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，临床焦虑或高水平特质焦虑的个体对威胁表现出注意偏倚。此外，当这些注意力偏差在实验室中被实验性地操纵时，研究人员可以加剧或改善焦虑思想和行为的水平。这导致研究人员认为，对威胁的注意偏见可能会导致焦虑。然而，威胁相关的注意偏差在多大程度上是持续焦虑的下游结果，还是早期出现的与焦虑障碍发展风险相关的易感因素，目前尚不清楚。强调注意操纵有效性的研究从机械论的角度来看待注意与情感的关系。这些研究重要而有用地证明了注意力可能在焦虑的出现中起因果作用的假设。然而，他们无法阐明这些信息处理偏见是如何在童年时期发展起来的。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，但没有捕捉到个体差异或注意力的特定子成分的重要性。在一些儿童中，情感偏见的注意，倾向于优先关注情感刺激，可能会“调整”最初的注意过滤器，以寻找和识别威胁，从而导致后续的偏见

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).