Neural Activity to Emotional Faces Combines With Neural Activity to Emotionally Evocative Scenes to Predict Childhood Anxiety Symptoms

Individuals with anxiety have increased attention to and sensitivity to both emotional faces and emotionally evocative scenes. Despite their intuitive connection, no empirical investigation has examined whether and how attention to faces and scenes/objects combine to predict anxiety because no study has tested attention to these two stimulus types together in an anxiety model. This comprehensive examination is critical to understanding existing inconsistencies in how attention to scenes/objects relates to children's anxiety and for a more complete model of anxiety development. Here, we examine whether individual differences in the neural correlates of attention to emotional faces interact with neural correlates of attention to emotional scenes/objects to predict children's anxiety symptoms. Forty 6- to 8-year-old typically developing children completed two event-related potential (ERP) tasks that separately required passive viewing of emotional faces (to target the Nc component) and emotionally evocative scenes/objects (to target the LPP component). Children also completed a self-report measure of anxiety symptoms. We found that greater Nc amplitude to fearful faces combined with greater LPP amplitude to unpleasant scenes/objects predicted increased children's anxiety, whereas neither neural responses to faces nor scenes/objects on their own significantly predicted children's anxiety. Results shed light on neural mechanisms underlying children's anxiety development.