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Updated: Jun 17, 2026

Measuring Attentional Biases for Threat in Children and Adults
Published on: October 19, 2014
Attentional bias towards angry faces in childhood anxiety disorders
Allison M Waters1, Julie Henry, Karin Mogg
1School of Psychology, Griffith University, Queensland, Australia. a.waters@griffith.edu.au
Objective:
To examine attentional bias towards angry and happy faces in 8-12 year old children with anxiety disorders (n=29) and non-anxious controls (n=24).
Method:
Children completed a visual-probe task in which pairs of angry/neutral and happy/neutral faces were displayed for 500ms and were replaced by a visual probe in the spatial location of one of the faces.
Results:
Children with more severe anxiety showed an attentional bias towards angry relative to neutral faces, compared with anxious children who had milder anxiety and non-anxious control children, both of whom did not show an attentional bias for angry faces. Unexpectedly, all groups showed an attentional bias towards happy faces relative to neutral ones.
Conclusions:
Anxiety symptom severity increases attention to threat stimuli in anxious children. This association may be due to differing threat appraisal processes or emotion regulation strategies.
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