Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
NEW RESEARCHAttentional Bias for Emotional Faces in Children With Generalized Anxiety Disorder
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.