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

Abstract

The current study examined the relations between individual differences in attention to emotion faces and temperamental negative affect across the first two years of life. Infant studies have noted a normative pattern of preferential attention to salient cues, particularly angry faces. A parallel literature suggests that elevated attention bias to threat is associated with anxiety, particularly if coupled with temperamental risk. Examining the emerging relations between attention to threat and temperamental negative affect may help distinguish normative from at-risk patterns of attention. Infants (N=145) ages 4 to 24 months (Mean=12.93 months, SD=5.57) completed an eye-tracking task modeled on the attention bias “dot-probe” task used with older children and adults. With age, infants spent greater time attending to emotion faces, particularly threat faces. All infants displayed slower latencies to fixate to incongruent versus congruent probes. Neither relation was moderated by temperament. Trial-by-trial analyses found that dwell time to the face was associated with latency to orient to subsequent probes, moderated by the infant's age and temperament. In young infants low in negative affect longer processing of angry faces was associated with faster subsequent fixation to probes; young infants high in negative affect displayed the opposite pattern at trend. Findings suggest that although age was directly associated with an emerging bias to threat, the impact of processing threat on subsequent orienting was associated with age and temperament. Early patterns of attention may shape how children respond to their environments, potentially via attention's gate-keeping role in framing a child's social world for processing.

Rapid face processing for positive and negative emotions in 5‐, 7‐, and 12‐month‐old infants: An exploratory study

“…Some have found the bias for fearful faces holds at 36 months of age (Leppänen et al ., ), and others showed a decline in looking times for fearful faces between seven and 24 months of age (Peltola et al ., ). Other investigators who examined infants from 4–24 months of age have found that infants spend a greater amount of time attending to emotional faces with age, particularly threatening faces (Pérez‐Edgar et al ., ).…”

“…It remains unclear whether this attentional bias is maintained over time. Findings from recent longitudinal studies have shown that the preference to look at threatening stimuli is maintained over time (Leppänen et al ., ; Nakagawa & Sukigara, ; Pérez‐Edgar et al ., ).…”

Temperament moderates developmental changes in vigilance to emotional faces in infants: Evidence from an eye‐tracking study

“…For example, a recent eye‐tracking study using an infant version of the dot‐probe paradigm reported that dwell time to angry faces increases with age in a sample of 4‐ to 24‐month infants. The effect of age was not significant for happy faces (Pérez‐Edgar et al, ). Furthermore, a related study found an age‐related increase in probe fixation latency after infants fixated face pairs containing an emotional face, but not after trials with nonsocial threats (e.g., snakes) (LoBue, Buss, Taber‐Thomas, & Pérez‐Edgar, ).…”

“…The effect of NA may change with maturation (e.g., Nakagawa & Sukigara, ) and NA moderates age‐related differences in threat bias in 4‐ to 24‐month‐olds. That is, the relation between dwell time to angry faces and subsequent face disengagement is dependent on levels of NA only for younger infants (Pérez‐Edgar et al, ). While LoBue and Pérez‐Edgar () found that high NA is linked to facilitated threat detection in childhood, we lack evidence supporting NA‐related individual differences in threat vigilance during infancy.…”

Disentangling the negativity bias: 7-9-month-old crawling and non-crawling infants' responses to fearful and angry expressions.

“…This study did not address other sources of variability that have been shown to impact infant emotional biases. New research suggests that infant temperament can effect attention latency and dwell time to negative displays of emotion (Pérez-Edgar et al, 2017). In addition, research has shown that maternal positive affect is related to infants looking longer to a fearful expression at 7 months as compared to a happy expression (e.g.…”