Variable- and person-centered approaches to affect-biased attention in infancy reveal unique relations with infant negative affect and maternal anxiety.

ABSTRACT: Affect-biased attention is an automatic process that prioritizes emotionally or motivationally salient stimuli. Several models of affect-biased attention and its development suggest that it comprises an individual's ability to both engage with and disengage from emotional stimuli. Researchers typically rely on singular tasks to measure affect-biased attention, which may lead to inconsistent results across studies. Here we examined affect-biased attention across three tasks in a unique sample of 193 infants, using both variable-centered (factor analysis; FA) and person-centered (latent profile analysis; LPA) approaches. Using exploratory FA, we found evidence for two factors of affect-biased attention: an Engagement factor and a Disengagement factor, where greater maternal anxiety was relat

SUBMITTER: Vallorani A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7814017 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature