Attention to Threat‐Related Faces in Preschool‐Aged Children and Associations With Fearful Temperament

ABSTRACT The allocation of attention to threatening stimuli is an evolutionarily salient aspect of development; however, different factors such as clinical symptomology and temperamental traits may relate to alterations in these attentional patterns. The current study used eye‐tracking to investigate the attentional patterns of 60 preschool‐aged children ( M age = 48.3 months, SD = 10.4 months) as they viewed images of emotional faces, including both threat‐related expressions (angry, fearful) and nonthreat‐related expressions (happy, sad, neutral). Areas of interest were created for the eyes and mouth of all faces. The Children's Behavior Questionnaire was used to assess children's temperament, focusing on the Fearfulness subscale as it might relate to attentional patterns to threat‐related faces. Overall, results indicated differential attention based on the emotion being viewed, with both longer fixations and an increased number of fixations toward the fearful mouth as compared to angry. Correlational results showed that for attention to the angry face and eyes, children higher on temperamental fearfulness exhibited both shorter average fixation lengths and a greater number of fixations. These findings suggest that temperamental fearfulness might influence attention to threat‐related faces. This topic is important to explore because altered social attention may continue to reinforce fearfulness in those higher on this temperamental trait, and this in turn could give the child a higher likelihood of developing difficulties later in life.