Perceptual experience through the five modalities (i.e., vision, hearing, touch, taste, and smell) has demonstrated its key role in semantics. Researchers also highlighted the role of interoceptive information in the grounded representation of concepts. However, to this day, there is no available data across these modalities in the French language. Therefore, the aim of this study was to circumvent this caveat. Participants aged between 18 and 50 completed an online survey in which we recorded scores of perceptual strength (PS), interoceptive information, imageability, concreteness, conceptual familiarity, and age of acquisition of 270 words of the French language. We also analysed the relationships between perceptual modalities and psycholinguistic variables. Results showed that vast majority of concepts were visually-dominant. Correlation analyses revealed that the five PS variables were strongly correlated with imageability, concreteness, and conceptual familiarity and highlight that PS variables index one aspect of the semantic representations of a word. On the other hand, high interoceptive scores were highlighted only for the less imageable and less concrete words, emphasizing their importance for the grounding of abstract concepts. Future research could use these norms in the investigation of the role of perceptual experience in the representation of concepts and their impact on word processing.

Anxiety disorders in adults have been associated with biased processing of emotional information which may be due to a deficit in attentional control. This deficit leads to an hypervigilance and a selective attention toward threatening information. Event-related potentials (ERPs) have been used to study this topic in anxious adults. Similar biases have been reported in children with anxiety but researches investigating the ERPs components underpinning these biases are more scarce. However, the understanding of the neural correlates of attentional biases in anxious children seem quite important since they could play a role in the etiology and the maintenance of this disorder. This review summarizes the results of researches having used ERPs to index emotional processing and attention control in children suffering from anxiety. We will focus on the P1, indexing basic visual perceptual processing, the N2, thought to reflect cognitive control process, the P3 typically associated with response inhibition, and the late positive potential (LPP) that indicates sustained attention toward motivationally salient stimuli. We will also examine the error-related negativity (ERN) that indexes monitoring system for detecting errors. Electro-physiological studies generally reported increased amplitudes of these components in anxious children, even when they did not differ from typically developing children at a behavioral level. These results suggest diminished cognitive control that influences children's selective attention mechanisms toward threatening information. Theoretical perspectives and implications for future researches will be discussed in the framework of current models of childhood anxiety.

Background Cognitive models indicated that social anxiety disorder (SAD) would be caused and maintained by a biased attentional processing of threatening information. This study investigates whether socially anxious children may present impaired attentional engagement and disengagement from negative emotional faces, as well as their underlying event-related potential responses. Methods and findings Fifteen children with high levels of social anxiety (HSA; 9 boys; mean age = 9.99y; SD = 1.14) and twenty low socially anxious children (LSA; 16 boys; mean age = 10.47y; SD = 1.17) participated in a spatial cueing task in which they had to detect targets following neutral/disgusted faces in a valid or invalid location. No group effect was reported on reaction times [p>.05]. However, electrophysiological data showed lower P3a amplitude in HSA children compared with the LSA group when processing facial stimuli. They also reported larger N2 amplitudes for valid-disgusted targets and a larger P3a amplitude for the invalid-disgusted ones. Conclusion In terms of electrophysiological data, our results validated, the hypothesis of attentional disengagement difficulties in SAD children. We also confirm the idea that high levels of social anxiety are associated with cognitive control impairments and have a greater impact on the processing efficiency than on the performance effectiveness.

Anxiety sensitivity (AS), namely the fear of anxiety symptoms, has been described as a precursor of sub-threshold anxiety levels. Sexton et al. (2003) posited that increased AS would arise from an elevated neuroticism and that both would act as vulnerability factors for panic disorder (PD), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) symptoms. Accordingly, this study aimed to (1) evaluate the applicability of this model to a pediatric population and (2) examine the influences of the other Big-Five personality dimensions on the four lower-order dimensions of AS (cognitive, physical, control, and physical) and on social phobia (SP), separation anxiety disorder (SAD) and depression symptoms. 200 children (104 girls) aged between 8 and 12 years old (mean age = 132.52 months, SD = 14.5) completed the Childhood Anxiety Sensitivity Index ( Silverman et al., 1991 ), the Big Five Questionnaire for Children ( Barbaranelli et al., 2003 ), and the Revised’s Children Anxiety and Depression Scale ( Chorpita et al., 2000 ). Regression analyses confirmed that AS and neuroticism together significantly predicted the presence of PD, OCD, and GAD symptoms but also SP, SAD, and depression symptoms. Moreover, neuroticism interacted with extraversion, conscientiousness and agreeableness to significantly predict SP, GAD, and depression. Surprisingly, the global AS score was only predicted by agreeableness, while AS dimensions also specifically related to openness. Finally, AS dimensions did not predict the presence of specific anxiety symptoms. To conclude, the predicting model of anxiety symptoms in children sets neuroticism and AS on the same level, with an unexpected influence of agreeableness on AS, raising the importance of other trait-like factors in the definition of such models. Moreover, AS should be considered as a unitary construct when predicting the presence of anxiety symptoms in children. Future interventions must consider these associations to help children detect and recognize the symptoms of their anxiety and help them to interpret them correctly.