Fear modulates parental orienting during childhood and adolescence

Adults quickly orient toward sources of danger and deploy fight-or-flight tactics to manage threatening situations. In contrast, infants who cannot implement the safety strategies available to adults and depend heavily on caregivers for survival are more likely to turn toward familiar adults, such as their parents, to help them navigate threatening circumstances. However, work has yet to investigate how readily children and adolescents orient toward their parents in threatening or fearful contexts. The current work addressed this question using a visual search paradigm that included arrays of parents' and strangers' faces as target and distractor stimuli, preceded by a fear or neutral emotional priming procedure. Linear mixed-effects models showed that children and adolescents (N = 88, age range = 4-17 years; 42M/46F) were faster to search for the face of their parent than of a stranger. However, fear priming attenuated this effect of the parent on search times, such that children and adolescents were significantly slower to orient toward their parent in an array of strangers' faces if they were first primed with fear as opposed to a neutral video. This work indicates that fear priming may phasically interfere with parental orienting during childhood and adolescence, possibly because fear reallocates attention away from parents and toward (potentially threatening) unfamiliar people in the environment to facilitate the development of independent threat learning and coping systems.