ArticleJournal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines2016
Attentional avoidance of fearful facial expressions following early life stress is associated with impaired social functioning.
Article in Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 28 papers.
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Who cites it
28 citing papers in PubMed, 48 citations in OpenAlex.
- Continuous Versus Grouping Approaches to Resilience: Predicting Mental Health Following Adversity in Two Longitudinal Datasets.JAACAP open · 2026Article
- The oxytocin system mediates behavioral and neurobiological alterations associated with early adversity.Molecular psychiatry · 2026Article
- Seeing the positive in the face of adversity: neurocognitive markers of risk and resilience in emotional conflict processing in children with maltreatment exposure.European child & adolescent psychiatry · 2026Article
- Early life adversity impairs visually evoked innate defensive behaviors via oxytocin signaling.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Lifetime Potentially Traumatic Events and Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy Outcomes in Pediatric Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.JAACAP open · 2025Article
- Disentangling Attentional Dynamics in Early Childhood: Response-Based Indicators of Avoidance of and Vigilance to Angry Faces in Relation to Anxiety and Traumatic Stress.Cognitive therapy and research · 2025Article
- Early threat experiences relate to reduced neural face discrimination in youth with emerging psychiatric symptoms: a frequency-tagging electroencephalography study.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2025Article
- The growing interdisciplinarity of developmental psychopathology: Implications for science and training.Development and psychopathology · 2024Article
- Verbal Weight-Related Abuse and Binge Eating Behavior: The Mediating Role of Attentional Bias to Threat Cues and Difficulties in Emotion Regulation.Brain and behavior · 2024Article
- Threat- and reward-related brain circuitry, perceived stress, and anxiety in adolescents during the COVID-19 pandemic: a longitudinal investigation.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2024Article
- Early-life stress biases responding to negative feedback and increases amygdala volume and vulnerability to later-life stress.Translational psychiatry · 2023Article
- The stress-buffering role of friendships in young people with childhood threat experiences: a preliminary report.European journal of psychotraumatology · 2023Article
- The Association between Stressful Life Events and Emotional and Behavioral Problems in Children 0-7 Years Old: The CIKEO Study.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Article
- The imprint of childhood adversity on emotional processing in high functioning young adults.Human brain mapping · 2021Article
- Higher Executive Control Network Coherence Buffers Against Puberty-Related Increases in Internalizing Symptoms During the COVID-19 Pandemic.Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging · 2021Article
- Cross-sectional and longitudinal associations of family income-to-needs ratio with cortical and subcortical brain volume in adolescent boys and girls.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2020Article
- Children's attentional biases to emotions as sources of variability in their vulnerability to interparental conflict.Developmental psychology · 2020Article
- Development of Social Attention and Oxytocin Levels in Maltreated Children.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Associations of waking cortisol with DHEA and testosterone across the pubertal transition: Effects of threat-related early life stress.Psychoneuroendocrinology · 2020Article
- Predicting Interpersonal Outcomes From Information Processing Tasks Using Personally Relevant and Generic Stimuli: A Methodology Study.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundEarly life stress is associated with poorer social functioning. Attentional biases in response to threat-related cues, linked to both early experience and psychopathology, may explain this association. To date, however, no study has examined attentional biases to fearful facial expressions as a function of early life stress or examined these biases as a potential mediator of the relation between early life stress and social problems.
methodsIn a sample of 154 children (ages 9-13 years) we examined the associations among interpersonal early life stressors (i.e., birth through age 6 years), attentional biases to emotional facial expressions using a dot-probe task, and social functioning on the Child Behavior Checklist.
resultsHigh levels of early life stress were associated with both greater levels of social problems and an attentional bias away from fearful facial expressions, even after accounting for stressors occurring in later childhood. No biases were found for happy or sad facial expressions as a function of early life stress. Finally, attentional biases to fearful faces mediated the association between early life stress and social problems.
conclusionsAttentional avoidance of fearful facial expressions, evidenced by a bias away from these stimuli, may be a developmental response to early adversity and link the experience of early life stress to poorer social functioning.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.