Children and Emotion

K. H. Lagattuta

• Publisher: S. Karger
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9783318024890
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie in der Psychologie

This publication brings together leading emotion researchers whose work has pioneered new questions, methods, and levels of analyses for investigating development and individual differences in how infants and children attend to, categorize, understand, talk about, and regulate emotions. Topics include infant attention and processing of emotions, developmental affective psychophysiology, emotions in maltreated children, attention biases and anxiety, emotional competence and social interactions, cultural differences in emotion socialization, gender and parent-child reminiscing about emotional events, family emotion conversations and socio-cognitive development, and causal reasoning about emotions. These contributions lay a foundation for new scientific discoveries in developmental affective science, and they inform evidence-based practices and interventions aimed at promoting children's emotional wellbeing. Given the centrality of emotions to children's development, this volume provides a valuable resource for developmental researchers and clinicians, as well as for parents, educators, and policy makers.

Hansen Lagattuta K (ed): Children and Emotion. New Insights into Developmental Affective Sciences.
Contrib Hum Dev. Basel, Karger, 2014, vol 26, pp 42-56 (DOI: 10.1159/000354350)

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Temperament and Attention as Core Mechanisms in the Early Emergence of Anxiety

Koraly Pérez-Edgar · Bradley Taber-Thomas · Eran Auday · Santiago Morales

The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pa., USA

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Abstract

Anxiety is a pervasive, impairing, and early appearing form of psychopathology. Even when anxiety remits, children remain at a two- to threefold increased risk for the later emergence of a mood disorder. Therefore, it is imperative to identify and examine underlying mechanisms that may shape early emerging patterns of behavior that are associated with anxiety. One of the strongest and first visible risk factors is childhood temperament. In particular, children who are behaviorally inhibited or temperamentally shy are more likely to exhibit signs of anxiety by adolescence. However, not all shy children do so, despite the early risk. We know that attention mechanisms, particularly the presence of attention biases toward or away from threat, can play a critical role in the emergence of anxiety. The current chapter will bring together these separate lines of research to examine the ways in which attention can modulate the documented link between early temperament and later anxiety. In doing so, the chapter will highlight multiple levels of analysis that focus on the behavioral, cognitive, and neural mechanisms in the temperament-attention-anxiety network. The chapter will help identify both markers and mechanisms of risk, supporting future work aimed at improving theory and intervention by focusing on attention biases to environmental threat.

Copyright © 2014 S. Karger AG, Basel

Children can differ fundamentally in the ways in which they view and approach the world around them. While some children eagerly embrace the ambiguities and uncertainties of their environments as opportunities for discovery and surprise, other children retreat from the world, fleeing from these same uncertainties as markers of threat and risk. These patterns of behavior emerge from a complex equation incorporating in-born or biologically based emotional biases as well as learning processes deriving information from the environment. On the biological side of the equation, temperament-based patterns of approach and withdrawal have been linked to long-standing and stable profiles of socioemotional behavior [Fox, Henderson, Pérez-Edgar & White, 2008]. From an environmental perspective, we know that rearing environments, whether harsh and punitive or sensitive and nurturing, can also shape the ways in which children navigate their world [LoBue, 2013]. Adding to this complexity, the child's own world view - as seen in patterns of attentional and interpretive biases - can step in to modify how he or she responds to surrounding events [White, Helfinstein & Fox, 2010].

Given the complex systems simultaneously at work shaping individual trajectories of development it is not surprising that there are a multitude of developmental pathways that emerge from seemingly equivalent starting points. For example, although infant temperament is one of the strongest early predictors of anxiety [Fox & Pine, 2012; Pérez-Edgar & Fox, 2005], the majority of temperamentally shy children do not go on to manifest an anxiety disorder [Degnan & Fox, 2007]. This pattern of early risk leading to relative normalcy may act as the developmental equivalent of the statistical construct of regression to the mean. Over the course of time, development appears to smooth away the jagged edges of early risk through naturally occurring maturational, experiential, and social processes [Degnan, Al-mas & Fox, 2010].

For a subset of children, however, the risks evident early in life persist, calcifying into a pattern of maladaptation throughout childhood and into adulthood. Children appear to be more open to prevention and intervention [Pine, Helfinstein, Bar-Haim, Nelson & Fox, 2009]. As a result, it becomes increasingly difficult over time to redirect maladaptive trajectories. Thus, it is exceedingly important to identify and target the mechanisms at play early in life. These mechanisms - developmental tethers - bind children to specific trajectories and resist the normal ameliorative or ‘smoothing away’ process. From our lab's perspective, developmental tethers grow out the child's individual early traits or biases. These biases provoke an environmental response. The child processes and interprets these responses and frames subsequent behaviors based on the conclusions drawn. This pattern of provocation and response can become cyclical, growing progressively more entrenched (and biased) with each successive iteration.

The current chapter will bring together separate lines of research in temperament and attention to examine the ways in which attention can modulate the documented link between early temperament and later anxiety. In doing so, the chapter will highlight multiple levels of analysis that focus on the behavioral, cognitive, and neural mechanisms in the temperament-attention-anxiety network. This includes observed social behavior, clinical assessments, computer-based attention tasks, psychophysiological techniques, and neuroimaging. The chapter will help identify the markers and mechanisms of risk, supporting future work aimed at improving both theory and intervention.

Temperament and the Emergence of Anxiety

The psychological construct of temperament captures distinct patterns of neurochemistry, neuro-anatomy, and gene expression which bias the ways in which individual children select, process, and respond to salient stimuli within their environments [Kagan, 2012; Rothbart, 2012]. Temperament-based differences are evident in the first months of life and may serve as the biological ‘seed’ for later personality [Rothbart, Ahadi & Evans, 2000]. Temperament-linked differences in outlook and behavior may also prove to be an important core mechanism for the later emergence of psychopathology [see also Hastings et al., this vol.]. In our laboratory, the focus has been on a specific temperamental type - behavioral inhibition. As infants, behaviorally inhibited children display signs of fear and wariness in response to unfamiliar stimuli [Schmidt et al., 1997] and this trait is marked by heightened vigilance, motor quieting, and withdrawal from novelty [Garcia Coll, Kagan & Reznick, 1984; Kagan, Reznick & Snidman, 1987]. By elementary school, many be-haviorally inhibited children fear social circumstances, displaying poorly regulated social behavior and social reticence [Coplan, Rubin, Fox, Calkins & Stewart, 1994; Fox et al., 1995]. This, in turn, increases the likelihood of peer rejection, low self-esteem, and poor social competence [Rubin, Chen & Hymel, 1993; Schmidt, Fox, Schulkin & Gold, 1999]. Longitudinal studies of behavioral inhibition, and the broader construct of temperamental shyness, have found a marked increased risk for anxiety, particularly social anxiety, by mid-adolescence [Chronis-Tuscano et al., 2009; Kagan, Snidman, McManis & Woodward, 2001].

Despite this two- to threefold increase in risk for anxiety disorders, the majority of behaviorally inhibited children are not clinically anxious [Degnan & Fox, 2007]. Clearly, there must be a number of moderating influences that shape the trajectory from temperament to disorder. Past work suggests that parenting styles [Williams et al., 2009], parental anxiety levels [Biederman et al., 2001], and early schooling environment [Almas et al., 2011] all play a role in exacerbating or ameliorating early risk. Recently, a great deal of attention (pun intended) has focused on the role that systematic biases in early information processing patterns may play in shaping the emergence and course of anxiety. This will be the focus of the current chapter.

Attention, Attention Biases, and Socioemotional Development

Cognitive models of anxiety suggest that attention biases toward threat may be causally implicated in the development of anxiety disorders [MacLeod & Mathews, 2012]. Early attention can be thought of as a gatekeeper, controlling which aspects of the environment are taken in for further processing while filtering out of awareness irrelevant information. Thus, attention mechanisms are central to our ability to carry out adaptive goal-directed behaviors [Crick & Dodge, 1994]. However, attention, as the gate-keeper to downstream information processing mechanisms, must also possess the flexibility to redirect resources to unexpected or ambiguous events in the environment, particularly if they are potentially threatening in nature.

LoBue [2013] suggests that humans have perceptual biases for threatening stimuli that are evident in infancy and that may set the stage for learning - drawing attention to important stimuli in the environment. Importantly, these biases precede the development of fear for these potential threats [Oldfield, 1971] and seem to be independent of exposure to the threat in the child's environment [Penkunas & Coss, 2013]. While a perceptual sensitivity to threat may be a normative, evolutionary-based safety mechanism, there is growing evidence that a pronounced bias in this attention mechanism may lay the foundation for anxiety. Indeed, Todd et al. [2012] have argued that the predisposition to attend to specific emotion categories of the environment, ‘affect-biased attention,’ may act to shape broad patterns of socioemotional functioning by creating a habitual filtering process that privileges certain classes of information over other, less salient, classes.

Thus, hard-wired biases toward threat may, in some vulnerable populations, set the stage for later socioemotional difficulties. Indeed, many in the clinical literature make the clear declaration that attention plays a causal role in the emergence of anxiety and should therefore be a primary target of clinical intervention [Amir, Beard, Burns & Bomyea, 2009]. However, a number of important and critical open questions remain to be answered. For example, although general reviews and meta-analyses [Bar-Haim, Lamy, Pergamin, Bakermans-Kranenburg & van IJzendoorn, 2007] suggest a general pattern of attention bias toward threat, biases away from threat can emerge with manipulations of task parameters [Mogg, Bradley, De Bono & Painter, 1997; Mogg, Bradley, Miles & Dixon, 2004], specific diagnosis [Waters, Bradley & Mogg, in press], and exposure to stress prior to testing [Helfinstein, White, Bar-Haim & Fox, 2008]. Thus, any clinical utility may be limited until we better understand the parameters that shape the strength and directionality of any underlying bias to threat. In addition, questions regarding the early emergence of attention biases (as discussed below) will need to be addressed in order to better understand the mechanisms underlying any observed patterns of bias.

Assessing Attention Biases to Threat

According to Wells and Matthews' [1996] Self-Regulatory Executive Function model of emotional disorder, attentional processes are involved in the maintenance of emotional disorder because attention biases ‘diminish individuals' ability to process information that is incompatible with their fears' [Lonigan & Vasey, 2009]. Thus, a bias or vulnerability to threat may reduce one's capacity to integrate information that would diminish fear, engendering a cycle of negative information processing that maintains anxiety. Individuals who are able to break this cycle by overriding the draw of negative information (and preventing biased attention and hypervigilance) are less likely to exhibit anxiety [Mathews & MacLeod, 1994]. For example, attention bias towards threat may predict self-reported anxiety only for children with low ability to control attention who also have low levels of attentional or effortful control [Lonigan & Vasey, 2009; Susa, Pitica, Benga & Miclea, 2012].

Most investigations and clinical manipulations of attention bias use a variant of the dot-probe task, originally developed by MacLeod et al. [1986]. In this task, participants see two stimuli (one threatening and one nonthreatening) side-by-side, typically for 50...