Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry最新文献

Background: Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is characterized by attentional biases that may contribute to its persistence. While adult models emphasize self-focused and hypervigilant attention, there is limited understanding of how these processes operate in children. This study examined internal and external attentional biases in children with SAD during anticipation of a social stress task-a period when anxiety is typically elevated.

Methods: Forty-two children with a primary SAD diagnosis and 46 healthy controls (HC), aged 9-14 years, completed a reaction time (RT) task with internal (bodily) and external (visual) probes during anticipation of a speech task, while facing a peer video audience. RTs to probes and eye movements toward audience faces were recorded.

Results: RTs did not differ between groups. Exploratory analyses revealed that age correlated negatively with RTs in both groups, suggesting developmental effects on processing speed, although no group differences in this relationship were found. Eye-tracking revealed that children with SAD exhibited more frequent and longer fixations on audience faces during the initial phase of the task compared to HCs.

Conclusions: Although RT tasks alone may not detect attentional biases in children with SAD, eye-tracking indicated heightened attention to socially salient cues during anticipation. These findings highlight the importance of multimodal assessment to capture subtle hypervigilance in pediatric SAD.

Caregiver sensitivity is the extent to which a caregiver notices a child's signal, interprets it correctly, and responds quickly and appropriately. Although originally introduced to developmental science as the key antecedent of attachment security, decades since its conception, hundreds of studies have been conducted examining the predictive significance of caregiver sensitivity to a broad range of developmental outcomes. The literature on caregiver sensitivity and related constructs (e.g., warmth, responsivity, negative parenting) has grown exponentially and is now the focus of several meta-analyses. We conducted an umbrella review - a systematic review of reviews - to examine the extent to which caregiver sensitivity and related constructs are associated with child attachment, socioemotional, and cognitive outcomes. Searches in EMBASE, PsycINFO, and Medline and yielded 2,157 abstracts. Studies were included if they were a meta-analysis of caregiver sensitivity or a related construct, focused on children's developmental outcomes, were available in English, French, or Spanish, and were published between 2010 and 2024. Conducted and reported in accordance with PRISMA guidelines, 17 meta-analyses were identified. Using the metaumbrella package in R, we conducted quantitative analyses which demonstrated that caregiver sensitivity was moderately associated with attachment security (r = .25, k = 253, n = 37,444), cognition (r = .23, k = 44, n = 6,777), language skills (r = .26, k = 54, n = 11,136), and weakly associated with socioemotional problems (r = -.07, k = 135, n = 33,305). Narrative analysis of other meta-analyses on caregiver warmth, responsivity, positive and negative parenting, and child outcomes also showed associations in the expected direction. Our findings demonstrate the critical importance of caregiver sensitivity on children's socioemotional and cognitive development, supporting caregiver sensitivity as an important target for early childhood prevention and intervention programs.