CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 34Anxiety, Depression, Psychometrics, Treatment, Cognitive ProcessesMemory and Neural MechanismsChild and Adolescent Psychosocial and Emotional Development

Direction of attention bias to threat relates to differences in fear acquisition and extinction in anxious children

Waters, Allison M., Kershaw, Rachel·2015·Behaviour Research and Therapy
DOI 10.1016/j.brat.2014.11.010
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

Anxious children show attention biases towards and away from threat stimuli. Moreover, threat avoidance compared to vigilance predicts a poorer outcome from exposure-based treatments, such as cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT), yet the mechanisms underlying this differential response are unclear. Pavlovian fear conditioning is a widely accepted theory to explain the acquisition and extinction of fear, including exposure-based treatments, such as CBT. In typical fear conditioning experiments, anxious children have shown larger physiological responses to an aversive unconditional stimulus (i.e., US on CS+ trials) and to non-reinforced stimuli (CS-) during fear acquisition and to both CSs during fear extinction compared to non-anxious peers. This study examined whether threat avoidance compared to threat vigilance was related to differences in fear acquisition and extinction in anxious children. Thirty-four clinically-anxious children completed a visual probe task including angry-neutral face pairs to determine the direction of threat attention bias as well as a discriminant conditioning and extinction task in which a geometric shape CS+ was paired with an aversive tone US, while the CS- geometric shape was always presented alone during acquisition trials. Both CSs were presented alone during extinction trials. Fear acquisition and extinction were indexed by skin conductance responses (SCR) and subjective measures. Children were classified as threat vigilant (N = 18) and threat avoidant (n = 16) based on the direction of threat attention bias on the visual probe task. During acquisition, threat avoidant relative to threat vigilant anxious children displayed larger orienting SCRs to both CSs during the first block of trials and larger third interval SCRs to the US on CS+ trials as well as on CS- trials. During extinction, threat avoidant anxious children showed delayed extinction of SCRs to both the CS+ and CS- and reported higher subjective anxiety ratings after extinction compared to threat vigilant anxious children. Threat avoidant anxious children may be more reactive physiologically to novel cues and to stimuli that become associated with threat and this may interfere with extinction learning. These findings could help explain previous evidence that threat avoidant anxious children do not respond as well as threat vigilant anxious children to exposure-based CBT.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1016/j.brat.2014.11.010

Cites

78 of 78 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Claims the paper makes

We couldn’t retrieve this paper’s full text, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

1 of the 79 references couldn’t be matched to a known paper.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Related

Authors
Waters, A. M., & Kershaw, R.
Affiliations
Griffith University (AU)
Corresponding author
Waters, Allison M.
ORCID
Waters, Allison M.
Venue
Behaviour Research and Therapy
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Published
2015-01
Volume
64
Pages
56-65
ISSN
0005-7967 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.1016/j.brat.2014.11.010
OpenAlex
W2063651775
Cited by
34
References
79
Citations by year
2025: 2 · 2024: 2 · 2023: 2 · 2021: 4 · 2020: 3 · 2019: 2 · 2018: 3 · 2017: 5 · 2016: 8 · 2015: 3
FWCI
7.42
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Licence
www.elsevier.com/tdm/userlicense/1.0/ (tdm)
Locations
  • Behaviour Research and Therapy (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • Griffith Research Online (submittedVersion)
Funders
Australian Research Council (DP1095536)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Anxiety, Depression, Psychometrics, Treatment, Cognitive Processes
  • Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Memory and Neural Mechanisms
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Clinical Psychology › Child and Adolescent Psychosocial and Emotional Development
Keywords
attention bias to threat, threat avoidance, threat vigilance, fear acquisition, fear extinction, anxious children, fear conditioning, skin conductance response, visual probe task
MeSH terms
Anxiety, Attention, Child, Extinction, Psychological, Fear, Female, Galvanic Skin Response, Humans, Male

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review