Processing Biases for Emotional Faces in 4- to 12-Year-Old Non-Clinical Children: An Exploratory Study of Developmental Patterns and Relationships with Social Anxiety and Behavioral Inhibition

Abstract

The present study examined (a) processing biases for emotional facial stimuli in a sample of 355 4-to 12-year-old non-clinical children, (b) developmental patterns of such biases, and (c) to what extent biases were related to social anxiety and the temperamental trait of behavioral inhibition in children of various ages. Processing biases were assessed with a dot probe task and a dynamic emotion recognition paradigm (i.e., morph task), whereas children's levels of social anxiety and behavioral inhibition were measured by means of parent-report. Results showed that on the morph task children were generally faster in detecting happy faces compared to angry faces, and this effect was not qualified by age, social anxiety, or behavioral inhibition. Further analyses revealed no significant effect of age on bias scores. However, analyses did reveal two classes in the data with one class mainly consisting of younger children and the other class predominantly composed of older children: Younger children were in general slower, less accurate, and displayed more variance in their scores on the processing biases tasks than older children. Results of this study underline the need of the development and use of more age-appropriate, non-reaction time-based tasks for measuring processing bias in younger children.

Frontolimbic functioning during threat-related attention: Relations to early behavioral inhibition and anxiety in children

“…In line with the neural parallels between anxiety and BI, adolescents with stable childhood BI also display heightened AB (Perez-Edgar et al, 2010a). However, younger children characterized for BI did not display AB in other studies (Broeren et al, 2011; Perez-Edgar et al, 2011; White et al, in press). In summary, although there is relatively consistent evidence in adults suggesting that AB to threat appears to be causally implicated in the onset and maintenance of anxiety symptoms (Pine et al, 2009), inconsistencies in the youth literature require further research.…”

“…The absence of significant relations between BI and behavioral AB to threat is not uncommon in behavioral (Broeren et al, 2011; Perez-Edgar et al, 2011; White et al, in press) and neuroimaging (Hardee et al, 2013) studies adopting the dot-probe paradigm. Several neuroimaging studies with clinically affected youth also found no associations between behavioral AB and anxiety (Britton et al, 2011; Monk et al, 2008; Price et al, 2014).…”

Developmental Relations Among Behavioral Inhibition, Anxiety, and Attention Biases to Threat and Positive Information

“…There may also be normative developmental changes in attention biases or other developmental factors, such as more efficient attentional control, that differentially contribute to attention biases between ages 5 and 7. Although most recent work in developmental samples does not find a direct association between age and attention bias (Broeren et al., ; Roy et al., ; Salum et al., ; Szpunar & Young, ), in a study with children between the ages of 4 and 12, Broeren et al. () did report that young children tended to show more variability in their RTs and bias scores.…”

“…This bias away from threat has also been reported in children with fearful temperaments (Morales et al., ). Several studies have failed to find evidence of a threat‐related attention bias in anxious youth (Waters et al., ) or fearful temperaments (Broeren, Muris, Bouwmeester, Field, & Voerman, ; Pérez‐Edgar et al., ) and several studies have documented a significant attention bias to threat in all children, regardless of anxiety status (Waters, Lipp, & Spence, ). Moreover, there are cognitive training studies in adults and children that found no link between change in attention bias and anxiety (e.g., Hallion & Ruscio, ; Shechner et al., ).…”

No Significant Evidence of Cognitive Biases for Emotional Stimuli in Children At-Risk of Developing Anxiety Disorders

“…However, accuracy in emotion recognition may be improved when children with symptoms of social anxiety are presented with child rather than adult faces (Ale et al 2010), and both accuracy and reaction times for identifying emotional expressions have been found to improve with age (Broeren et al 2011). On the other hand, other research suggests that social anxiety may enhance children’s emotion recognition abilities, with one study showing that children who had greater social anxiety symptoms were better at emotion recognition (Ale et al 2010).…”