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    • Studies examining attention bias towards happy faces

    2018-10-29

    Studies examining attention bias towards happy faces are scarce. In the internalizing literature, increased attention towards happy faces is most commonly conceptualized as reflecting a bias towards rewards. Evidence suggesting that happy faces may be socially rewarding comes from fMRI studies in which happy faces activate the distributed “reward circuitry,” such as the ventral striatum and OFC (e.g., Monk et al., 2008; O’Doherty et al., 2003; Phillips et al., 1998; Shechner et al., 2012 for a review). This evidence has been used as the basis to use happy facial expressions to study social reward processing in adults and children (e.g., children with autism spectrum disorder, Sepeta et al., 2012). Studies find that anxious and depressed individual have a bias away from rewards such as positive/happy words, faces, and pictures (Frewen et al., 2008; Shechner et al., 2012). In addition, training anxious individuals to attend towards reward leads to a dihydrofolate reductase inhibitor in anxiety symptoms, anxious behavior, and anxiety-related physiology (Heeren et al., 2012). Similarly, studies training anxious children to attend towards reward (i.e., happy faces) find a significant reduction in anxiety (Britton et al., 2013; Waters et al., 2013). Moreover, positive affect is related to attention bias to reward (i.e., emotionally positive words; Tamir and Robinson, 2007) and training adults to attend towards reward increases positive affect (Grafton et al., 2012; Taylor et al., 2011). Finally, children abandoned in infancy to institutional care in Romania, but randomly placed in high-quality foster care displayed a bias towards reward at age 8 (Troller-Renfree et al., 2015) and 12 years (Troller-Renfree et al., 2016), compared to post-institutionalized children not in foster care. Moreover, individual differences in attention bias towards reward among post-institutionalized children were concurrently related to more social engagement, more prosocial behavior, fewer externalizing and internalizing problems, and less social withdrawal (Troller-Renfree et al., 2016, 2015). In normative samples, however, emerging evidence suggests a different pattern. A recent study (Morales et al., 2016a) indicates that attention bias towards rewards (i.e., happy faces) is related to externalizing problems and temperamental exuberance, a trait characterized by high approach and impulsive behavior and related to later emergence of externalizing disorders (Fox et al., 2001b; Polak-Toste and Gunnar, 2006). We found that attention bias towards reward in childhood (70 months) was related to children’s exuberance during toddlerhood (20 months) and externalizing behaviors during kindergarten. Moreover, the longitudinal relation between toddler exuberance and childhood attentional bias towards reward was mediated by effortful control, such that increased exuberance predicted increased bias toward reward via lower effortful control (Morales et al., 2016a). A recent study replicated the negative relation between attention bias towards reward and effortful control in childhood (Cole et al., 2016). These findings suggest that attention bias towards reward may be an index of a high behavioral approach system coupled with reduced activity from the behavioral inhibition system, leading to exuberance, and at the extreme, externalizing problems. These recent findings may seem contradictory to the existing literature that reports attention bias towards reward is associated with positive outcomes (e.g., less anxiety, increased positive affect, prosocial behavior, and social engagement). However, most of these studies have been carried out with selected populations, such as clinically anxious individuals or post-institutionalized children. As suggested by our model, the meaning of affect-biased attention depends on individual differences in developmental experiences and context. Thus, it is possible that attention bias towards reward differs in its meaning and manifestation between a population exposed to early depravation, in which a bias towards reward is associated with positive outcomes (Troller-Renfree et al., 2016, 2015), and a normative sample, in which a bias towards reward is associated with early temperamental exuberance, lower effortful control, and externalizing problems (Morales et al., 2016a).