UC Davis

Cognitive theories propose that selective attention is essential to extracting relevant emotional information from the environment and guiding subsequent behavior (Atkinson & Braddick, 2012; Carrasco, 2011; Wieser & Keil, 2020). Excessive selective attention to threat-related information (i.e., attention bias for threat) is associated with heightened anxiety in both children and adults (Bar-Haim et al., 2007; Cisler & Koster, 2010). However, the underlying mechanisms and how they unfold over the course of development to influence anxiety outcomes are still poorly understood. Through the investigation of age-related changes in attention bias to threat and anxiety outcomes, we can begin to characterize developmental pathways for anxiety, and address outstanding questions in the literature regarding the neural and behavioral time course of selective attention to emotional information predictive of anxiety. The current study examines the role of attention to emotion and anxiety outcomes by addressing methodological limitations of the extant literature and empirically testing theoretical developmental models of attention bias and anxiety. This study is one of the first of its kind to use a longitudinal and multi-method approach to characterize developmental changes in attention bias and anxiety symptoms using converging evidence from behavioral, eye-tracking, and neural correlates of the brain. Overall, this research suggests that across multiple measures of attention bias for threat, the presence of threat bias early in development is a risk factor for anxiety outcomes. Findings from this study reveal that behavioral measures of attention bias early in childhood are predictive of anxiety symptoms, and initial attention allocation as well as attentional control are key features of selective attention that are predictive of anxiety outcomes.