Neural changes in responses to an home-based attention training in children with social phobia
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1
Université de Mons, Psychologie Cognitive et Neuropsychologie, Belgium
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2
Fonds pour la Recherche en Sciences Humaines (FRESH/FNRS), Belgium
Attentional biases (AB) towards threatening faces are a major feature of social anxiety disorder. At a neural level, AB have been indexed by enhanced amplitudes of P1, reflecting increased perceptual processing, and P2, indicating difficulties to remove attention from threatening information. According to Eysenck et al.’s theory (2007), AB would be due to an attention control deficit whose retraining has shown promising results in adults. The aims of this study were to evaluate the efficacy of a home-based attentional training on AB in children with clinical social phobia and to index the neural changes induced by this procedure. After a first evaluation of AB, fifteen 8 to 12 year-old socially anxious children (mean age = 10.12; SD = .76) completed 10 sessions of attentional retraining after what they completed another evaluation of AB. AB were assessed by a visual dot-probe task in which children had to detect neutral targets cued by neutral or disgusted faces. During retraining sessions, the targets systematically followed the neutral face in order to train children to engage their attention towards savety cues. Children also had to complete the State-Trait Inventory for Children (Spielberger, 1973), the Social Phobia and Anxiety Inventory for Children (Beidel et al., 1995) and the Brief Fear of Negative Evaluation (Leary et al., 1983) before and after the training. Behavioral and neurophysiological results will be fully developped. We will discuss the implication of our findings and consider the applicability of the attentional control theory in the framework of pediatric AD. Finally, we will examine whether specific ERP components can be considered as endophenotypes of anxious disorders and biological markers for treatment’s efficacy.
Acknowledgements
This research was funded by the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS), Human Sciences Research Fund (FRESH)
References
Puliafico, A. C., & Kendall, P. C. (2006). Threat-related attentional bias in anxious youth: A review. Clinical child and family psychology review, 9(3-4), 162-180.
Eysenck, M. W., Derakshan, N., Santos, R., & Calvo, M. G. (2007). Anxiety and cognitive performance: attentional control theory. Emotion, 7(2), 336.
Lowther, H., & Newman, E. (2014). Attention bias modification (ABM) as a treatment for child and adolescent anxiety: a systematic review. Journal of affective disorders, 168, 125-135.
Wauthia, E., & Rossignol, M. (2016). Emotional processing and attention control impairments in children with anxiety: An integrative review of event-related potentials findings. Frontiers in psychology, 7.
Keywords:
Social Anxiety Disorder,
Children,
attention bias modification,
attention control,
Event-related potentials
Conference:
12th National Congress of the Belgian Society for Neuroscience, Gent, Belgium, 22 May - 22 May, 2017.
Presentation Type:
Poster Presentation
Topic:
Cognition and Behavior
Citation:
Wauthia
E,
Picone
A and
Rossignol
M
(2019). Neural changes in responses to an home-based attention training in children with social phobia.
Front. Neurosci.
Conference Abstract:
12th National Congress of the Belgian Society for Neuroscience.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnins.2017.94.00111
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Received:
18 Apr 2017;
Published Online:
25 Jan 2019.
*
Correspondence:
Miss. Erika Wauthia, Université de Mons, Psychologie Cognitive et Neuropsychologie, Mons, 7000, Belgium, erika.wauthia@umons.ac.be