Attentional Bias Towards Angry Faces in Childhood Anxiety Disorders

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.