Research suggests that, during stress, resilient individuals use positive emotion regulation strategies and experience a greater number of positive emotions than those who are less resilient. Therefore, differences could be expected in attentional biases towards emotional stimuli based on resilience. The current study investigated attentional biases towards neutral, negative and positive images in response to varying levels of resilence and mood induction conditions (neutral, negative and positive). Sixty participants viewed a series of pre and post-mood induction slides in order to measure attentional biases to emotional stimuli. The study provided evidence for the presence of trait and state congruent attentional biases. More resilient individuals demonstrated an initial bias towards positive stimuli and once emotion was aroused, the bias was away from negative stimuli. Additionally, mood congruent attentional biases were observed for participants induced into positive and negative mood states. Implications as they apply to research and clinical practice are discussed.

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Social anxiety disorder is the third most common mental disorder with the lifetime prevalence rate of 13.3% in the US population. Typically, it causes significant impairment in a wide range of functioning and follows a chronic, unremitting course if untreated. Over the past two decades, there has been a dramatic increase in clinical research aimed at examining underlying mechanisms maintaining social anxiety. One line of research has investigated attentional biases in social anxiety, using various cognitive experiment paradigms, including the emotional Stroop and the modified dotprobe tasks. However, overall findings are equivocal about the nature of attentional biases in social anxiety and several methodological problems limit the interpretability of the data. The present study examined attentional biases associated with social anxiety using a new research paradigm in the field of anxiety disorders: the inattentional blindness paradigm. This paradigm presents a social cue in the absence of the subjects’ expectation while they are engaged in a cognitively demanding task, thereby enabling the more purely attentional aspect of information processing to be examined reducing the influence of potential response biases or effortful strategies. Two independent experiments were conducted using nonclinical student samples consisting of individuals high in social anxiety (HSAs) versus individuals low in social anxiety (LSAs) based on the static and sustained inattentional blindness tasks. Overall, results revealed that HSAs were more likely to detect or identify a socially-threatening cue, relative to LSAs; whereas LSAs were more likely to detect or identify a non-threatening social cue, relative to HSAs. These findings were observed only in the presence of a bogus-speech manipulation. These data suggest the promising utility of the inattentional blindness paradigm in investigating attentional biases in social anxiety and perhaps other psychopathological conditions. Theoretical and clinical implications are discussed. / text

This study profiled the mental health needs of youth incarcerated in southern Ontario. The objectives were three-fold. 1) To demonstrate that incarcerated youth endorsed more externalizing than internalizing difficulties on a self-report measure of psychopathology. 2) To demonstrate that incarcerated youth had cognitive vulnerabilities consistent with anxiety and depression, despite their general lack of overt endorsement of internalizing symptoms. 3) To demonstrate that socialization practices in the home and community predicted the endorsement of psychopathology, and to provide a possible explanation for this relationship by considering alexithymia as a mediating variable. The Adolescent Psychopathology Scale – Short Form, Mill Hill Vocabulary Scale, Toronto Alexithymia Scale, Family Expressiveness Questionnaire, Street Codes Questionnaire, Cultural Mistrust Inventory, and a Dot Probe task were administered to 91 adolescents incarcerated in Southern Ontario. Results indicated that incarcerated youth endorsed significantly greater externalizing than internalizing symptoms. Youth demonstrated significant attentional biases toward threatening, but not depressive faces. Negative dominant socialization practices in the home predicted the endorsement of both externalizing and internalizing symptoms, and there was partial support for alexithymia mediating these relationships. Youth who embraced community practices that socialized violence endorsed externalizing but not internalizing difficulties. These results challenge clinicians to consider the internalizing difficulties of incarcerated youth more carefully during assessment.

Recent modeling work shows that patterns of shared perceptual features relate to the group-level order of acquisition of early-learned words (Peters & Borovsky, 2019). Here we present results for two eye-tracked word recognition studies showing patterns of shared perceptual features likewise influence processing of known and novel noun-concepts in individual 24- to 30-month-old toddlers. In the first study (Chapter 2, N=54), we explored the influence of perceptual connectivity on both initial attentional biases to known objects and subsequent label processing. In the second study (Chapter 3, N=49), we investigated whether perceptual connectivity influences patterns of attention during learning opportunities for novel object-features and object-labels, subsequent pre-labeling attentional biases, and object-label learning outcomes. Results across studies revealed four main findings. First, patterns of shared (visual-motion and visual-form and surface) perceptual features do relate to differences in early noun-concept processing at the individual level. Second, such influences are tentatively at play from the outset of novel noun-concept learning. Third, connectivity driven attentional biases to both recently learned and well-known objects follow a similar timecourse and show similar patterns of individual differences. Fourth, initial, pre-labeling attentional biases to objects relate to subsequent label processing, but do not linearly explain effects of connectivity. Finally, we consider whether these findings provide support for shared-feature-guided selective attention to object features as a mechanism underlying early lexico-semantic development.

Parmi les patients souffrant d'épilepsie, particulièrement du lobe temporal (ELT), 30% restent résistants aux médicaments malgré l'administration optimale des traitements pharmacologiques. Le caractère imprédictible des crises est l’un des aspects les plus invalidants de la maladie. De plus, les troubles dépressifs et anxieux sont des comorbidités psychiatriques fréquemment associées à l’épilepsie et impactent encore plus négativement la qualité de vie que les crises. Les approches par biofeedback, ont démontré leur efficacité dans le contrôle des crises. Une thérapie par biofeedback sur la conductance cutanée (GSR biofeedback) a montré son efficacité sur les symptômes psychiatriques. Cependant, les mécanismes sous-tendant l’efficacité sur ces symptômes restent peu connus. L’objectif de cette thèse est de mieux comprendre ces mécanismes. Deux pistes sont explorées : une physiologique dans laquelle il existerait un effet direct du GSR biofeedback sur la régulation physiologique des émotions ; une attentionnelle, dans laquelle il y aurait un effet indirect de l’entraînement sur le contrôle de l’attention. Les études menées ont permis de montrer que les patients avec ELT présentent des réponses électrodermales aux émotions plus faibles que des témoins, mais qu'elles ne sont pas plus élevées après des séances de GSR biofeedback. En revanche, l’amélioration des symptômes anxieux et dépressifs est liée à des modifications du traitement attentionnel des informations menaçantes. Le GSR biofeedback en améliorant le contrôle attentionnel induirait une diminution de la vigilance face à la menace, conduisant à une réduction de la vulnérabilité émotionnelle chez ces patients. / Among patients with epilepsy, particularly temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE), 30% remain drug-resistant despite optimal administration of pharmacological treatments. The unpredictability of seizures is one of the most disabling aspects of the disease. In addition, depressive and anxiety disorders are psychiatric comorbidities frequently associated with epilepsy and have a greater negative impact on quality of life than seizures. Biofeedback approaches have been shown to be effective in controlling seizures. A biofeedback therapy on skin conductance (GSR biofeedback) has shown its efficacy on psychiatric symptoms. However, the mechanisms underlying this efficacy remain poorly understood. The objective of this thesis is to better understand these mechanisms. Two tracks are explored: a physiological one in which there is a direct effect of GSR biofeedback on the physiological regulation of emotions; an attentional one, in which there would be an indirect effect of the training on the control of attention. The studies presented have shown that TLE patients have weaker electrodermal responses than controls but that they are not higher after GSR biofeedback sessions. In contrast, the improvement of anxiety and depressive symptoms is related to changes in the attentional processing of threatening information. GSR biofeedback by improving attentional control would lead to a decrease in alertness to threat, leading to a reduction in emotional vulnerability in these patients.

Anxiety can be advantageous in terms of survival and well-being, yet atypically high levels may be maladaptive and result in the clinical diagnosis of an anxiety disorder. Several risk factors have been implicated in the manifestation of clinical anxiety, including cognitive biases. In recent years, a plethora of research has emerged demonstrating that anxious adults exhibit biases of attention for threatening stimuli, especially that which is biologically relevant (e.g., facial expressions). Specific components of attentional bias have also been identified, namely facilitated engagement, impaired disengagement, and avoidance. However, the majority of studies have focused on the spatial domain of attention. Furthermore, the area is under-researched in children, despite research demonstrating that symptoms relating to clinical and non-clinical anxiety follow a stable course from childhood through to adolescence and adulthood. Consequently, the aim of this thesis was to investigate how anxiety affects children’s visual attention for emotive, particularly angry, faces. In order to provide a more comprehensive understanding, the current research involved examining the role of temporal and spatial attention utilising rapid serial visual presentation with the attentional blink, and the visual probe paradigm, respectively. The main hypothesis was that high state and/or trait anxiety would be associated with an attentional bias for angry, relative to positive or neutral faces in both the temporal and spatial domains. In relation to the temporal domain, key findings demonstrated that high levels of trait anxiety were associated with facilitated engagement towards both angry and neutral faces. It was further found that all children rapidly disengaged attention away from angry faces. Findings related to the processing of angry faces accorded with the main hypothesis stated in this thesis, as well as research and theory in the area. The finding that anxious children preferentially processed neutral faces in an attentional blink investigation was unexpected. This was argued to potentially reflect this stimulus type being interpreted as threatening. Key findings regarding the spatial domain were that high trait anxious children displayed an early covert bias of attention away from happy faces and a later, overt bias of attention away from angry faces. The finding that high trait anxiety was linked to an attentional bias away from happy faces in a visual probe task was also unexpected. This was argued to potentially reflect smiling faces being interpreted as signifying social dominance, thus resulting in the viewer experiencing feelings of subordination and becoming avoidant and/or submissive. To conclude, this thesis has enhanced current knowledge of attentional bias in both the temporal and spatial domains for emotive stimuli in anxious children. It has demonstrated that higher levels of trait anxiety moderate children’s allocation of attentional resources to different stimulus types, whether these are threatening, positive, or neutral. This has important implications for evaluating past research in adults and children, and for further developing theoretical models of attentional bias and anxiety. It also offers important clinical implications, since attending towards or away from specific stimuli may affect the development and maintenance of anxiety disorders. Recently, a treatment that aims to modify attentional bias in anxious individuals has begun to be developed. In light of the present findings, it may be necessary to review this treatment so that anxious children are re-trained in the specific biases of attention demonstrated here.