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Anxiety is the most common form of psychopathology, and it is often characterized by chronic impairment across the lifespan. Researchers have identified core neural markers that confer risk for anxious outcomes. An increased error-related negativity (ERN) in anxious individuals has been shown to prospectively predict onset of anxiety disorders across development. Hence, it is critical to examine environmental factors that may shape the ERN. In the current study, we use a large sample of 170 female adolescents aged 10–17 to investigate whether the ERN mediates the relationship between parenting style and anxiety diagnostic status. This study replicates previous findings, and it extends previous work by suggesting that this relationship is more robust in young children as compared to adolescents. Interventions targeting the ERN via parenting may be most effective during childhood.

Anxiety is one of the most common forms of child psychopathology associated with persistent impairment across the lifespan. Therefore, investigating mechanisms that underlie anxiety in early childhood may improve prevention and intervention efforts.Researchers have linked selective attention toward threat (i.e., attentional bias to threat) with the development of anxiety. However, previous work on attentional bias has used less reliable, reaction time (RT)-based measures of attention. Additionally, few studies have used eye-tracking to measure attentional bias in young children. In the present study, we investigated the psychometric properties of an eye-tracking measure of attentional bias in a sample of young children between 6-and 9-years-old and explored if trait and clinical anxiety were related to attentional biases to threat.Results showed good psychometric properties for threat and neutral attentional biases, comparable to those found in adult eye-tracking studies. Temperamental and clinical anxiety did not significantly relate to threat/neutral dwell time and attentional biases. The significance of these null findings was discussed in relation to existing developmental theories of attentional biases. Future studies should explore if temperamental or clinical anxiety prospectively predict threat attentional bias and the onset of anxiety in older children using a longitudinal design. K E Y W O R D Sanxiety, attentional bias, development, eye-tracking, psychometrics 2 | CHONG aNd MEYER anxiety disorders. It has been suggested that attentional bias toward threat may act as a moderator between fearful temperament and later anxiety and social withdrawal (Morales et al., 2015;Pérez-Edgar et al., 2010;White et al., 2017). Furthermore, reviews by Van Bockstaele et al. (2014) and Morales et al. (2016) have suggested that there may be bidirectional relationships between threat-related attentional bias and anxiety, such that threat-biased attention and anxiety may amplify each other. Indeed, despite strong evidence of a relationship between anxiety and attention, the exact mechanism(s) whereby attention to threat may lead to anxiety (or vice versa) remain unclear (Burris et al., 2019).Recent meta-analyses supported the general finding that anxiety is associated with selective attention toward threatening stimuli in both adults and children, d = 0.21 to 0.45 (Bar-Haim et al., 2007;Dudeney et al., 2015;Lisk et al., 2020). However, there are some mixed findings in the developmental literature: some studies have shown that children with anxiety are more vigilant toward threat

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