Attention biases, anxiety, and development: toward or away from threats or rewards?

Abstract

Research on attention provides a promising framework for studying anxiety pathophysiology and treatment. The study of attention biases appears particularly pertinent to developmental research, as attention affects learning and has down-stream effects on behavior. This review summarizes recent findings about attention orienting in anxiety, drawing on findings in recent developmental psychopathology and affective neuroscience research. These findings generate specific insights about both development and therapeutics. The review goes beyond a traditional focus on biased processing of threats and considers biased processing of rewards. Building on this work, we then turn to treatment of pediatric anxiety, where manipulation of attention to threat and/or reward may serve a therapeutic role as a component of Attention Bias Modification Therapy.

Threat perception predicts cognitive behavioral therapy outcomes in anxious children

“…They do not address the tendency for some children to become anxious more frequently than others in response to environmental stimuli. This tendency has been linked to undue attention to threat in anxious children [6,7]. Based on studies to date, it is unclear whether or not this vulnerability is ameliorated by CBT, or predicts a less robust treatment response.…”

“…Biased attention to threat may be disorder-specific [6,7]. For example, Spector, Pecknold and Libman [12] found a specific bias to social threat in adults with generalized Social Phobia.…”

Brain and Behavior – Hypothalamus and Limbic System: The Neurobiology of Emotions

“…It is what your brain looks like on fear, it is a functional magnetic resonance imaging of fearful versus neutral faces, and it has been basic findings that have been replicated across the world [17]. The amygdala is hyperactivated when a fearful stimulus has occurred and what we find and it is worked by immediate stimulus across post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) [35].…”

“…It is unusual view of the hippocampus which shows the underside of its structure and exemplifies the increased surface area achieved through extensive folding here's the outflow from the hippocampus the fornix [10][11][12][13]. These fibers swing around the thalamus and come down here as the columns of the fornix just posterior to the anterior commissure; the columns of the fornix will project down to the mammillary bodies and the mammal economic track is going to connect the mammillary bodies with the anterior nucleus [4,13,14] and the dorsal medial nucleus of the thalamus from the thalamus the information travels to the limbic lobe [15][16][17].…”

Pediatric anxiety disorders: from neuroscience to evidence-based clinical practice

“…In particular, a set of dysfunctional mental processes has been linked to pediatric anxiety and associated traits, such as the early-childhood temperament of behavioral inhibition. These dysfunctional processes can be classified into five groups of information-processing functions: 1) threatattention interaction (a tendency for anxious children to automatically orient their attention towards or away from threats) 72 ; 2) threat appraisal (a tendency for anxious children to classify and respond to neutral or harmless stimuli as if they are dangerous) 73 ; 3) memory and learning processes (a tendency for anxious individuals to learn different associations among safe and dangerous stimuli, as presented in fear conditioning and extinction experiments) [73][74][75] ; 4) social evaluative processes (a tendency for anxious children to become concerned about peer evaluation) 76 ; 5) increased sensitivity to rewards (a tendency for anxiety children to more strongly alter their behavior when trying to achieve rewards). 77,78 This set of findings suggests that anxiety disorders involve dysfunctional processes in various emotional and cognitive processes, each of which is in turn regulated by several brain regions that may support anxiety disorder pathophysiology.…”