Early development of attention to threat-related facial expressions

Abstract

Infants from an early age have a bias to attend more to faces than non-faces and after 5 months are particularly attentive to fearful faces. We examined the specificity of this “fear bias” in 5-, 7-, and 12-month-old infants (N = 269) and 36-month-old children (N = 191) and whether its development is associated with features of the early rearing environment, specifically maternal anxiety and depression symptoms. Attention dwell times were assessed by measuring the latencies of gaze shifts from a stimulus at fixation to a new stimulus in the visual periphery. In infancy, dwell times were shorter for non-face control stimuli vs. happy faces at all ages, and happy vs. fearful, but not angry, faces at 7 and 12 months. At 36 months, dwell times were shorter for non-faces and happy faces compared to fearful and angry faces. Individual variations in attention dwell times were not associated with mothers’ self-reported depression or anxiety symptoms at either age. The results suggest that sensitivity to fearful faces precedes a more general bias for threat-alerting stimuli in early development. We did not find evidence that the initial manifestation of these biases is related to moderate variations in maternal depression or anxiety symptoms.