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Updated: Jun 4, 2026
Measuring Attentional Biases for Threat in Children and Adults
Published on: October 19, 2014
Enhanced cardiac and attentional responding to fearful faces in 7-month-old infants
Mikko J Peltola1, Jukka M Leppänen, Jari K Hietanen
1Department of Psychology, University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland. mikko.peltola@uta.fi
Insights
Infants show an attentional bias towards fearful faces, accompanied by a stronger cardiac orienting response (heart rate deceleration). This suggests early development of emotional attention processing in infants.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Cardiovascular Psychophysiology
Background:
- Orienting to emotional stimuli involves heart rate deceleration, indicating enhanced processing.
- This phenomenon's presence in infants is not well-established.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate if infants exhibit emotional modulation of cardiac responses.
- To determine if infants show an attentional bias towards fearful stimuli.
Main Methods:
- Recorded heart rate (HR) and eye movements in 7-month-old infants.
- Infants viewed fearful and happy faces, followed by peripheral distractors.
- Measured saccades to distractors and HR deceleration during face presentation.
Main Results:
- Infants showed an attentional bias for fearful faces, with fewer and later saccades to distractors.
- Larger HR deceleration occurred during fearful trials without distractor saccades.
- No HR difference was observed between fearful and happy faces when distractors were attended.
Conclusions:
- The attentional bias for fearful faces in infants is linked to an increased cardiac orienting response.
- This suggests that infants preferentially process negative emotional stimuli.
- Findings support the early emergence of emotion-modulated attention mechanisms.
Abstract:
Orienting of attention to emotionally negative stimuli is accompanied by rapid heart rate (HR) deceleration, reflecting enhanced attentional and sensory processing. We studied whether similar emotional modulation of cardiac responding is observed in infants. HR and eye movements were recorded from 7-month-old infants while they observed a fearful or happy face that was flanked after 700 ms by a peripheral distractor for 2000 ms. An attentional bias for fearful faces was indicated by less frequent and longer latency saccades toward the distractors during fearful than happy trials. HR deceleration was significantly larger during fearful than happy trials on which infants did not make a distractor-directed saccade. For trials with a distractor-directed saccade, no difference between fearful and happy faces emerged. Thus, the bias to attend preferentially to fearful faces is accompanied by a concomitant increase in the cardiac orienting response.
