Attentional bias toward threat: Variations by stimulus types and implications for socioemotional functioning

• In Event: Processes contributing to impaired regulatory responses after childhood trauma

Abstract

Extant research on children’s attentional bias to threatening stimuli has generated diverse hypotheses regarding its role in developmental psychopathology. On one hand, attentiveness toward threatening stimuli has important implications for survival and evolutionary adaptivity, and research has documented that both children and adults identify threatening stimuli more rapidly than non-threatening stimuli (LoBue & DeLoache, 2010). Less literature has examined attentional bias in clinical populations, but attentional bias toward threatening stimuli – and in particular, threatening faces – has been associated with both anxiety and posttraumatic stress symptoms in children (LoBue & Pérez-Edgar, 2014; Swartz et al., 2011). Despite evidence that threat attentiveness has been associated with maladaptive adjustment in young children (Miller, 2015), other research has suggested that attentional avoidance of threatening stimuli might be more characteristic in children exposed to violence and trauma (Pine et al., 2005), perhaps as a way of modulating their acute responses to real-life threats (Bar-Haim, 2010). Very few studies, however, have examined associations between violence exposure, attentional bias to threat and children’s socioemotional functioning. Given the complex and contradictory findings identified in bivariate associations of these variable across samples, the integration of these constructs addresses an important gap. The current study examined the association between attentional bias toward threat in a sample of N=37 children ages 3-14 (M=6.44, SD=3.18), 37.8% of whom were living in home with recent intimate partner violence (IPV). Children’s mothers reported the frequency and severity of IPV in the past year as well as children’s emotion regulation and prosocial skills. Children completed a standardized, computerized task designed to assess threat detection (LoBue & DeLoache, 2010). The task was implemented in two conditions (4-trials per child), with angry/happy faces drawn from NIM-STIM and with frogs/snakes, with both the order of conditions (i.e., animal vs. face) and order of target/distractor stimuli randomly counterbalanced. See Figures 1 & 2 for sample stimuli. Results indicated that controlling for child age and sex, greater avoidance of threatening faces was associated with better emotion regulation and prosocial skills in IPV-exposed children (β=.12, p=.024; β=.19, p<.001), but attentional avoidance of threatening faces was not associated with emotion regulation or prosocial skills for children not exposed to IPV (Figure 1). In contrast, attentiveness to threatening animal stimuli was associated with poorer emotion regulation and prosocial skills in IPV-exposed children (β=-.11, p=.001; β=-.14, p<.001) and with poorer prosocial skills for non-exposed children (β=-.21, p=.045; Figure 2). These findings suggest attentional bias and avoidance may be relevant factors associated with children’s socioemotional functioning, but more so for children with a history of exposure to threat in the familial context. Further, the relative adaptive versus maladaptive function of attentional bias toward threat may vary across stimuli, suggesting meaningful developmental implications of interpersonal versus non-interpersonal patterns of threat detection.

Authors

• Laura Miller-Graff, University of Notre Dame
  Presenting Author

• Caroline R Scheid, University of Notre Dame
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jessica R. Carney, University of Notre Dame
  Non-Presenting Author