Abstract
Attentional biases to and away from threat are considered hallmarks of temperamental behavioral inhibition (BI), which is a documented risk factor for social anxiety disorder. However, most research on affective attentional biases has traditionally been constrained to computer screens, where stimuli often lack ecological validity. Moreover, prior research predominantly focuses on momentary presentations of stimuli, rather than examining how attention may change over the course of prolonged exposure to salient people and objects. Here, in a sample of children oversampled for BI, we used mobile eye-tracking to examine attention to an experimenter wearing a “scary” or novel gorilla mask, as well as attention to the experimenter after mask removal as a recovery from exposure. Conditional growth curve modeling was used to examine how level of BI related to attentional trajectories over the course of the exposure. We found a main effect of BI in the initial exposure to the mask, with a positive association between level of BI and proportion of gaze allocated to the stranger’s masked face over time. Additionally, there was a main effect of BI on proportion of gaze allocated to the stranger’s face plus their mask during the recovery period when the mask was removed.
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Funding
This material is based upon work supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (DGE1255832 to KEG), a National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) T32 (HD101390 to KMB), and a National Institute of Mental Health R21 Grant (MH111980 to KPE).
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Gunther, K.E., Brown, K.M., Fu, X. et al. Mobile Eye Tracking Captures Changes in Attention Over Time During a Naturalistic Threat Paradigm in Behaviorally Inhibited Children. Affec Sci 2, 495–505 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42761-021-00077-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42761-021-00077-3