Patterns of Attention to Threat linked with Negative Reactivity in Infancy

描述(由申请人提供)：成人和儿童的临床文献表明，临床焦虑或有高度特质焦虑的个体表现出注意力偏向和威胁。此外，当这些注意力偏向在实验室中被实验操纵时，研究人员可以加剧或改善焦虑的思想和行为水平。这导致研究人员争辩说，对威胁的注意力偏差可能会导致焦虑。然而，威胁相关的注意偏差在多大程度上代表了持续焦虑的下游结果，或者是与发展成焦虑症的风险有关的早期诱因，目前尚不清楚。这些研究强调了注意操纵的有效性，对注意和情感之间的关系采取了机械性的观点。这些研究是对注意力可能在焦虑的出现中起因果作用这一假设的重要和有用的概念证明。然而，他们无法解释这些信息加工偏向实际上是如何在童年过程中发展起来的。婴儿研究表明，在生命的第一年，人们普遍倾向于寻找与威胁相关的刺激，但并没有捕捉到个体差异或注意力的特定亚成分的重要性。在一些儿童中，影响偏向的注意，即优先注意情感刺激的倾向，可能会对最初的注意过滤器进行调整，以寻找和识别威胁，从而偏向随后的注意 信息加工和行为设定，是情绪调节的基本形式。我们知道焦虑的成年人和儿童表现出对威胁的注意偏差，早期的气质与更高的负面情绪和焦虑水平有关，而且早在撒谎的第一年就明显地表现出对威胁的优先关注的标准模式。然而，我们对这些相互关系如何出现和随时间的变化知之甚少，因为大部分注意-影响文献(1)集中在成人临床定义的人群上，(2)没有系统地评估多个任务和背景下的两种结构，(3)很少采取发展的观点来检查核心机制在婴儿时期出现的情况，并区分标准模式和与特定风险因素相关的模式。目前的研究建议改进和验证三项眼球跟踪任务，这些任务可以捕捉到生命头两年的注意力核心成分。此外，我们将实施丰富的气质负面情绪评估，这与后来出现的焦虑和社交退缩有关。这一系列研究反映了研究领域标准的重点，即通过检查对潜在威胁的反应(负价系统)、注意力模式(认知系统)和跨不同社会-情绪环境的早期影响模式(负价系统和社会过程)来整合机制。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The adult and child clinical literature suggests that individuals who are clinically anxious or have high levels of trait anxiety show attention biases t threat. In addition, when these attention biases are experimentally manipulated in the lab, researchers can exacerbate or ameliorate levels of anxious thought and behavior. This has led researchers to argue that attention biases to threat may cause anxiety. However, the degree to which threat-related attention bias represents a down-stream result of ongoing anxiety or an early-emerging predisposing factor implicated in the risk for the development of anxiety disorders remains unclear. The studies highlighting the effectiveness of attention manipulation take a mechanistic view of the relation between attention and affect. These studies are important and useful proof of concept for the assumption that attention may play a causal role in the emergence of anxiety. However, they cannot elucidate how these information processing biases actually develop over the course of childhood. Infant studies suggest that a general preference for looking to threat-relevant stimuli is evident in the first year of life, but have no captured the importance of individual differences or specific subcomponents of attention. In some children, affect biased attention, the predisposition to preferentially attend to affective stimuli, may "tune" initial attentional filters to seek out and identify threat, biasing subsequent information processing and behavioral enactment and serving as a foundational form of emotion regulation. We know that anxious adults and children show attention biases to threat, that early temperament is associated with elevated levels of negative affect and anxiety, and that normative patterns of preferential attention to threat are evident as early as the first year of lie. However, we know little concerning how these inter-relations appear and change over time since much of the attention-affect literature (1) has focused on adult clinically-defined populations, (2) does not systematically assess both constructs across multiple tasks and contexts, and (3) rarely takes a developmental view that examines core mechanisms as they emerge in infancy and differentiate between normative patterns and patterns associated with specific risk factors. The current study proposes to refine and validate three eye- tracking tasks that capture core components of attention in the first two years of life. In addition, we will implement a rich assessment of temperamental negative affect, which is associated with the later emergence of anxiety and social withdrawal. This line of research reflects the focus in the Research Domain Criteria on integrating mechanisms by examining response to potential threat (negative valence systems), attention patterns (cognitive systems) and early patterns of affect across varying socio-emotional contexts (negative valence systems and social processes).