Attentional Control Theory in Childhood: Enhanced Attentional Capture by Non-Emotional and Emotional Distractors in Anxiety and Depression

Abstract

Attentional control theory (ACT) proposes that anxiety is associated with executive functioning deficits. The theory has been widely investigated in adults. The current study tested whether symptoms of childhood anxiety and depression were associated with experimentally measured attentional control in the context of non-emotional and emotional stimuli. Sixty-one children (mean age = 9.23 years, range = 8.39-10.41) reported their trait anxiety and depression symptoms and completed three visual search tasks. The tasks used a variant of an irrelevant singleton paradigm and measured attentional capture by task-irrelevant non-emotional (color) and emotional (facial expressions) distractors. Significant attentional capture by both non-emotional and emotional distractors was observed, and was significantly correlated with trait anxiety and symptoms of depression. The strength of relationship between attentional capture and the symptoms did not differ significantly for non-emotional and emotional distractors. The results suggest that symptoms of childhood anxiety and depression are associated with poorer attentional control both in the presence of emotional and non-emotional stimuli, supporting ACT in younger populations. This attentional deficit in the context of non-emotional information might be as central to childhood internalizing symptoms as attentional biases often observed on tasks investigating processing of emotional stimuli.

Fig 1. Example of no-distractor and distractor trials for each of the three tasks used in the study: a) Shapes task, b) Faces-color task, c) Faces-valence task.

In shapes task example, on both trials a diamond is a target shape and participants are required to indicate by button press that the line inside is vertical. On a distractor trial one of the circles in the array is of a task-irrelevant distractor of opposite color (red).In faces-color and faces-valence tasks examples, a male face is a target face and participants are required to indicate by button press that the line next to it is vertical. In faces-color task example on a distractor trial one of the female faces in the array is of a task-irrelevant distractor of opposite color (red). In faces-valence task example on a distractor trial one of the female faces in the array is of a task-irrelevant distractor of opposite valence (an angry facial expression).

Fig 2. RT distractor cost for the shapes, faces-color and faces-valence tasks.

Error bars indicate 95% confidence intervals. Non-overlapping confidence intervals indicate significant difference between the mean scores.