Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
ReviewSystematic Review and Meta-Analysis: Eye-Tracking of Attention to Threat in Child and Adolescent Anxiety
Section snippets
Eligibility Criteria
We included studies that met the following criteria: (1) Because of practical considerations relating to translation, and because the majority of biomedical literature is published in English-language journals,25 with no clear systematic bias of such language restriction in trials reported in conventional medicine,26 the study had to be available in English. (2) The study must be an original investigation. (3) The study must investigate human participants ≤18 years of age. (4) The study must
Search Results
Figure 1 illustrates the literature search and study selection process. Initial searches identified 3,871 studies. After removing duplicates, this was reduced to 1,818 studies. After excluding by abstract, this number was reduced to 29 studies. Full-text screening resulted in exclusion of 16 more studies, resulting in 13 eligible studies.
Study Characteristics
Study characteristics are displayed in Table 1.36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48 The entire data set was scanned for outliers; these were
Discussion
This first meta-analysis of eye-tracking measures of attention bias in child and adolescent anxiety included data from 798 participants aged 3 to 18 years across 13 studies. A significantly greater tendency to direct first fixations on threatening over neutral stimuli did not characterize or differentiate anxious and nonanxious children or adolescents. Instead, anxious youths showed a greater tendency to avoid maintaining their gaze on threat compared to nonanxious youths, a difference that
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Mr. Lisk is supported by a UK Medical Research Council studentship (MR/K50130X/1) and the European Commission FP7 Braintrain grant (602186). Dr. Lau has received funding from the UK Medical Research Council (MR/N006194/1).
This article is part of a special series devoted to the subject of anxiety and OCD. The series covers current topics in anxiety and OCD, including epidemiology, translational neuroscience, and clinical care. The series was edited by Guest Editor Daniel A. Geller, MBBS, FRACP.
Disclosure: Dr. Bar-Haim has active competitive grants from the U.S. Department of Defense, the US-Israel Binational Science Foundation, the Israel Science Foundation, and JOY Ventures. Dr. Lau has active competitive grants from the British Academy and Mental Health Research UK. Mr. Lisk, Ms. Vaswani, and Ms. Linetzky have reported no biomedical financial interests or potential conflicts of interest.