Abnormal emotional processing in maltreated children diagnosed of Complex Posttraumatic Stress Disorder

Maltreated children usually show a specific pattern of emotional and behavioral symptoms that exceed those relating to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). These symptoms have been defined as Complex PTSD (CPTSD). The underlying attentional mechanisms of abnormal emotional processing and their relation to the clinical presentation of CPTSD are not well understood. A visual dot-probe paradigm involving pre-attentive (i.e., 500 ms) and attentive (i.e., 1500 ms) presentation rates of neutral versus emotional (i.e., angry, happy or sad) facial expressions was applied. Twenty-one maltreated CPTSD children were compared with twenty-six controls. The results are as follows: an attention bias away from threatening faces and an attentional bias towards sad faces were observed in maltreated CPTSD children during pre-attentive and attentive processing. Whereas the attentional bias away from angry faces was associated with social problems, the attentional bias towards sad faces was associated with depressive and withdrawn symptoms. Therefore, CPTSD children develop maladaptive negative cognitive styles, which may underlie not only social problems (by a cognitive avoidance of threatening stimuli) but also depressive symptoms (by a cognitive approach to sad stimuli). Attention processing abnormalities should be considered as therapeutic targets for new treatment approaches in this population.     

焦虑个体注意偏向研究回顾

焦虑是人面临自由选择时存在的心理体验。焦虑症患者或高特质焦虑者在加工信息过程中,对所加工的刺激不是同等程度地分配注意,而是根据刺激的特点进行不同程度的加工,对与威胁相关的刺激产生注意偏向,也就是优先加工威胁性刺激,对威胁性刺激加工效率高。以往对焦虑者注意偏向的研究采用的主要研究范式有:点探测范式和线索-靶子范式。研究的主要被试有:焦虑病人、社交恐惧障碍者和焦虑状态的正常人。选择的实验材料主要是:携带威胁信息的词汇和图片,其中图片主要是带有不同情绪的面孔图片,并以生气的、愤怒的为主。未来的研究应该关注焦虑者注意偏向的形成机制及生理机制。     

Developmental Relations Among Behavioral Inhibition,Anxiety, and Attention Biases to Threat and Positive Information

This study examined relations between behavioral inhibition (BI) assessed in toddlerhood (n = 268) and attention biases (AB) to threat and positive faces and maternal‐reported anxiety assessed when children were 5‐ and 7‐year‐old. Results revealed that BI predicted anxiety at age 7 in children with AB toward threat, away from positive, or with no bias, at age 7; BI did not predict anxiety for children displaying AB away from threat or toward positive. Five‐year AB did not moderate the link between BI and 7‐year anxiety. No direct association between AB and BI or anxiety was detected; moreover, children did not show stable AB across development. These findings extend our understanding of the developmental links among BI, AB, and anxiety.     

Attention biases and social-emotional development in preschool-aged children who have been exposed to domestic violence

BackgroundSchool-aged children and adolescents exposed to domestic violence (DV) disproportionality attend to threatening and sad cues in their environment. This bias in attention has been found to predict elevations in symptoms of psychopathology. Studies have yet to explore attention biases using eyetracking technology in preschool-aged children with DV exposure.ObjectiveThis study investigated whether preschool-aged children exposed to DV show vigilance to angry and sad faces versus happy faces and a target non-face stimulus relative to non-exposed children, and whether such vigilance relates to child social-emotional development.Participants and settingPreschool-aged children were recruited from a large, diverse, urban community. DV-exposed children were recruited from a dyadic, mother-child treatment group specifically designed for, and restricted to, mothers who have experienced domestic violence (DV-exposed group, n = 23). Children with no prior exposure to DV and their mothers were recruited within the same community (non-exposed group, n = 32).MethodsChildren completed an eye-tracking task to assess their attention to face stimuli and mothers rated their children's social-emotional development. Total duration of fixations were analyzed.ResultsResults showed that DV-exposed children have a significantly stronger attention bias away from sad faces (p = 0.03; d = 0.62) and neutral faces (p = 0.02; d = 0.70) relative to non-exposed children, and this attention bias away from sad and neutral faces is associated with child social-emotional problems. Contrary to our hypothesis, no bias towards anger was found for DV-exposed versus non-exposed children.ConclusionsThis study contributes to growing evidence that young children's negative attention biases influence functioning and have important implications for children's well-being and development.     

强迫症患者注意偏向研究方法述评

在简要回顾有关强迫症个体注意偏向的研究的基础上,较为系统地比较、阐述了强迫症注意偏向研究中的主要研究范式（强迫症Stroop任务、点探测任务、空间线索任务）.最后,通过对前人研究的分析总结,对强迫症注意偏向未来研究的取向和趋势进行了展望.     

Visual Attention Movements: A Developmental Study

The pattern of attention movements underlying reorientation of visual selective attention independent of eye movements was studied developmentally in 2 experiments. In Experiment 1, 8-year-old, 11-year-old, and college-age subjects first oriented their attention to a central location and were then cued to direct their attention either to the left or the right peripheral field. Following variable intervals, the target appeared at the cued location and reaction times were recorded. The data were interpretable in terms of the attentional spotlight theory since there was an interaction between distance of the target from fixation and SOA. In terms of this theory, the data indicate that the velocity of attention movements increases throughout the age range studied. Experiment 2, in contradiction to attentional spotlight theory, failed to find evidence of an interaction between distance and SOA. This experiment suggested that young children can covertly orient their attention by including valid, neutral, and invalid cues, and that these cues can both facilitate and inhibit attentional orientation. This experiment also extended the findings to central as well as peripheral cues.     

The Improvement of Mothers’ and Children’s Emotional and Behavioral Reactions through the Modification of Attentional Bias in Mothers: A Micro-Trial Study

Objective. The aim of this study was to test whether and to what extent inducing attentional bias in mothers toward a child’s positive emotions using a micro-trial method would improve mothers’ emotional and behavioral reactions in parenting-related situations. Effects on children were also assessed. Design. Forty-two mothers of 4- to 5-year-old children participated. Half of the mothers were exposed to an attention bias modification task designed to elicit a transient bias toward positive stimuli. After the manipulation, they were observed during a free-play session and frustration laboratory tasks designed to elicit positive and negative emotions. Results. Mothers exposed to the attention bias modification task displayed more positive emotional and behavioral reactions toward their child during both free-play and frustration tasks. Their children also behaved better, especially during the free-play session. The influence of mothers’ attention allocation on children’s outcomes was mediated by mothers’ behavior. Conclusions. An attention bias modification program is useful in improving interactions between mothers and children.     

Impaired visual attention in children with dyslexia

Reading involves the correct and rapid identification of visual stimuli with letters and words. The processing of visual stimuli depends not only on the integrity of the peripheral and central visual system but also on the attentional systems involved. In the present study, a cue-target visual attention task was administered to a population-based sample of 25 children with dyslexia from 10 to 12 years of age. A control group matched for group size, age, and gender was obtained from the same general population. A two-stage screening process involved a spelling task of regular words followed by a battery of five single-word reading tasks. The cue-target task involved both a computer-controlled stimulus presentation and a computer-controlled measurement of reaction time. The data were analyzed by visual field, cue condition (valid, invalid, and no cue), and cue-target interval (CTI). The results showed a general pattern of slower responses in the dyslexia group compared to the control group. The dyslexia group also had longer reaction times in the short CTI condition (covert shift of attention) and in the long CTI condition (overt shift of attention). The findings may reflect a general attentional deficit to visual stimuli in dyslexia, possibly related to problems with the recruitment of necessary cognitive resources for the performance of complex reaction time tasks and for fluent reading.     

The boundaries of attention deficit disorder

This report examines distinctions and interrelationships among attention deficit disorder (ADD) and two closely related conditions: learning disability (LD) and oppositional/conduct (O/C) disorder. To evaluate our hypothesis that some of the difficulty in resolving the relationship between ADD and, particularly, O/C may reflect the consequences of selective referral patterns, we studied groups of children diagnosed as ADD from different referral sources. Results suggest that referral bias does exist and that children referred to mental health settings differ from those referred to pediatricians, child neurologists, or psychologists. Because of the nature of the subjects referred to mental health services, nonrepresentative associations may emerge. Rather than being considered as prototypical of all children with attention disorder, children referred to mental health facilities may represent simply an extreme of the continuum of ADD. Evidence suggests that many children with ADD will be represented by those referred primarily for attentional deficits and learning problems, rather than those with inattention, hyperactivity, or aggression referred for child psychiatric evaluation.     

The Moving Window Technique: A Window Into Developmental Changes in Attention During Facial Emotion Recognition

The strategies children employ to selectively attend to different parts of the face may reflect important developmental changes in facial emotion recognition. Using the Moving Window Technique (MWT), children aged 5–12 years and adults (N = 129) explored faces with a mouse‐controlled window in an emotion recognition task. An age‐related increase in attention to the left eye emerged at age 11–12 years and reached significance in adulthood. This left‐eye bias is consistent with previous eye tracking research and findings of a perceptual bias for the left side of faces. These results suggest that a strategic attentional bias to the left eye begins to emerge at age 11–12 years and is likely established sometime in adolescence.     

Orienting Attention Within Visual Short‐Term Memory: Development and Mechanisms

How does developing attentional control operate within visual short‐term memory (VSTM)? Seven‐year‐olds, 11‐year‐olds, and adults (total n = 205) were asked to report whether probe items were part of preceding visual arrays. In Experiment 1, central or peripheral cues oriented attention to the location of to‐be‐probed items either prior to encoding or during maintenance. Cues improved memory regardless of their position, but younger children benefited less from cues presented during maintenance, and these benefits related to VSTM span over and above basic memory in uncued trials. In Experiment 2, cues of low validity eliminated benefits, suggesting that even the youngest children use cues voluntarily, rather than automatically. These findings elucidate the close coupling between developing visuospatial attentional control and VSTM.     

Extended Visual Fixation in Young Infants: Look Distributions, Heart Rate Changes, and Attention

Visual fixation in in ants from 3 to 6 months of age was examined for its fit to the theory of "attentional inertia." This theory posits that during the progression of a look there is increasing attention toward the stimulus and an "inertia" to continue looking. An extended audiovisual stimulus was presented for 20 min to infants while fixation was videotaped and heart rate (HR) was recorded. Consistent with the attentional inertia theory, look duration toward the stimulus had a lognormal distribution. Hazard functions describing these distributions showed a decreasing conditional probability of looking away with increases in look duration. Look onset and stimulus changes that occurred within a look were accompanied by HR deceleration. The average HR level continued to decrease over the duration of a look and returned to prestimuls level immediately look and returned to prestimulus level immediately prior to the fixation offset. Infant fixation has characteristics similar to fixation in children and adults, and attention appears to increase over to the course of a look in young infants.     

An ERP study of emotional face processing in the adult and infant brain

To examine the ontogeny of emotional face processing, event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from adults and 7-month-old infants while viewing pictures of fearful, happy, and neutral faces. Face-sensitive ERPs at occipital-temporal scalp regions differentiated between fearful and neutral/happy faces in both adults (N170 was larger for fear) and infants (P400 was larger for fear). Behavioral measures showed no overt attentional bias toward fearful faces in adults, but in infants, the duration of the first fixation was longer for fearful than happy faces. Together, these results suggest that the neural systems underlying the differential processing of fearful and happy/neutral faces are functional early in life, and that affective factors may play an important role in modulating infants' face processing.     

Infants' Selective Attention to Reliable Visual Cues in the Presence of Salient Distractors

With many features competing for attention in their visual environment, infants must learn to deploy attention toward informative cues while ignoring distractions. Three eye tracking experiments were conducted to investigate whether 6‐ and 8‐month‐olds (total N = 102) would shift attention away from a distractor stimulus to learn a cue–reward relation. While 8‐month‐olds showed evidence of increasingly selective attention toward the predictive cues, even when the distractors were highly salient, 6‐month‐olds shifted attention toward the predictive cues only when the distractors were equally (not more) engaging. These experiments suggest that attention in infancy is highly dependent on the relative weightings of predictiveness and visual salience, which may differ across development and context.     

Implicit attitudes toward children may be unrelated to child abuse risk

Objective

To explore whether adults possess implicit attitudes toward children and whether those attitudes are especially negative among respondents who are high in child physical abuse (CPA) risk.

Methods

The present study used an implicit evaluative priming procedure. In this procedure, participants were instructed to make decisions about the evaluative implications of target words. These words were preceded by photographs of child faces or adult faces displaying positive, neutral, or negative expressions. Reaction times for the evaluative decisions were used as an index of the extent to which photos invoked negative or positive evaluative reactions.

Results

Results from 2 studies, the first conducted on a student sample (N = 90) and the second on a parent sample (N = 95), demonstrated that evaluative congruence between the facial expressions displayed in photographs and the target words facilitated responses. Furthermore, the results suggested that regardless of CPA risk, child faces, relative to adult faces, facilitated responses to negative target words, suggesting an out-group bias. This implicit out-group bias was not moderated by respondents’ CPA risk status.

Conclusions

Faces of children, relative to faces of adults, appear to activate negative information structures that facilitate evaluative decisions of negative stimuli, suggesting an out-group bias. Given that out-group biases typically lead to less favorable treatment of out-group members, additional research is needed to examine the pervasiveness of negative evaluative biases towards children and the potential implications of such biases on children's lives. Further, research examining whether high CPA risk parents and low CPA risk parents differ in how they manage initial negative evaluative reactions is needed.     

Children with autism illuminate the role of social intention in word learning

To what extent do children with autism (AD) versus typically developing children (TD) rely on attentional and intentional cues to learn words? Four experiments compared 17 AD children (M age=5.08 years) with 17 language- and 17 mental-age-matched TD children (M ages=2.57 and 3.12 years, respectively) on nonverbal enactment and word-learning tasks. Results revealed variability in all groups, but particularly within the AD group. Performance on intention tasks was the most powerful predictor of vocabulary in the AD group but not in the TD groups. These findings suggest that word learning cannot be explained exclusively by either attentional or intentional processes, and they provide evidence of a special role for intentional understanding in the vocabulary development of AD children.     

儿童情绪调节的ERP标识器

情绪调节的神经科学研究表明,情绪与认知之间的相互作用是适应性情绪调节能力发展的基础。儿童情绪调节发展的两个重要的候选神经标识器类型,分别标识了情绪需求条件下的注意控制和消极情绪的注意加工。现有事件相关电位研究表明,N2、Nc、误差相关负波、晚正电位这些反映情绪、认知整合的ERPs成分可作为儿童和成人情绪调节的临床指标,并且有可能起到情绪调节神经标识器和预测特定情感障碍风险的作用。在探究情绪调节和情感心理病理学神经标识器的未来研究中,应充分重视情绪对认知的作用,改善研究方法并关注个体差异。     

Hostile attributional biases among aggressive boys are exacerbated under conditions of threats to the self

Previous studies have found a tendency for aggressive boys to display hostile attributional biases and social cue interpretation deficits. It was hypothesized that these biases and deficits would be exaggerated under conditions of social anxiety and threat. Aggressive and nonaggressive boys aged 8 - 10 (total N = 65) were administered tests of attributional tendencies and social cue interpretation skills (via videorecorded stimuli) under relaxed and threatening conditions. It was found that, relative to normal boys, aggressive boys displayed a bias toward attributing hostile intentions to peers, a deficit in interpreting accurately others' intentions, and a deficit in linking interpretations to behavioral responses. The hypothesis that these biases and deficits would be exaggerated under conditions of threat was also supported. Findings were interpreted as consistent with theories of preemptive processing and emotional vulnerability in aggressive boys.     

National survey of problems and competencies among four- to sixteen-year-olds: parents' reports for normative and clinical samples.

We compared parent-reported problems and competencies for national samples of 2,600 4-16-year-olds assessed at intake into mental health services and 2,600 demographically matched nonreferred children assessed in a home interview survey. Parents responded to the ACQ Behavior Checklist, which includes 23 competence items, three competence scales, 216 problem items, eight syndrome scales, Internalizing, Externalizing, and total competence and problem scores. Most items and scales discriminated significantly (p less than .01) between referred and nonreferred samples. There were important sex and age differences in problem patterns, but regional and ethnic differences were minimal. Somewhat more problems and fewer competencies were reported for lower- than upper-socioeconomic-status children. Referral rates were similar in the most urban and rural areas, but they were significantly higher in areas of intermediate urbanization. Correlations of problem scores with those obtained 10 years earlier in a regional survey and with surveys in other countries showed considerable consistency in the rank order of prevalence rates among specific problems. Apparently owing to its more differentiated response scales, the ACQ was susceptible to respondent characteristics that reduced its discriminative power below that of the Child Behavior Checklist. Comparisons of procedures for discriminating between the normal and the clinical range supported the value of a borderline category for children who are neither clearly normal nor clearly deviant. Interview data from the survey sample yielded significantly higher ACQ problem scores for children who had fewer related adults in their homes, those who had more unrelated adults in their homes, those whose biological parents were unmarried, separated, or divorced, those whose families received public assistance, and those whose household or family members had received mental health services. Children who scored higher on Externalizing than Internalizing problems tended to have unmarried, separated, or divorced parents and to come from families receiving public assistance. However, among children whose household or family members had received mental health services, there were greater proportions of both Externalizing and Internalizing patterns than among other children.     

时间语义加工中内隐空间图式的激活机制

本研究采用实验方法考察时间语义理解中内隐空间图式的激活,借此探讨感知运动经验在抽象语义加工中的作用.实验发现,时间语义加工会激活左右空间编码,引起注意力向时空隐喻映射一致的方向转移(左/早,右/晚).过去时间引起注意力向左转移,促进左侧目标的识别,未来时间引起注意力向右转移,促进左侧目标的识别.实验表明,时间语义加工会...