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Measuring Attentional Biases for Threat in Children and Adults
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Measuring Attentional Biases for Threat in Children and Adults

Published on: October 19, 2014

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Early development of attention to threat-related facial expressions

Jukka M Leppänen1, Julia K Cataldo2, Michelle Bosquet Enlow3

  • 1Infant Cognition Laboratory, Center for Child Health Research, Faculty of Medicine and Life Sciences, University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland.

Plos One
|May 17, 2018
PubMed

Insights

Infants show early attention to faces, developing a specific bias for fearful faces by 7 months. This fear bias in visual attention is not linked to maternal anxiety or depression symptoms in early development.

Area of Science:

  • Developmental Psychology
  • Cognitive Neuroscience
  • Infant Perception

Background:

  • Infants exhibit an innate preference for faces over non-face stimuli.
  • By 5 months, infants show increased attention towards fearful facial expressions.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the developmental trajectory of the "fear bias" in visual attention from infancy to early childhood.
  • To examine the association between this fear bias and maternal anxiety and depression symptoms.

Main Methods:

  • Assessed attention dwell times in 5-, 7-, and 12-month-old infants and 36-month-old children using gaze shift latency.
  • Measured maternal self-reported anxiety and depression symptoms.

Main Results:

  • Infants showed shorter dwell times for non-face stimuli compared to happy faces across all ages.
  • At 7 and 12 months, infants had shorter dwell times for happy faces compared to fearful faces.
  • At 36 months, children showed shorter dwell times for non-faces and happy faces compared to fearful and angry faces.
  • No significant association was found between attention dwell times and maternal depression or anxiety symptoms.

Conclusions:

  • Sensitivity to fearful faces emerges before a generalized bias for threat-related stimuli in early development.
  • Moderate variations in maternal anxiety and depression symptoms do not appear to influence the initial development of these visual attention biases.

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