Impact of attention biases to threat and effortful control on individual variations in negative affect and social withdrawal in very young children

Abstract

Early temperamental sensitivity may form the basis for the later development of socioemotional maladjustment. In particular, temperamental negative affect places children at risk for the development of anxiety. However, not all children who show negative affect go on to develop anxiety or extreme social withdrawal. Recent research indicates that reactive control, in the form of attention to threat, may serve as a bridge between early temperament and the development of later social difficulties. In addition, variation in effortful control may also modulate this trajectory. Children (MeanAge=5.57 years) were assessed for attention bias to threatening and pleasant faces using a dot-probe paradigm. Attention bias to threatening (but not happy) faces moderated the direct positive relation between negative affect and social withdrawal. Children with threat biases showed a significant link between negative affect and social withdrawal, while children who avoided threat did not. In contrast, effortful control did not moderate the relation between negative affect and social withdrawal. Rather, there was a direct negative relation between effortful control and social withdrawal. The findings from this short report indicate that the relation amongst temperament, attention bias, and social withdrawal appears early in life and point to early emerging specificity in reactive and regulatory functioning.

The impact of negative affect on attention patterns to threat across the first 2 years of life.

“…It may also be that parallel developmental processes may have been at play with the older infants. In particular, the broader attention bias literature suggests that high levels of effortful or attentional control can modulate levels of bias and the relation between temperament and bias (C. Cole, Zapp, Fettig, & Perez-Edgar, 2016; Lonigan & Vasey, 2009; Susa, Pitică, Benga, & Miclea, 2012). The first two years of life sees the emergence and rapid increase of child-directed regulatory processes (Rothbart & Rueda, 2005; Rothbart, Sheese, Rueda, & Posner, 2011), which may impact patterns of visual attention.…”

The Neurobiology of Dispositional Negativity and Attentional Biases to Threat: Implications for Understanding Anxiety Disorders in Adults and Youth

“…Like many patients with anxiety disorders, adults, adolescents, and children with a more negative disposition are biased to allocate excess attention to threat-related cues, even when they are irrelevant to the task at hand (Aue & Okon-Singer, 2015; Bar-Haim, Lamy, Pergamin, Bakermans-Kranenburg, & van IJzendoorn, 2007; Cole, Zapp, Fettig, & Perez-Edgar, 2016; Dudeney, Sharpe, & Hunt, 2015; LoBue & Perez-Edgar, 2014; Van Bockstaele et al, 2014) (for thoughtful discussions of heterogeneity, see Naim et al, 2015; Roy, Dennis, & Warner, 2015; Waters et al, 2015) 2 . In particular, recent meta-analyses indicate that children and adolescents with elevated levels of dispositional negativity or frank anxiety disorders show a significantly greater attentional bias for threat-related stimuli when compared to typical youth ( k = 44 studies; mean Cohen’s d = 0.21) or when compared emotionally neutral stimuli (k = 16 studies; mean Cohen’s d = 0.54; Dudeney et al, 2015).…”

Behavioral Inhibition: Temperament or Prodrome?

“…Effortful control, in turn, can be defined as the self-regulatory component of temperament linked to the ability to modulate reactivity, monitor behavior, and engage in future planning [15]. The relation between reactivity, regulation, and social withdrawal is dissociable as threat bias moderates the significant positive link between reactivity and social withdrawal but does not modulate the direct negative association between effortful control and social withdrawal [85]. Effortful control is seen as a core tool in the child’s arsenal needed to both self-regulate and integrate oneself as an adaptive member of the larger social environment.…”