Variability in caregiver attention bias to threat: A Goldilocks effect in infant emotional development?

Abstract

Attention biases to threat are considered part of the etiology of anxiety disorders. Attention bias variability (ABV) quantifies intraindividual fluctuations in attention biases and may better capture the relation between attention biases and psychopathology risk versus mean levels of attention bias. ABV to threat has been associated with attentional control and emotion regulation, which may impact how caregivers interact with their child. In a relatively diverse sample of infants (50% White, 50.7% female), we asked how caregiver ABV to threat related to trajectories of infant negative affect across the first 2 years of life. Families were part of a multi-site longitudinal study, and data were collected from 4 to 24 months of age. Multilevel modeling examined the effect of average caregiver attention biases on changes in negative affect. We found a significant interaction between infant age and caregiver ABV to threat. Probing this interaction revealed that infants of caregivers with high ABV showed decreases in negative affect over time, while infants of caregivers with low-to-average ABV showed potentiated increases in negative affect. We discuss how both high and extreme patterns of ABV may relate to deviations in developmental trajectories.

External and internal attention processes in the early integration of cognition and emotion: Risk and protective factors for anxiety in the context of behavioral inhibition.

“…One approach to remedy these limitations has been to use measures that are more proximal to attention processes than motorically driven button presses. This includes event-related potentials (Kappenman et al, 2014;Thai et al, 2016), functional magnetic resonance imaging (Fu et al, 2017;Price et al, 2015), and stationary eye tracking (Gunther et al, 2023;Waechter et al, 2014). Overall, these studies are more robust and indicate that there are individual differences in attention within anxiety and these differences vary across multiple levels of analysis, based on timescale and functional system.…”

Two-Hit Model of Behavioral Inhibition and Anxiety

“…This information may then be utilized to determine whether it is appropriate to explore for new knowledge or exploit previously successful behavioral repertoires (Pérez-Edgar 2018). At the extreme, caregiver distress, particularly if variable over time (Gunther et al 2022, Vallorani et al 2023, may convey unpredictable conditions, signals that the perceptive infant takes in as evidence for an environment signaling caution.…”