The primary goal of this study was to examine the relations between young adults’ reports of childhood abuse and their current attention and interpretation biases for facial displays of emotion. Consistent with prediction, individuals reporting a history of moderate to severe childhood abuse exhibited preferential attention to angry faces and increased sensitivity in the detection of angry expressions at lower levels of emotional intensity. Both the attention and interpretation biases were specific to angry rather than happy or sad faces. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that experiences of childhood abuse may contribute to the development of experience-specific information-processing biases.

People with Williams syndrome are extremely sociable, empathic, and expressive in communication. Some researchers suggest they may be especially sensitive to perceiving emotional expressions. We administered the Faces and Paralanguage subtests of the Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy Scale (DANVA2), a standardized measure of emotion recognition for basic emotions to three groups: adolescents and adults with Williams syndrome, age and IQ-matched participants with learning/intellectual disability, and age-matched nonimpaired controls. The Williams syndrome and learning/intellectual disability groups performed significantly worse than the typically developing controls on both subtests, especially on negative emotions. Error analysis indicated the same general pattern of performance across versions and subtests of the DANVA2 for all groups. These findings suggest that emotion recognition is not spared in Williams syndrome.

Theoretical models of social phobia propose that biased attention contributes to the maintenance of symptoms; however these theoretical models make opposing predictions. Specifically, whereas Rapee and Heimberg (1997) suggest the biases are characterized by hypervigilence to threat cues and difficulty disengaging attention from threat, Clark and Wells (1995) suggest that threat cues are largely avoided. Previous research has been limited by the almost exclusive reliance on behavioral response times to experimental tasks to provide an index of attentional biases. The current study evaluated the relationship between the time-course of attention and symptoms of social anxiety and depression. Forty-two young adults completed a dot-probe task with emotional faces while eye movement data were collected. The results revealed that increased social anxiety was associated with attention to emotional (rather than neutral) faces over time as well as difficulty disengaging attention from angry expressions; some evidence was found for a relationship between heightened depressive symptoms and increased attention to fear faces.