Hadwin Julie A, Donnelly Nick, French Christopher C, Richards Anne, Watts Antonia, Daley Dave
Centre for Research into Psychological Development, Department of Psychology, University of Southampton, UK.
J Child Psychol Psychiatry. 2003 Mar;44(3):432-44. doi: 10.1111/1469-7610.00133.
This study presents two experiments that investigated the relationship between 7- and 10-year-olds' levels of self-report trait anxiety and depression and their visual search for threatening (angry faces) and non-threatening (happy and neutral faces) stimuli.
In both experiments a visual search paradigm was used to measure participants' reaction times to detect the presence or absence of angry, happy or neutral schematic faces (Experiment 1) or cartoon drawings (Experiment 2). On target present trials, a target face was displayed alongside three, five or seven distractor items. On target absent trials all items were distractors.
Both experiments demonstrated that on target absent (but not present) trials, increased levels of anxiety produced significantly faster search times in the angry face condition, but not in the neutral condition. In Experiment 2 there was some trend towards significance between anxiety and searches for happy faces in absent trials. There were no effects of depression on search times in any condition.
The results support previous work highlighting a specific link between anxiety and attention to threat in childhood.
本研究进行了两项实验，探究7岁和10岁儿童的自我报告特质焦虑和抑郁水平与他们对威胁性（愤怒面孔）和非威胁性（快乐和中性面孔）刺激的视觉搜索之间的关系。
在两项实验中，均使用视觉搜索范式来测量参与者检测愤怒、快乐或中性示意面孔（实验1）或卡通画（实验2）是否存在的反应时间。在目标存在的试验中，一张目标面孔与三个、五个或七个干扰项一起显示。在目标不存在的试验中，所有项目均为干扰项。
两项实验均表明，在目标不存在（而非存在）的试验中，焦虑水平的增加在愤怒面孔条件下显著加快了搜索时间，但在中性条件下则不然。在实验2中，在目标不存在的试验中，焦虑与对快乐面孔的搜索之间存在某种显著趋势。在任何条件下，抑郁对搜索时间均无影响。
研究结果支持了先前的研究，该研究强调了儿童期焦虑与对威胁的注意力之间的特定联系。
