Sustaining attention in affective contexts during adolescence: age-related differences and association with elevated symptoms of depression and anxiety.

ABSTRACT: Sustained attention, a key cognitive skill that improves during childhood and adolescence, tends to be worse in some emotional and behavioural disorders. Sustained attention is typically studied in non-affective task contexts; here, we used a novel task to index performance in affective versus neutral contexts across adolescence (N = 465; ages 11-18). We asked whether: (i) performance would be worse in negative versus neutral task contexts; (ii) performance would improve with age; (iii) affective interference would be greater in younger adolescents; (iv) adolescents at risk for depression and higher in anxiety would show overall worse performance; and (v) would show differential performance in negative contexts. Results indicated that participants performed more poorly in negative c

SUBMITTER: Dunning DL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11573249 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature