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Attentional bias for angry and happy faces in 7-12 year old children with general anxiety disorder (GAD) is examined. Results suggest that an attentional bias toward threat faces depends on a certain degree of clinical severity and/or the type of anxiety diagnosis in children.

Research suggests that there is an age-related decline in the processing of negative emotional information, which may contribute to the reported decline in emotional problems in older people. We used a signal detection approach to investigate the effect of normal aging on the interpretation of ambiguous emotional facial expressions. High-functioning older and younger adults indicated which emotion they perceived when presented with morphed faces containing a 60% to 40% blend of two emotions (mixtures of happy, sad, or angry faces). They also completed measures of mood, perceptual ability, and cognitive functioning. Older and younger adults did not differ significantly in their ability to discriminate between positive and negative emotions. Response-bias measures indicated that older adults were significantly less likely than younger adults to report the presence of anger in angry--happy face blends. Results are discussed in relation to other research into age-related effects on emotion processing. Key Words: Emotion recognition--Aging--Facial emotion.

The psychological sequelae of the September 11th terrorist attacks were examined in 249 college students at three sites in the USA and one site in the UK in the year following the attacks. Participants completed questionnaires tapping 9/ 11-related exposure and distress, and completed a modified Stroop task assessing time to color-name cards containing terror-related and neutral words. Geographical location and amount of exposure to the attacks were significant predictors of self-reported 9/11-related distress, but were not associated with processing bias for terror-related stimuli, stir-reported 9/11-related distress was significantly associated with processing bias, but only in the group (n = 124) which performed the neutral card first. Processing biases for terror-related stimuli are dependent on method of assessment and appear to be more closely tied to self-reported distress than to amount of objective exposure to the attacks.

The study investigated biases for negative information in component processes of visual attention (initial shift vs. maintenance of gaze) in dysphoric and nondysphoric individuals. Eye movements were recorded while participants viewed a series of picture pairs depicting negative, positive, and neutral scenes (each pair presented for 3 s). Biases in initial orienting were assessed from the direction and latency of the initial shift in gaze, whereas biases in the maintenance of attention were assessed from the duration of gaze on the picture that was initially fixated. Results indicated that the dysphoric group showed a significantly greater bias to maintain gaze longer on negative pictures, relative to control pictures, compared with the nondysphoric group. There was no evidence of a dysphoria-related bias in initial shift of orienting to negative cues. Results are consistent with a depression-related bias that operates in the maintenance of attention on negative material. Keywords: dysphoria, emotional pictures, attentional bias, eye tracking

In 2 experiments, the authors tested predictions from cognitive models of social anxiety regarding attentional biases for social and nonsocial cues by monitoring eye movements to pictures of faces and objects in high social anxiety (HSA) and low social anxiety (LSA) individuals. Under no-stress conditions (Experiment 1), HSA individuals initially directed their gaze toward neutral faces, relative to objects, more often than did LSA participants. However, under social--evaluative stress (Experiment 2), HSA individuals showed reduced biases in initial orienting and maintenance of gaze on faces (cf. objects) compared with the LSA group. HSA individuals were also relatively quicker to look at emotional faces than neutral faces but looked at emotional faces for less time, compared with LSA individuals, consistent with a vigilant-avoidant pattern of bias. Keywords: attentional bias, gaze, eye movements, faces, social anxiety

Abstract Recent research using a dual-task procedure indicates that smoking behaviour can proceed automatically (i.e. it makes minimal demands on cognitive resources) in experienced, but not novice, smokers (Baxter and [...]

To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2005.10.008 Byline: Karin Mogg, Katherine E. Bradbury, Brendan P. Bradley Keywords: Depression; Interpretation of ambiguity; Negative bias; Text comprehension Abstract: The present study used two cognitive tasks -- a text comprehension task and a homophone task -- to investigate whether clinically depressed individuals have a negative bias when interpreting ambiguous information. Previous research indicates that both tasks are sensitive to anxiety-related interpretive biases, and that the former is less prone to response bias effects. Negative memory biases were also assessed. Results showed that, compared with normal controls, depressed individuals made more negative interpretations on the homophone task, and they also showed an enhanced negative recall bias. However, the groups did not differ in interpretative bias on the text comprehension task. Possible explanations of the results are discussed, including the potential influences of self-referent processing and response bias. Author Affiliation: School of Psychology, University of Southampton, Highfield, Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK Article History: Received 7 February 2005; Revised 3 October 2005; Accepted 25 October 2005

To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2006.05.003 Byline: Karin Mogg, Brendan P. Bradley Keywords: Attentional bias; Time course; Spider; Specific fear; Visual probe task Abstract: The time course of attentional biases for spider stimuli was assessed in two groups of individuals with high or low levels of spider fear. Pairs of photographs of spiders and cats were presented in a visual probe task with three exposure durations: 200, 500 and 2000ms. Results indicated greater attentional bias for spider stimuli in high fear, than in low fear, individuals in the 200ms condition. The attentional bias in the high fear group significantly reduced as stimulus exposure duration increased, with no significant biases found in the longer exposure conditions. Results support the view that high fear is associated with an enhanced initial attentional bias for fear-relevant stimuli, but that this attentional bias is not maintained over time. Author Affiliation: Centre for the Study of Emotion and Motivation, School of Psychology, University of Southampton, UK Article History: Received 12 December 2003; Revised 14 May 2004; Accepted 26 May 2004

To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2004.12.007 Byline: Matthew Garner (a)(b), Karin Mogg (a), Brendan P. Bradley (a) Keywords: Covariation bias; On-line bias; Faces; Social anxiety Abstract: An illusory correlation paradigm was used to compare high and low socially anxious individuals' initial, on-line and a posteriori covariation estimates between emotional faces and aversive, pleasant and neutral outcomes. Overall, participants demonstrated an initial expectancy bias for aversive outcomes following angry faces, and pleasant outcomes following happy faces. On-line expectancy biases indicated that initial biases were extinguished during the task, with the exception of low socially anxious individuals who continued to over-associate positive social cues with pleasant outcomes. In addition to lacking this protective positive on-line bias, the high social anxiety group reported retrospectively more negative social cues than the low socially anxious group. Findings are discussed in relation to similar evidence from recent interpretive and memory paradigms. Author Affiliation: (a) Centre for the Study of Emotion and Motivation, School of Psychology, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK (b) Division of Clinical Neurosciences, School of Medicine, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK Article History: Received 10 March 2004; Revised 12 November 2004; Accepted 1 December 2004 Article Note: (footnote) [star] This research was supported in part by ESRC Studentship Award -- R42200034154 held by Matthew Garner. Karin Mogg holds a Wellcome Senior Research Fellowship in Basic Biomedical Science (ref. 051076).

This study investigated the time course of attentional responses to emotional facial expressions in a clinical sample with social phobia. With a visual probe task, photographs of angry, happy, and neutral faces were presented at 2 exposure durations: 500 and 1,250 ms. At 500 ms, the social phobia group showed enhanced vigilance for angry faces, relative to happy and neutral faces, in comparison with normal controls. In the 1,250-ms condition, there were no significant attentional biases in the social phobia group. Results are consistent with a bias in initial orienting to threat cues in social anxiety. Findings are discussed in relation to recent cognitive models of anxiety disorders.