsychology, 14, 684–685.Google Scholar
Horley, K., Williams, L. M., Gonsalvez, C., & Gordon, E. (2003). Social phobics do not see eye to eye: A visual scanpath study of emotional expression processing. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 17, 33–44.Google Scholar
Howell, D. C. (1997). Fundamental statistics for the behavioral sciences (4th ed.). Boston: PWS-Kent.
Jones, G. V. (1984). Fragment and schema models of recall. Memory and Cognition, 12, 250–263.Google Scholar
Jones, G. V. (1987). Independence and exclusivity among psychological processes: Implications for the structure of recall. Psychological Review, 94, 229–235.Google Scholar
Kindt, M., Bierman, D., & Brosschott, J. F. (1997). Cognitive bias in spider fear and control children: Assessment of emotional interference by a card format and a single-trial format of the Stroop task. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 66, 163–179.Google Scholar
Kindt, M., & Van den Hout, M. (2001). Selective attention and anxiety: A perspective on developmental issues and the causal status. Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioural Assessment, 23, 193–202.Google Scholar
MacLeod, C., & Cohen, I. L. (1993). Anxiety and the interpretation of ambiguity: A text comprehension study. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 102, 238–247.Google Scholar
MacLeod, C., Rutherford, E., Campbell, L., Ebsworthy, G., & Holker, L. (2002). Selective attention and emotional vulnerability: Assessing the causal basis of their association through the experimental manipulation of attentional bias. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 111, 107–123.Google Scholar
Martin, J. M., & Cole, D. A. (2000). Using the personal stroop to detect children's awareness of social rejection by peers. Cognition & Emotion, 14, 241–260.Google Scholar
Martin, M., Horder, P., & Jones, G. V. (1992). Integral bias in naming of phobia-related words. Cognition & Emotion, 6, 479–486.Google Scholar
Martin, M., & Jones, G. V. (1995). Integral bias in the cognitive processing of emotionally linked pictures. British Journal of Psychology, 86, 419–435.Google Scholar
Mathews, A., & MacLeod, C. (1985). Selective processing of threat cues in anxiety states. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 23, 563–569.Google Scholar
Mathews, A., Richards, A., & Eysenck, M. W. (1989). The interpretation of homophones related to threat in anxiety states. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 98, 31–34.Google Scholar
Mogg, K., & Bradley, B. P. (1998). A cognitive–motivational analysis of anxiety. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 36, 809–848.Google Scholar
Mondloch, C. J., Le Grand, R., & Maurer, D. (2002). Configural face processing develops more slowly than featural face processing, Perception, 31, 553–566.Google Scholar
Moradi, A. R., Taghavi, M. R., Neshat-Doost, H. T., Yule, W., & Dalgleish, T. (1999). Performance of children and adolescents with PTSD on the Stroop colour-naming task. Psychological Medicine, 29, 415–419.Google Scholar
Morris, J. S., Öhman, A., & Dolan, R. J. (1998). Conscious and unconscious emotional learning in the human amygdala. Nature, 393, 467–470.Google Scholar
Morton, J., & Johnson, M. H. (1991). CONSPEC and CONLEARN: A two-process theory of infant face recognition. Psychological Review, 98, 164–181.Google Scholar
Muris, P., Merckelbach, H., & Damsma, E. (2000). Threat perception bias in non-referred socially anxious children. Journal of Clinical Child Psychology, 29, 348–359.Google Scholar
Muris, P., Merckelbach, H., Ollendick, T., King, N., & Bogie, N. (2002). Three traditional and three new childhood anxiety questionnaires: Their reliability and validity in a normal adolescent sample. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 40, 753–772.Google Scholar
Power, M., & Dalgleish, T. (1997). Cognition and emotion: From order to disorder. Hove: Psychology Press, Taylor & Francis.
Rapee, R. M. (2000). Group treatment of children with anxiety disorders: Outcome and predictors of treatment response. Australian Journal of Psychology, 52, 125–129.Google Scholar
Richards, A. (2004). Anxiety and the resolution of ambiguity. In J. Yiend (Ed.), Cognition, emotion and psychopathology: Theoretical, empirical and clinical directions (pp. 130–148). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Richards, A., & French, C. C. (1992). An anxiety-related bias in semantic activation when processing threat/neutral homographs. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 45, 503–525.Google Scholar
Richards, A., French, C. C., Calder, A. J., Webb, B., Fox, R., & Young, A. W. (2002). Anxiety-related bias in the classification of emotionally ambiguous facial expressions. Emotion, 2, 273–287.Google Scholar
Richards, A., French, C. C., & Reynolds, A. (1993). Anxiety and the spelling and use in sentences of threat/neutral homophones. Current Psychology Research and Reviews, 12, 18–25Google Scholar
Richards, A., French, C. C., Zanelli, J., Calder, A., & Young, A. (2003). Enhanced sensitivity to anger in anxious individuals. Manuscript submitted for publication.
Richards, A., Richards, L. C., & McGeeney, A. (2000). Anxiety-related Stroop interference in adolescents. Journal of General Psychology, 127, 327–333.Google Scholar
Schwartz, C. E., Snidman, N., & Kagan, J. (1996). Early temperamental predictors of Stroop interference to threatening information at adolescence. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 10, 89–96.Google Scholar
Snodgrass, J. G., & Corwin, J. (1988). Pragmatics of measuring recognition memory: Applications to dementia and amnesia. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 117, 34–50.Google Scholar
Spielberger, C. (1973). Manual for the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory for Children. Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press.
Taghavi, M. R., Moradi, A. R., Neshat-Doost, H. T., Yule, W., & Dalgleish, T. (2000). Interpretation of ambiguous emotional information in clinically anxious children and adolescents. Cognition & Emotion, 14, 809–822.Google Scholar
Vasey, M. W., Daleiden, E. L., Williams, L. L., & Brown, L. M. (1995). Biased attention in childhood anxiety disorders: A preliminary study. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 23, 267–279.Google Scholar
Vasey, M. W., Dalgleish, T., & Silverman, W. K. (2003). Research on information processing factors in child and adolescent psychopathology: A critical commentary. Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 32, 81–93.Google Scholar
Vasey, M. W., & MacLeod, C. (2001). Information processing factors in childhood anxiety: A review and developmental perspective. In M. W. Vasey & M. R. Dadds (Eds.), The developmental psychopathology of anxiety (pp. 253–277). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Warren, S. L., Emde, R. N., & Sroufe, L. A. (2000). Internal representations: Predicting anxiety from children's play narratives. Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 39, 100–107.Google Scholar
Wells, A., & Matthews, G. (1994). Attention and emotion: A clinical perspective. Hove: Erlbaum.
Williams, J. M. G., Watts, F. N., MacLeod, C., & Mathews, A. (1997). Cognitive psychology and emotional disorders (2nd ed.). Chichester: Wiley.
Young, A. W., Perrett, D. I., Calder, A. J., Sprengelmeyer, R., & Ekman, P. (2002). Facial expressions of emotion: Stimuli and tests (FEEST). Bury St. Edmunds: Thames Valley Test Company.
Young, A. W., Rowland, D., Calder, A. J., Etcoff, N. L., Seth, A., & Perrett, D. I. (1997). Facial expression megamix: Tests of dimensional and category accounts of emotion recognition. Cognition, 63, 271–313.Google Scholar
Young-Browne, G., Rosenfeld, H. M., & Horowitz, F. D. (1977). Infant discrimination of facial expressions. Child Development, 48, 555–562.Google Scholar