Emotional Processing and Attention Control Impairments in Children with Anxiety: An Integrative Review of Event-Related Potentials Findings

Abstract

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.

Context-based interpersonal relationship modulates social comparison between outcomes: an event-related potential study

“…Indeed, some recent studies have confirmed the importance of individual difference in ERP signals related to social comparison ( Hu et al. , 2017 ; Wang et al. , 2017 ; Qi et al.…”

Electrocortical measures of information processing biases in social anxiety disorder: A review

“…Furthermore, differences between ERN and correct-response negativity amplitude in 7-year-old children predicted SAD symptoms at age 9 (Lahat, Lamm, et al, 2014). It should be noted however that the ERN is not specific to SAD, but also found in other anxiety disorders in children (Wauthia & Rossignol, 2016). The CRN and Pe are each studied in only one developmental study and were not related to social anxiety (Lahat, Lamm, et al, 2014;McDermott et al, 2009).…”

Individuals with depressive tendencies experience difficulty in forgetting negative material: two mechanisms revealed by ERP data in the directed forgetting paradigm

“…It should be noted that, both P3 and LPP refer to large and slow positive potentials, which peak at the parietal electrodes later than 300 ms post-stimulus. In this study, the term “P3” is used to refer to the relatively earlier positive component (about 300 ms) with a sharper peak, and the term “LPP” to refer to the slower positive wave (after 500 ms) with a blunter peak 41 , 42 . In addition to the three ERP components that have been often mentioned in the DF paradigm, the present study investigated early components such as the occipital P1 and the frontal P2, which are well-known attention-related components 43 , 44 , but have not been explored in previous DF studies.…”