Attention Bias Of Maltreatment Children For Emotional Face Pairs

Faces convey lots of information for social interaction and are central for regulating these interactions.Indeed,the ability to accurately process emotion from faces is fundamental for successful social interaction.Deficits in this ability have been linked to numerous forms of psychopathology.Theorists have proposed that negative experiences in childhood,particularly childhood psychological maltreatment,may contribute to the development of information-processing biases specific to facial display of angry.The prime goal of this study was to examine children’s cognitive development,especially the development of attention.It not only suggests some advises for children’s development,but also lays a foundation of providing effective interventions in the future.In this study,eye movement recording methods was used to explore the attention bias of psychological maltreatment children.Fourty-seven children,were participated in this study.Twenty-three of them were experienced childhood psychological maltreatment.In Experiment 1,children were asked to react quickly in the emotion dot-probe task.Maltreatment children displayed a great attention bias toward angry faces than non-maltreatment children.In Experiment 2,children were asked viewing some facial expressions for five seconds,while the eye tracking was recorded.Results indicated that,this bias occurred in the earliest phase.Specifically,maltreatment children were less likely to direct their first fixation to angry faces,but they pay more attention to angry faces on the whole.The results were consistent with the results of previous studies.It showed that compared with non-maltreatment children,psychological maltreatment children displayed biased orienting to threat-related stimuli.This study also showed that bias manifest at initial attention orienting in eye-tracking patterns.