Attention Bias of Anxious Youth During Extended Exposure of Emotional Face Pairs: An Eye-Tracking Study

Abstract

Background Previous studies demonstrate that anxiety is characterized by biased attention toward threats, typically measured by differences in motor reaction time to threat and neutral cues. Using eye-tracking methodology, the current study measured attention biases in anxious and nonanxious youth, using unrestricted free viewing of angry, happy, and neutral faces. Methods Eighteen anxious and 15 nonanxious youth (8–17 years old) passively viewed angry-neutral and happy-neutral face pairs for 10 s while their eye movements were recorded. Results Anxious youth displayed a greater attention bias toward angry faces than nonanxious youth, and this bias occurred in the earliest phases of stimulus presentation. Specifically, anxious youth were more likely to direct their first fixation to angry faces, and they made faster fixations to angry than neutral faces. Conclusions Consistent with findings from earlier, reaction-time studies, the current study shows that anxious youth, like anxious adults, exhibit biased orienting to threat-related stimuli. This study adds to the existing literature by documenting that threat biases in eye-tracking patterns are manifest at initial attention orienting.

Anxiety and Attentional Bias in Preschool-Aged Children: An Eyetracking Study

“…Child actors were used in light of evidence that adult faces are particularly salient to children, regardless of emotional expression (Benoit, McNally, Rapee, Gamble, and Wiseman 2007) and recent recommendations that attentional bias research with children should use child face stimuli (Shechner et al 2013). Greyscale images were edited to show only facial features, measured 200×280 pixels and were presented such that the centre of each image was 200 pixels to the left/right of the centre of the screen.…”

“…Similarly, to date, there is little indication of a bias in maintained attention in child anxiety, with three of the four studies conducted with children failing to find differences between clinically anxious children and controls on maintained attention to emotional faces (Gamble and Rapee 2009;Seefeldt et al 2014;Shechner et al. 2013).…”

“…All of these studies used a freeviewing paradigm, recording gaze whilst pairs of emotional stimuli were presented. The findings are somewhat inconsistent across studies but in general there is only modest support for an anxiety-related vigilance bias in anxious children; InAlbon et al (2010) and Gamble and Rapee (2009) both found no vigilance bias in child participants, Seefeldt et al (2014) found a vigilance bias in socially anxious children only when state anxiety was elevated via an experimental manipulation, and Shechner et al (2013) found a vigilance bias but their sample included participants aged up to 17 years.…”

“…To our knowledge, only four studies have used eyetracking to examine attentional bias in anxious children (Gamble and Rapee 2009;In-Albon, Kossowsky, and Schneider 2010;Seefeldt, Kramer, Tuschen-Caffier, and Heinrichs 2014;Shechner et al 2013). All of these studies used a freeviewing paradigm, recording gaze whilst pairs of emotional stimuli were presented.…”

State anxiety and emotional face recognition in healthy volunteers

“…This includes selective attention towards, and difficulty disengaging from, threat information [15][16][17][18]. In addition, high trait and clinical anxiety have been associated with impairment in the recognition of emotional expressions, although there is question as to whether this impairment is global or emotionspecific.…”