Efficiency in Social and Nonsocial Threat Detection and Callous-Unemotional Traits

• In Event: Emotional Competence from Infancy to Late Childhood

Abstract

Humans show attentional biases to detect social (e.g., angry face among many neutral faces) and non-social (e.g., snake among many flowers) stimuli (LoBue et al., 2014). Visual threat detection paradigms typically use only a single array size to assess latency to select a threat target among distractors (i.e., one snake among eight flowers). Knowledge about attentional threat biases can be improved by comparing the extent to which varying array sizes affects reaction time between conditions (Frischen et al., 2008). The current study assessed children (N=43, age range = 7-10 years, Mage=8.69, SDage=1.07) and adults (N=51, age range = 18-23 years, Mage=19.52, SDage=1.20) who completed a visual search task that varied across several dimensions. Targets were either social (emotional face target among neutral face distractors) or non-social (animal among flowers). Participants saw targets that were threat-relevant (snakes, angry or fearful faces) or threat-irrelevant (frogs, happy faces). To compare the stability of search across array space (search “efficiency”), arrays included four, eight, or twelve images. Across children and adults, search efficiency was higher for threat-relevant versus threat-irrelevant stimuli (X2(2)=88.15, p<.001), replicating prior studies of attention bias to threat that only included single array sizes. Overall, search efficiency was better for nonsocial versus social stimuli (X2(2)=25.39, p<.001) and for adults versus children (X2(2)=7.40, p=.02). Additionally, there was an interaction between array size, social nature of stimuli, and threat (X2(2)=7.40, p=.02; Figure 1). Participants responded faster to threat-relevant images than threat-irrelevant images in the eight-array nonsocial condition, but not the four-array or 12-array conditions. However, there was a greater difference in efficiency between threat-relevant and threat-irrelevant stimuli in the nonsocial versus social condition. That is, children and adults were far more stable in responding to nonsocial threat-relevant images than nonsocial threat-irrelevant images, but they differentiated less for faces.

We also explored whether there were clinically-relevant individual differences in task responding. Children who are at risk for developing anxiety detect social threats, but not non-social threats, faster than typically developing children (LoBue & Perez-Edgar, 2014). In contrast, children with callous-emotional (CU) traits (i.e., lack of empathy, remorse, and prosociality), who are at high risk for antisocial behavior and aggression, show fearlessness and punishment insensitivity (Waller & Hyde, 2018). Deficits in noticing and responding to social threat are thought to contribute to the development of CU traits. However, no studies exist that have used the visual search paradigm to isolate these attentional deficits. We explored the relation between CU traits and threat detection of social and nonsocial stimuli using the visual search paradigm. Children higher in CU traits were marginally slower to detect threat-relevant (versus threat-irrelevant) social stimuli as compared to adults (X2(1)=3.55, p=.06; Figure 2). There was no relation between threat detection and CU traits across age groups for nonsocial stimuli (p=.16). Taken together, our results provide support for strong preattentional processing of nonsocial threats relative to social threats. At the same time, deficits in responding to social threats could be a developmental marker of risk for CU traits.

Authors

• Rista Plate, University of Pennsylvania
  Presenting Author

• Rebecca Waller, University of Pennsylvania
  Non-Presenting Author

• Nicholas James Wagner, Boston University
  Non-Presenting Author