Information-Processing Biases in Children and Adolescents:An Introduction to the Special Issue.

This special issue focuses on new developments in research on information-processing biases in children and adolescents. Prior research suggests that attention and interpretation biases in response to emotional stimuli may be associated with the etiology and maintenance of anxiety and depression in youth. Although our understanding of youth biases has burgeoned over the past decade, questions remain regarding mixed findings across studies, heterogeneity of biases across individuals, specific factors that contribute to and maintain biases, and how best to maximize the efficacy of interventions designed to modify biases. Through the use of innovative methods and technology, the articles in this special issue illustrate progress being made toward filling these gaps in our knowledge and showcase some of the exciting new developments in this area of research.Keywords: information processing biases; cognitive biases; children; adolescents; anxiety; depressionAlthough most children and adolescents with anxiety or depressive disorders benefit from existing interventions, a large minority do not (Treatment of Adolescent Depression Study Team, 2004; Walkup et al., 2008). With the goal of fine-tuning treatments or developing new interventions, researchers have increasingly devoted themselves to the identification of novel factors that may be associated with the etiology and maintenance of youth psychopathology.Information-processing biases are among those factors that may increase vulnerability to, or maintain, anxiety and depression. Based on prior cognitive models of emotional disorders (Crick & Dodge, 1994; Kendall, 1985), Daleiden and Vasey (1997) developed an information-processing model specific to childhood anxiety and related disorders, which has served as a framework for subsequent research on cognitive biases at each stage of the model. In the Encoding stage, attention is automatically oriented to a stimulus, followed by either sustained attention to the stimulus or disengagement from it. At this stage, youth may present with a biased tendency toward, or away from, threatening or potentially threatening stimuli (i.e., attention bias to threat). Next, in the Interpretation stage, the child takes the encoded information and makes meaning of what he or she has perceived. Those with anxiety or depression tend to select negative or threatening interpretations (vs. neutral or positive) of information that is ambiguous or neutral in valence (i.e., interpretation bias). Later stages of the model involve selection of a behavioral response; for those children with anxiety and depression, this response is influenced by the perception and interpretation of threat, which may lead to a behavioral tendency of avoidance versus approach. This sequence of information processing and subsequent behavioral responses go on to reinforce the child's belief that he or she is not able to cope with the situation, which in turn maintains attention and interpretation biases in response to future situations.Studies have generally supported this theoretical model: (a) on average, youth with high trait or clinical anxiety are more likely than youth without anxiety to attend to threatening information (or in some cases, to avoid attending to threatening information; Puliafico & Kendall, 2006); (b) youth with depression tend to preferentially attend to sad stimuli (Hankin, Gibb, Abela, & Flory, 2010); and (c) anxious and depressed youth are likely to interpret ambiguous situations as more threatening and their coping abilities as less adequate when compared to healthy control youth (e.g., Barrett, Rapee, Dadds, & Ryan, 1996; Bogels & Zigterman, 2000; Dalgleish et al., 1997; Micco & Ehrenreich, 2008). Based on these findings, interventions to remediate cognitive biases have been developed. These include cognitive bias modification for attention (CBM-A), typically employing dot probe technology to reinforce attention toward neutral or positive emotional stimuli, and cognitive bias modification for interpretation (CBM-I), which involves reinforcing selection of positive interpretations of ambiguous or potentially threatening vignettes (for overview, see Woud & Becker, 2014). …