Early development of attention to threat-related facial expressions

Infants from an early age have a bias to attend more to faces than non-faces and after 5 months are particularly attentive to fearful faces. We examined the specificity of this "fear bias" in 5-, 7-, and 12-month-old infants (N = 269) and 36-month-old children (N = 191) and whether its dev...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2018-05, Vol.13 (5), p.e0197424
Main Authors: Leppänen, Jukka M, Cataldo, Julia K, Bosquet Enlow, Michelle, Nelson, Charles A
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Analysis
Anger
Anxiety
Attention - physiology
Attentional bias
Babies
Bias
Biology and Life Sciences
Child, Preschool
Children
Children & youth
Computer and Information Sciences
Emotions
Eye movements
Facial Expression
Fear
Female
Happiness
Hospitals
Humans
Infant
Infants
Male
Medicine and Health Sciences
Mental depression
Pattern Recognition, Visual - physiology
People and Places
Physical Sciences
Psychiatry
Psychological aspects
Reaction Time - physiology
Social Sciences
Studies
Visual stimuli
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Summary:Infants from an early age have a bias to attend more to faces than non-faces and after 5 months are particularly attentive to fearful faces. We examined the specificity of this "fear bias" in 5-, 7-, and 12-month-old infants (N = 269) and 36-month-old children (N = 191) and whether its development is associated with features of the early rearing environment, specifically maternal anxiety and depression symptoms. Attention dwell times were assessed by measuring the latencies of gaze shifts from a stimulus at fixation to a new stimulus in the visual periphery. In infancy, dwell times were shorter for non-face control stimuli vs. happy faces at all ages, and happy vs. fearful, but not angry, faces at 7 and 12 months. At 36 months, dwell times were shorter for non-faces and happy faces compared to fearful and angry faces. Individual variations in attention dwell times were not associated with mothers' self-reported depression or anxiety symptoms at either age. The results suggest that sensitivity to fearful faces precedes a more general bias for threat-alerting stimuli in early development. We did not find evidence that the initial manifestation of these biases is related to moderate variations in maternal depression or anxiety symptoms.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0197424