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ERIC Number: EJ1161878
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2017-Dec
Pages: 14
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0012-1649
EISSN: N/A
The Impact of Negative Affect on Attention Patterns to Threat across the First 2 Years of Life
Pérez-Edgar, Koraly; Morales, Santiago; LoBue, Vanessa; Taber-Thomas, Bradley C.; Allen, Elizabeth K.; Brown, Kayla M.; Buss, Kristin A.
Developmental Psychology, v53 n12 p2219-2232 Dec 2017
The current study examined the relations between individual differences in attention to emotion faces and temperamental negative affect across the first 2 years of life. Infant studies have noted a normative pattern of preferential attention to salient cues, particularly angry faces. A parallel literature suggests that elevated attention bias to threat is associated with anxiety, particularly if coupled with temperamental risk. Examining the emerging relations between attention to threat and temperamental negative affect may help distinguish normative from at-risk patterns of attention. Infants (N = 145) ages 4 to 24 months (M = 12.93 months, SD = 5.57) completed an eye-tracking task modeled on the attention bias "dot-probe" task used with older children and adults. With age, infants spent greater time attending to emotion faces, particularly threat faces. All infants displayed slower latencies to fixate to incongruent versus congruent probes. Neither relation was moderated by temperament. Trial-by-trial analyses found that dwell time to the face was associated with latency to orient to subsequent probes, moderated by the infant's age and temperament. In young infants low in negative affect longer processing of angry faces was associated with faster subsequent fixation to probes; young infants high in negative affect displayed the opposite pattern at trend. Findings suggest that although age was directly associated with an emerging bias to threat, the "impact" of processing threat on subsequent orienting was associated with age and temperament. Early patterns of attention may shape how children respond to their environments, potentially via attention's gate-keeping role in framing a child's social world for processing.
American Psychological Association. Journals Department, 750 First Street NE, Washington, DC 20002. Tel: 800-374-2721; Tel: 202-336-5510; Fax: 202-336-5502; e-mail: order@apa.org; Web site: http://www.apa.org
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Assessments and Surveys: Rothbart Infant Behavior Questionnaire
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A