Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Attention Bias Towards Threat In Pediatric Anxiety Disorders, Amy K. Roy, Roma A. Vasa, Maggie Bruck, Karin Mogg, Brendan P. Bradley, Michael Sweeney, Lindsey Bergman, Erin B. Mcclure-Tone, Daniel S. Pine

Psychology Faculty Publications

Objective: To examine attention bias towards threat faces in a large sample of anxiety disordered youths using a well-established visual probe task.

Method: Study participants included 101 children and adolescents (ages 7- 18 years) with generalized anxiety disorder, social phobia and/or separation anxiety disorder enrolled in a multi-site anxiety treatment study. Non-anxious youths (n = 51; ages 9 – 18 years) were recruited separately. Participants were administered a computerized visual probe task that presents pairs of faces portraying threat (angry), positive (happy) and neutral expressions. They pressed a response-key to indicate the spatial location of a probe that replaced one …