Biased Attention to Threat: Answering Old Questions With Young Infants

Burris, Jessica L.; Oleas, Denise S.; Reider, Lori B.; Buss, Kristin A.; Pérez‐Edgar, Koraly; LoBue, Vanessa

doi:10.1177/0963721419861415

Cited by 14 publications

(18 citation statements)

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“…Threat-biased attention develops from early childhood ( Bayet and Nelson, 2019 ), and maladaptive development of this attentional mechanism conveys risks for later socioemotional problems ( LoBue and Pérez-Edgar, 2014 , Pérez-Edgar et al, 2011 , Pérez-Edgar et al, 2010 ). A well-documented behavioral change in threat-biased attention occurs in early childhood, such that from infancy to childhood there is shift from a specific bias towards fear (e.g., preferential looking to fearful faces) to a more generalized attentional bias toward threatening signals or negative emotions (e.g., anger and fear) by three years of age ( Burris et al, 2019 , Leppänen et al, 2007 ). However, little is known about the neural substrates of these behavioral changes, which in turn hinders our understanding of the brain-behavioral relationship in the development of threat-biased attention.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Converging neural and behavioral evidence for a rapid, generalized response to threat-related facial expressions in 3-year-old children

2021

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Electrophysiological studies on adults suggest that humans are efficient at detecting threat from facial information and tend to grant these signals a priority in access to attention, awareness, and action. The developmental origins of this bias are poorly understood, partly because few studies have examined the emergence of a generalized neural and behavioral response to distinct categories of threat in early childhood. We used event-related potential (ERP) and eye-tracking measures to examine children’s early visual responses and overt attentional biases towards multiple exemplars of angry and fearful vs. other (e.g., happy and neutral) faces. A large group of children was assessed longitudinally in infancy (5, 7, or 12 months) and at 3 years of age. The final ERP dataset included 148 infants and 132 3-year-old children; and the final eye-tracking dataset included 272 infants and 334 3-year-olds. We demonstrate that 1) neural and behavioral responses to facial expressions converge on an enhanced response to fearful and angry faces at 3 years of age, with no differentiation between or bias towards one or the other of these expressions, and 2) a support vector machine learning model using data on the early-stage neural responses to threat reliably predicts the duration of overt attentional dwell time for threat-related faces at 3 years. However, we found little within-subject correlation between threat-bias attention in infancy and at 3 years of age. These results provide unique evidence for the early development of a rapid, unified response to two distinct categories of facial expressions with different physical characteristics, but shared threat-related meaning.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Converging neural and behavioral evidence for a rapid, generalized response to threat-related facial expressions in 3-year-old children

2021

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“…Lastly, the acquisition model suggests that specific developmental experiences will cause normative attentional biases to increase over time. Our research team is currently collecting data to test these proposed models (Burris et al, 2019;in press).…”

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confidence: 99%

The centrality of temperament to the research domain criteria (RDoC): The earliest building blocks of psychopathology

et al. 2021

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The research domain criteria (RDoC) is an innovative approach designed to explore dimensions of human behavior. The aim of this approach is to move beyond the limits of psychiatric categories in the hope of aligning the identification of psychological health and dysfunction with clinical neuroscience. Despite its contributions to adult psychopathology research, RDoC undervalues ontogenetic development, which circumscribes our understanding of the etiologies, trajectories, and maintaining mechanisms of psychopathology risk. In this paper, we argue that integrating temperament research into the RDoC framework will advance our understanding of the mechanistic origins of psychopathology beginning in infancy. In illustrating this approach, we propose the incorporation of core principles of temperament theories into a new “life span considerations” subsection as one option for infusing development into the RDoC matrix. In doing so, researchers and clinicians may ultimately have the tools necessary to support emotional development and reduce a young child's likelihood of psychological dysfunction beginning in the first years of life.

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“…Indeed, less engagement, or slower looking, and difficulty disengaging from emotional stimuli—characteristic of infants of anxious mothers—associate with the development of anxiety in infants and children. Thus, emotional input from depressed or anxious caregivers could provide a foundation for the development of these same emotional problems in the infants themselves (see Burris et al, 2019 for a review). Further, physically maltreated boys who have a bias for angry faces are more aggressive than their same-aged peers, suggesting that a bias for anger in emotional facial configurations might translate into more externalizing behaviors over time, at least in boys (Shackman & Pollak, 2014).…”

Section: How Input Shapes Children's Emotion Perceptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How the Emotional Environment Shapes the Emotional Life of the Child

LoBue

Ogren

2021

Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences

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Emotion understanding facilitates the development of healthy social interactions. To develop emotion knowledge, infants and young children must learn to make inferences about people's dynamically changing facial and vocal expressions in the context of their everyday lives. Given that emotional information varies so widely, the emotional input that children receive might particularly shape their emotion understanding over time. This review explores how variation in children's received emotional input shapes their emotion understanding and their emotional behavior over the course of development. Variation in emotional input from caregivers shapes individual differences in infants’ emotion perception and understanding, as well as older children's emotional behavior. Finally, this work can inform policy and focus interventions designed to help infants and young children with social-emotional development.

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Biased Attention to Threat: Answering Old Questions With Young Infants

Cited by 14 publications

References 30 publications

Converging neural and behavioral evidence for a rapid, generalized response to threat-related facial expressions in 3-year-old children

Converging neural and behavioral evidence for a rapid, generalized response to threat-related facial expressions in 3-year-old children

The centrality of temperament to the research domain criteria (RDoC): The earliest building blocks of psychopathology

How the Emotional Environment Shapes the Emotional Life of the Child

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