Attentional bias towards threat in maltreated adolescents: The role of flexible attention control

Childhood maltreatment increases the risk of developing psychiatric disorders in adulthood. Understanding the mechanisms that increase risk for psychopathology could suggest additional targets for treatments. This study... [ view full abstract ]

Childhood maltreatment increases the risk of developing psychiatric disorders in adulthood. Understanding the mechanisms that increase risk for psychopathology could suggest additional targets for treatments. This study examined whether early maltreatment disrupted attentional processing in particular the flexibility with which attention is deployed in the presence of threatening stimuli.

A culturally-diverse sample of 24 maltreated and 24 non-maltreated adolescents matched on age, gender and IQ completed a modified visual-dot probe task developed to assess attentional biases and flexibility toward (or away from) emotional faces. In this task, reaction times in detecting probes (finding a target within a letter string) that replaced angry and fearful faces were compared to those replacing neutral faces. In general, faster reaction times to probes that replace emotional stimuli are suggestive of attention-vigilance towards threat. We also modified this paradigm to investigate attentional flexibility: the cognitive load of the task (the degree to which target detection uses working memory resources) was either high or low. We expected that if maltreated adolescents struggled to deploy attention flexibly, they would only show biases under low load conditions (as this requires fewer working memory resources and therefore greater attention control). Results showed no difference in accuracy between groups but maltreated adolescents in general responded significantly more slowly than their non-maltreated peers. Crucially maltreated (but not non-maltreated) adolescents showed greater attentional-vigilance towards angry relative to neutral faces but this bias was only present when the cognitive load of the task was low. Thus, under simple task conditions, maltreated adolescents struggled to flexibly use attention to disengage from angry faces. These findings did not characterize attention to fearful faces. As attention biases to both angry and fearful faces was linked to anxiety symptoms in this sample, attentional difficulties may act as latent vulnerability factors to later psychopathology.