Patterns of Attention to Threat linked with Negative Reactivity in Infancy

描述（由申请人提供）：成人和儿童临床文献表明，临床焦虑或具有高水平特质焦虑的个体表现出对威胁的注意力偏差。此外，当这些注意力偏差在实验室中进行实验操作时，研究人员可以加剧或改善焦虑的思想和行为水平。这导致研究人员认为，对威胁的注意力偏见可能会导致焦虑。然而，与威胁相关的注意力偏差在多大程度上代表了持续焦虑的下游结果，或者是与焦虑症发展风险有关的早期出现的诱发因素，目前尚不清楚。强调注意操纵有效性的研究从机制的角度看待注意和情感之间的关系。这些研究是重要的和有用的概念证明的假设，注意力可能在焦虑的出现中发挥因果作用。然而，他们无法阐明这些信息处理偏见实际上是如何在童年时期发展的。婴儿研究表明，在生命的第一年，人们对与威胁相关的刺激的普遍偏好是显而易见的，但还没有抓住个体差异或注意力特定子成分的重要性。在一些儿童中，情感偏向注意力，即倾向于优先注意情感刺激的倾向，可能会"调整"最初的注意力过滤器，以寻找和识别威胁， 信息处理和行为制定，并作为情绪调节的基本形式。我们知道，焦虑的成年人和儿童对威胁表现出注意力偏差，早期的气质与负面情绪和焦虑水平的升高有关，并且早在撒谎的第一年，优先注意威胁的规范模式就很明显。然而，我们对这些相互关系如何随着时间的推移而出现和变化知之甚少，因为大部分注意力-影响文献（1）都集中在成人临床定义的人群中，（2）没有系统地评估多个任务和背景下的两种结构，以及（3）很少采取发展的观点，审查核心机制，因为它们出现在婴儿期，并区分规范模式和相关模式特定的风险因素。目前的研究提出了改进和验证三个眼动跟踪任务，这些任务捕捉了生命最初两年内注意力的核心组成部分。此外，我们将实施一个丰富的评估气质的负面影响，这是与后来出现的焦虑和社会退缩。这一系列研究反映了研究领域标准对整合机制的关注，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）和不同社会情感背景下的早期影响模式（负价系统和社会过程）。

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).