TY  - JOUR
A1  - Grossheinrich, Nicola
A1  - Firk, Christine
A1  - Schulte-Rüther, Martin
A1  - von Leupoldt, Andreas
A1  - Konrad, Kerstin
A1  - Huestegge, Lynn
T1  - Looking while unhappy: a mood-congruent attention bias toward sad adult faces in children
JF  - Frontiers in Psychology
N2  - A negative mood-congruent attention bias has been consistently observed, for example, in clinical studies on major depression. This bias is assumed to be dysfunctional in that it supports maintaining a sad mood, whereas a potentially adaptive role has largely been neglected. Previous experiments involving sad mood induction techniques found a negative mood-congruent attention bias specifically for young individuals, explained by an adaptive need for information transfer in the service of mood regulation. In the present study we investigated the attentional bias in typically developing children (aged 6–12 years) when happy and sad moods were induced. Crucially, we manipulated the age (adult vs. child) of the displayed pairs of facial expressions depicting sadness, anger, fear and happiness. The results indicate that sad children indeed exhibited a mood specific attention bias toward sad facial expressions. Additionally, this bias was more pronounced for adult faces. Results are discussed in the context of an information gain which should be stronger when looking at adult faces due to their more expansive life experience. These findings bear implications for both research methods and future interventions.
KW  - eye tracking
KW  - emotion regulation
KW  - mood induction
KW  - attention bias
KW  - major depression
KW  - adaptive role
Y1  - 2018
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-177688
VL  - 9
IS  - 2577
ER  -