NEW RESEARCH
Attentional Bias for Emotional Faces in Children With Generalized Anxiety Disorder

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ABSTRACT

Objective

To examine attentional bias for angry and happy faces in 7- to 12-year-old children with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD; n = 23) and nonanxious controls (n = 25).

Method

Children completed a visual probe task in which pairs of face stimuli were displayed for 500 milliseconds and were replaced by a visual probe in the spatial location of one of the faces.

Results

Severely anxious children with GAD showed an attentional bias toward both angry and happy faces. Children with GAD with a milder level of anxiety and nonanxious controls did not show an attentional bias toward emotional faces. Moreover, within the GAD group, attentional bias for angry faces was associated with increased anxiety severity and the presence of social phobia.

Conclusions

Biased attention toward threat as a function of increased severity in pediatric GAD may reflect differing threat appraisal processes or emotion regulation strategies.

Section snippets

Participants

Participants included 48 children ages 7 years, 0 months to 12 years, 9 months (27 males, 21 females): 23 anxious children (16 males, 7 females) and 25 nonanxious CONs (11 males, 14 females). Anxious children were recruited via advertisements distributed to local community agencies and primary schools. Nonanxious CON children were recruited from a local primary school. Ninety-eight percent of children were born in Australia, and 2% were born in South Africa. All of the children spoke English as

Group Characteristics

The groups differed significantly on a range of diagnostic and symptom measures (Table 1). HCA children had significantly higher ADIS-C/P CSRs for their principal GAD diagnosis in comparison with LCA children and any nonclinical CSRs of CON children (both p < .001). HCA children also had a significantly higher number of clinical diagnoses than LCA and CON children (both p < .001). HCA children had significantly higher SCAS-P GAD subscale scores than LCA and CON children (p < .001). LCA children

DISCUSSION

The present study found that highly anxious children with GAD showed an attentional bias toward emotional faces and that this bias did not significantly differ as a function of the type of emotional expression (i.e., angry versus happy). In contrast, children with GAD but who had a milder level of anxiety severity showed the opposite tendency to direct attention away from emotional faces, although their attentional bias was not significantly different from no bias. Similarly, nonanxious CON

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    Accepted August 19, 2007, under the Editorship of Mina K. Dulcan, M.D.

    This work was supported by a Griffith University research grant to Dr. Waters. The authors thank Trisha Wharton, Dean Vuksanovic, and Julie Henry for assistance with data collection.

    Disclosure: The authors report no conflicts of interest.

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