There's that scary picture: Attention bias to threatening scenes in Williams syndrome

Common and distinct neural correlates of facial emotion processing in social anxiety disorder and Williams syndrome: A systematic review and voxel-based meta-analysis of functional resonance imaging studies

“…Specifically, individuals with WS are less able to detect social threat signals, as evidenced by difficulties in perceiving negative emotions through facial expressions and voices (Plesa-Skwerer, Faja, Schofield, Verbalis, & Tager-Flusberg, 2006) and in detecting angry faces (Santos, Silva, Rosset, & Deruelle, 2010). Indeed, they show a greater attention bias towards processing happy faces (Dodd & Porter, 2011), a tendency to perceive unfamiliar faces as more positive (Bellugi et al, 1999) and to rate happy facial expressions as more approachable (Frigerio et al, 2006). These findings contrast with those reported in SAD subjects who are typically hypervigilant to facial expressions, tend to judge neutral faces as negative , and rapidly avoid facial stimuli perceived as threatening (Machado-deSousa et al, 2010).…”

Attention Bias to Emotional Faces Varies by IQ and Anxiety in Williams Syndrome

“…Two previous studies have examined attention bias to threatening scenes and emotional faces in WS using the dot-probe paradigm (Dodd & Porter, 2010, 2011). Results showed attention bias to threatening scenes and happy faces, but not angry faces.…”

Anxiety and autonomic response to social-affective stimuli in individuals with Williams syndrome

“…Moreover, detailed data analyses reported by Järvinen and colleagues (2012) showed that those with WS commonly misidentified negative affective stimuli as positive, indicating that their relative strength in the perception of positive social stimuli may occur at the expense of reduced attention and sensitivity to negative affective stimuli. It is noteworthy, however, that individuals with WS show an opposing behavioural and neural pattern (i.e., hypervigilance) to threatening non-social stimuli (e.g., scenic pictures) (Dodd & Porter, 2011;Meyer-Lindenberg et al, 2005a).…”